Comm Media

Reaction to Chapter Three

I love how recently this book was written. The intro to the Chapter includes the Apple iPod break-through. I did not realize how much Apple had to go through in order to start iTunes; the company had to convince the top five music-industry corporations as well as other smaller corporations that they could be a safe, self-contained testing ground for an online music distribution business. I also did not realize that iTunes was the first legal music distribution business. I find it amazing how people like Leon Scott de Martinville and Emile Berliner decided to experiment and were some of the founding fathers of the start of sound recording. This technology has simply been a part of my every day life, and I never thought about how these people had to think so far out of the box to invent such a thing.
I found it funny that I read about Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters; my friend loves jazz and tries to get me to like it as well. However, no matter how many times I hear these great musicians, jazz will never be something I listen to in my spare time. On the contrary, I enjoyed reading about Chuck Berry because my friend convinced me to go to his free concert a couple of weeks ago. I saw the eighty year-old man perform in a blue sequined shirt and a captains hat. I looked at some of his videos on the Internet, and he is as vivacious as ever. The man is one of a kind. I enjoyed this chapter because I have a wide taste in music. I enjoyed reading about the different genres of music, and the people that made huge steps forward for the music industry.


Vocabulary :
---from Chapter Three in Media & Culture: an introduction to mass communication (fifth edition) by Richard Campbell, Christopher R. Martin, and Bettina Fabos
1. audiotape: lightweight magnetized strands of ribbon that make possible sound editing and multiple-track mixing; instrumentals or vocals can be recorded at one location and later mixed onto a master recording in another studio
2. stereo: the recording of two separate channels or tracks of sound
3. digital recording: music recorded and played back by laser beam rather than by needle or magnetic tape
4. analog recording: a recording that is made by capturing the fluctuations of the original sound waves and storing those signals on records or cassettes as a continuous stream or magnetism - analogous to the actual sound
5. compact discs (CDs): playback-only storage discs for music that incorporate pure and very precise digital techniques, thus eliminating noise during recording and editing sessions
6. DVD: digital video disc, a digital storage format that looks like a CD but has a greater capacity, enabling it to handle feature-length films as well as graphics, video, multichannel audio, and interactivity
7. MP3: short for MPEG-1 Layer 3, an advanced type of audio compression that reduces file size, enabling audio to be easily distributed over the Internet and to be digitally transmitted in real time
8. pop music: popular music that appeals to either a wide cross section of the public or to sizable subdivisions within the larger public based on age, region, or ethnic background ; the word pop has also been used as a label to distinguish popular music from classical music
9. jazz: an improvisational and mostly instrumental music form that absorbs and integrates a diverse body of musical styles, including African rhythms, blues, big band, and gospel
10. cover music: songs recorded or performed by musicians who did not originally write or perform the music; in the 1950s, cover music was an attempt by white producers and artists to capitalize on popular songs by blacks
11. rock and roll: music that mixed the vocal and instrumental traditions of popular music; it merged the black influences of urban blues, gospel, and R&B with the white influences of country, folk, and pop vocals
12. blues: originally a kind o black folk music, this music emerged as a distinct category in the early 1900s; it was influenced by African-America spirituals, ballads, and work songs in the rural South, and by urban guitar and vocal solos from the 1930s and 1940s
13. rhythm and blues (R&B): music that merged urban blues with big-band sounds
14. rockabilly: music that mixed bluegrass and country influences with those of black folk music and early amplified blues
15. payola:the unethical (but no always legal) practice of record promoters paying deejays or radio programmers to favor particular songs over others
16. soul music: music that mixes gospel, blues, and urban and southern black styles with slower, more emotional and melancholic lyrics
17: folk music: music performed by untrained musicians and passed down through oral traditions; it encompasses a wide range of music from Appalachian fiddle tunes to the accordion-led zydeco of Louisiana
18: folk-rock: amplified folk music, often featuring politically overt lyrics; influenced by rock and roll
19. punk rock: rock music that challenges the orthodoxy and commercialism of the recording business; it is characterized by loud, unpolished qualities, a jackhammer beat, primal vocal screams, crude aggression, and defiant or comic lyrics
20: grunge: rock music that takes the spirit of punk and infuses it with more attention to melody
21. alternative rock: nonmainstream rock music, which includes many types of experimental music and some forms of punk and grunge
22. hip-hop music: music that combines spoken street dialect with cuts (or samples) from older records and bears the influences of social politics, male boasting, and comic lyrics carried forward from blues, R&B, soul, and rock and roll
23. gangsta rap: a style or rap music that depicts the hardships of urban life and sometimes glorifies the violent styles of street gangs
24. electronica: often referred to as "techno", an underground music genre that developed in the 1990s; it features keyboards, drum machine beats, and music samples often sequences with computers
25. oligopoly: in media economics, an organizational structure in which few firms control most of an industry's production and distribution resources
26. indies: independent music and film production house that work outside industry oligopolies; they often produce less mainstream music and film
27. A&R (artist and repertoire) agents: these talent scouts of the music business discover, develop, and sometimes manage performers
28. piracy: the illegal uploading, downloading, or streaming of copyrighted material, such as music
29. counterfeiting: the unauthorized copying of CDs, cassettes, and other packaging
30. bootlegging: the illegal counterfeiting or pirating of CDs, cassettes, and videos that are produced and/or sold without official permission from the original songwriter, performer, or copyright holder

