#dtc356 ~ Blog #5 [Introduction of Jenkins]

#dtc356 [Blog #5 (Introduction of Jenkins)]

This book has a full focus on how the convergence culture affect the roles of media that are spreading and growing on us, society. There are 3 key basic concepts of convergence culture: media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence. Media convergence is what things are changing the old ways to the new ways, through the modification or upgrade of media. This influences people everywhere to follow because somehow it has become the new trend. We gotta leave trivial old ways behind and start embracing the new world that contain various ideas with a wide range of thoughtfulness from people. Participatory culture is the idea that both producers and consumers share ideas and collaboratively develop and create something that can satisfy both parties, inherently exemplified by the societal consumption and the profits earned by manufacturers for listening to the customers and making their dream products come true. Collective intelligence simply collectively accumulates intelligence from everyone who participated in the development of an idea, turns them into sources to improvement, and foundationalize them as the basis of the making of a product or media, with of course, fulfilling the necessities and what the consumers want. For instance, in the new product from Apple called iPad, has the features that are always owned by old cellphones, included with music and videos compilation library also Mac laptop features, etc. One device has the abilities to provide satisfaction to the user through the availability of other devices in it.

My favorite quotes:

* None of us know everything; each of us knows something, and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills. (4)

* Thanks to the proliferation of channels and the portability of new computing and telecommunications technologies, we are entering an era when media will be everywhere. (16)

* Convergence, as we can see, is both a top-down corporate driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process. (18)

* You are now entering convergence culture. It is not a surprise that we are not yet ready to cope with its complexities and contradictions. We need to find ways to negotiate the changes taking place. No one group can set the terms. No one group can control access and participation. (23)

This is very important to me as in life, things keep changing over years and generations. What my parents understand often times are very unusual and unreasonable to me, although I am sure it was reasonable to everyone during their youth years. My parents do not like to use the new types of technology, not necessarily recent like iPhone, but phones or computers. Even the stoves are using oil instead of electricity. It is not that they don't have money to purchase them or are not capable of using them, but they decided not to follow the convergence of technology as they think those stuffs are meant for younger generations. But as times passed by, they realized how important it is to have a mobile phone and access to internet at least in everyday's life. Another thing is as a DTC student, understanding and discerning media well is the key to successful way to better culture. Since the way people think keep changing, media keep converging as well. The only way to through years would be to follow the trend and being up to date to the new things. also I need to be in the front line of understanding those so that I can keep track of how people' thoughts in the world change and affect the evolution of media.

The relation of this main idea of the book to the Weinberger's would be that convergence acts the same way as the leaves of the information/knowledge tree become smarter. All kinds of media are being converted into something new in different pace of progress. This is based on the demand of consumers who think life should be more enjoyable if things/tools/ideas they use are becoming practical, instant, multi-functional, and interesting. However, to develop such goal, they ought to realize that collective intelligence which is crucial to the growth of participatory culture is much needed in order to generate smarter leaves, which eventually lead to a more intellectual life and better way of living. Unfortunately, those people who cannot keep up to the convergence process will slowly turn into incompetent individuals and may become the victims of societal values for not being up to date.

#dtc356 ~ Blog #3: Chapter 10

Chapter 10 (The Work of Knowledge)

Kowledge is power, while truth is a form of accuracy. In the third order of order, the focus is mostly towards the truth, therefore only few who have to knowledge. For instance, Wikipedia provides information in an exaggerated way or sometimes incorrect, whereas The Britannicas give enough information without unnecessary additional things, even so they provide them at the bottom of every article without mingling them in the article itself. Knowledge is too broad and general, in order to narrow it down, we ought to rely on the media and all metadata that is available in the digital world then obtain the information based on the way it is interpreted. What they give to us is merely truth, not knowledge. By acquiring knowledge, we are capable of controlling things around the world and that is again, pure power. It is true that one individual can only be expert far as a book shelf in a libary, however by having many experts in one field, truths can be achieved through filtering out their thoughts based on consensus or percentage. Sometimes, miscellaneous things shall be left miscellaneous so that people have the choices of what to believe in, also it is allowing them to have access to getting the facts the if they are smart enough to figure out.

This is critical to me as a DTC student because often times, society just simply fall into what the media told or taught them. Some journals/articles publishers tend to take easy way out to jot down what needed to say in a simple manner, or even too much. Although critics are there to give out their inner opinions and thoughts on them, we still need to filter out their responses and simplify the big, overall idea of the topic then decide which are truths and facts. Highly trusted and well-renowned books or dictionaries are obviously the best media that provide the best metadata as well. They are the solutions we need to count on in purpose of getting the facts. But in the end, it is not the published articles or metadata that matter. It all comes down to us on how we decide to accept or reject the truths, while bring them back to knowledge; then we can be powerful individuals with powerful asset, that is knowledge.

#dtc356 Chapter 8 & 9

#dtc356
Chapter 8 [What Nothing Says]

The main idea of this article is that information cannot be understood in just one way or another. We humans sometimes try to make things simple yet we make it more complicated for the others. That's why the information is categorized into types, such as explicit, implicit, or unspoken (known publicly as a commonsense). The organization of information is in the form of clusters which are interpreted specificly or generally according to specific people and sometimes it is understandable in one perspective but not in another.

This is crucial to my understanding as a DTC student because we need to be able to distunguish the kinds of information and to whom it is directed to so we are not falling into the rhetorical 'tricks' laid out by the manufacturers, publishers, business advertisement, etc. Often people see only one side, but they just simply or subconsciously ignore the other important facts (sometimes hidden or implied) that might be useful for them. This goes to all generations since perspectives on each individual on earth vary.

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Chapter 9 [Messiness as a virtue]

Messiness on the web world is inevitable since it resembles the basic method of how humans think. An individual or user may think of a matter in one way, however no one else can think of it using exactly the same way. Sometimes organization of matters that are too tidy under only one variable can result in the disorderliness of information; whereas the dispersion of things on the same ground can give out amazingly organized system of information that could represent the actual work mechanism for individuals. hence, the messiness in many circumstances may act as a way to organize things or information if people know how to manage or use it in certain ways.

This is important due to the fact that there is no possible way for someone to rule the net and apply all rules to everything because knowledge or information is too global and general. In order to break them down, we need the help of users around the world to accumulate data and spread them out. It is true that it will turn messy; nevertheless if an individual has learnt to understand, select, filter the information/metadata among the chaotic disorderliness, they are able to obtain more information than just out of extremely organized matters in which may lead to even worse lunatic information distribution.