posted by maggie @ 11:39 AM 0 comments

Reaction to Chapter Two

I thought that chapter two was very thought-provoking. I did not realize how quickly the Internet phenomenon spread. I was interested in reading how microprocessors ad fiber-optic cables work. They were terms that I have heard of but never really understood. I never realized how search engines are biased. When I read that, it became a huge surprise for me. I had no idea that big businesses would pay to have their sites come up first in the search engine. The example that the book used really cleared things up. The example the book used was that if you searched "obesity" on Google or Yahoo!, the first sites that would appear all stated how obesity was a disease, and what you could do to get rid of it. Big businesses wanted people to buy their food, take their pill, or use their exercise plan to lose the weight. Rather, the sites that should appear should include the social factors that cause obesity.
I often need to help my parents use the computer. Sometimes they need to make power points, or even to simply type up a letter. My dad just asked me last week, "How do you know how to do all this?" My answer was, "Because I'm young." I said it as a joke. However, it is somewhat true. Computers are not-even fifty years old. Even so, they only became available to the public between thirty and forty years ago. Similarly, the Internet is even younger. I am growing up in the age of the Internet.
"The Internet will soon be so pervasive tat not having access to the technology or not knowing how to use it will be the equivalent of not knowing how to read or write." - Michael Fleisher (chief executive of Garnet Group, a technology consulting firm, 2000)

Vocabulary :
---from Chapter Two in Media & Culture: an introduction to mass communication (fifth edition) by Richard Campbell, Christopher R. Martin, and Bettina Fabos
1. Internet: the vast central network of high-speed telephone lines designed to link and carry computer information worldwide
2. ARPAnet: the original Internet, designed by the Y.S. Defense Department's Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA)
3. mass media: the cultural industries - the channels of communication - that produce and distribute songs, novels, news, movies, online computer services, and other cultural products to a large number of people
4. microprocessors: miniature circuits that process and store electronic signals, integrating thousands of electronic components into thin strands of silicon along which binary codes travel
5. fiber-optic cable: thin glass bundles of fiber capable of transmitting thousands of messages converted through shooting pulses of light along cable wires; these bundles of fiber can carry broadcast channels, telephone signals, and all sorts of digital codes
6. Internet service providers (ISP): a company that provides Internet access to homes and businesses for free
7. browsers: information-search services, such as Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Explorer, that offer detailed organizational maps to the World Wide Web
8. directories: review and cataloging services that group Web sites under particular categories (eg. Arts & Humanities, News & Media, Entertainment)
9. search engines: computer programs that allow users to enter key words or queries to find related sites on the World Wide Web
10. e-mail: electronic mail messages sent by the Internet; developed by the computer engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1971
11. instant messaging services: a Web feature that enables users to chat with buddies in real time via pop-up windows assigned to each conversation
12. HTML (HyperText Markup Language): the written code that creates Web pages and links; a language all computers can read
13. portals: an entry point to the Internet, such as a search engine
14. Internet2 (I2): the next generation of online technology, deployed on an experimental basis in 1999, that is expected to be one thousand times faster than today's Internet
15. open-source software: noncommercial software shared freely and developed collectively on the Internet
16. e-commerce: electronic commerce, or commercial activity on the Web
16: cookies: information profiles about a user that are usually automatically accepted by the Web browser and stored on the user's own computer hard drive
17: spyware: software with secretive codes that enable commercial firms to "spy" on users and gain access to their computers
18. opt-in/opt-out policies: controversial Web site policies over personalized data gathering: opt-in means Web sites must gain explicit permission from online their personal consumers before the site can collect their personal data; opt-out means that Web sites can automatically collect personal data unless the consumer goes to the trouble of filling out a specific form to restrict the practice
19: digital divide: the socioeconomic disparity between those who do and do not have access to digital technology and media, such as the Internet
20. spam: a computer term referring to unsolicited e-mail

posted by maggie @ 10:02 PM 0 comments

Pandia Search Engine Tutorial

If you want:
specialised discussion forums
look for e-mail addresses
narrow down blog search

Web Search Services: directories vs. engines
directories: hierarchical databases with references to hand-picked websites.
- Directories are very useful when you have no more than a general notion of what you are looking for.
- Yahoo is #1 but on their special page.
search engines: robots that read the webpages and put the text into a large database/index that you may access
- Used when you know exactly what you are looking for.
- Cover more of the web than directories.
- Google Yahoo! Search MSN Search Ask
metasearch engines extract hits from both search engines and directories.
- Search.com Metacrawler Pandia Metasearch

Boolean searching:
AND +
AND NOT -
OR
"using quotes"
NEAR
Thomas Alva Edison --> Thomas NEAR Edison
dogs near/3 cats --> how far apart the words can be from each other
parentheses:
pan pizza" AND (pepperoni OR ham) AND olives
vs.
("pan pizza" AND pepperoni) OR (ham AND olives)

Field searching:
narrowing down your search by searching for specific text in a specific place.
Title: bar on top of window browser
URL
Domains: commercial (.com), US educational (.edu), US government (.gov), or US military (.mil)

Error messages:
If you get the message "Document not found" then the website exists but that specific page doesn't
If the server does not have a DNS entry, the page does not exist

Addresses on the Internet:
World Wide Web
http://www.pandia.com/index.html (points to a
web-page coded in hypertext mark-up language
or HTML)
Files
ftp://domain.com/file.zip (points to a file on an
Internet server)
Newsgroups
news:alt.domain-names.disputes (points to a
newsgroup on the Usenet)
E-mail
firstname.lastname@domain.com (points to an
email-address)
Gopher
gopher://home.eunet.no:70/00/1/readgop
(points to a gopher-file - an old fashioned
standard for distributing information on the
Internet)

Menu based search:
- All these words, meaning that the search engine is to fetch pages that have all these words on them (equals Boolean AND or +)
- Any words or One of these words, meaning that the search engine is to fetch pages that have at least one of these words, but not necessarily all, on them (equals Boolean OR)
- This exact phrase, meaning that the search engine is to find pages that include these words in this particular order. When using Boolean searching or search engine math you would enclose the words in double quotation marks (“-“)

posted by maggie @ 8:13 AM 0 comments

Reaction to Chapter One

The history of communication was a tad on the boring side in my opinion. Most people realize that people first communicated through word of mouth, then through writing, and later technology. I've learned in countless history classes about the impact of the printing press and the Socratic method. However, I did find it interesting how recent the book was written. The mentioning of the war in Iraq, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Bill Clinton scandal, and other stories caught my attention. I realized that this textbook isn't one of those everyday texts in which the context stops fifty years earlier than the present day. This book has taken into account every aspect of the media from it's early beginnings to the present day.
When mentioning "high culture" vs. "low culture", I found that the skyscraper analogy actually did help me understand my personal tastes in "low culture". I find most of the things at the top of the skyscraper to be boring and old. However, I did find it interesting how the book brought up The Simpsons TV cartoon, which included references to both high and low culture. I never realized that a show I have watched for years simply for the comedic relief included so many cultural references.
I also found the Case Study: Mixed Messages Bombard Teens on Sex and Violence in the text to be quite interesting. The article explained how it is not necessarily the teenagers fault that their current sources of enjoyment seem to be radical and unwanted at the time. The last paragraph in the article really caught my attention in mentioning the survey by Students Against Drunk Driving and Liberty Mutual Insurance. They found that while teenagers were more concerned with problems like drunk driving and suicide, their parents worried about car accidents and casual sex. The fact that only 5% of parents though that their kids would drink and drive, while 21% of teenagers surveyed actually had was quite surprising. I seems to me that parents need to talk to their children more.
I agree with the argument stated that the main sources of media try too hard to entertain the masses rather than teach them. I now want to watch PBS's Frontline for recent news updates. I agree with the quote by Robert Thompson of Syracuse University, "Whatever cable does, the networks and studios will do, and right now television, just like a little kid, is dropping its pants to attract attention."


Vocabulary :
---from Chapter One in Media & Culture: an introduction to mass communication (fifth edition) by Richard Campbell, Christopher R. Martin, and Bettina Fabos
1. communication: the process of creating symbol systems that convey information and meaning
2. culture: the symbols of expression that individuals, groups, and societies use to make sense of daily life and to articulate their values
3. mass media: the cultural industries - the channels of communication - that produce and distribute songs, novels, newspapers, movies, Internet services, and other cultural products to large numbers of people
4. mass communication: the process of designing and delivering cultural messages and stories to large and diverse audiences through media channels
5. digital communication: when images, texts, and sounds are converted into electronic signals which are then reassembled as a precise reproduction of itself
6. media convergence: the appearance of older media forms on the newest media channels
7. senders: the authors, producers, and organizations of communication
8. messages: the programs, texts, images, sounds, and ads pertaining to communication
9. mass media channel: newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, or the Internet
10. receivers: readers, viewers, citizens, and consumers of the media
11. gatekeepers: editors, producers, and other media managers
12. feedback: when citizens and consumers return messages to senders or gatekeepers through letters to the editor, phone calls, e-mail, Web site postings, or as audience members of talk shows
13. selective exposure: when audiences typically seek messages and produce meanings that correspond to their own cultural beliefs and values
14. high culture: a symbolic expression that has come to mean "good taste"; fine art
15. low culture: a symbolic expression allegedly aligned with the questionable tastes of the "masses", who enjoy the commercial "junk" circulated by the mass media
16. modern: a historical period spanning the time from the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the present; its social values include celebrating the individual, believing in rational order, working efficiently, and rejecting tradition
16: postmodern: a contemporary period spanning the 1960s to the present; its social values include opposing hierarchy, diversifying and recycling culture, questioning scientific reasoning, and embracing paradox
17: critical process: the process whereby a media literate person or student studying mass communication forms and practices employs the techniques of description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement
18. media literacy: an understanding of the mass communication process through the development of critical thinking tools - description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, engagement - that enable a person to become more engaged as a citizen and more discerning as a consumer of mass media products

posted by maggie @ 7:36 PM 0 comments