Editing Saturday night field party and inserting music videos into the timeline.
Saturday Night Field Party
Social Media
While reading Jean Tweng’s article, many of her points resonated with me as I am sure they did with my classmates as well. The funny thing about having an addiction is you never want to admit that you actually have it. You lie to yourself and act like your behavior is normal until you have finally convinced yourself that it is. The inconvenient thing about a social media addiction is that it is normal. In our society today, we are collectively agreeing to ignore the addictions that we all face every day in the name of “normalcy.” Recently though, we have seen more and more of the side effects that are plaguing our lives. Fear of missing out, depression, eye strains from staring at a screen for too long, disconnect from the rest of society when all you are trying to do is “stay connected,” etc. The first point that Tweng made that caught my eye was “Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.” While I do feel like I have good friends and I am happy day to day, I do feel disconnect as well. My “rest time” of the day goes from 15 minutes of just scrolling through my newsfeed to suddenly losing 2 hours of my day to being sucked into the void that is Facebook or Instagram. It is so easy to just give in and feel like by being on your phone you are being involved in the world around you, when you are actually just shutting yourself out and taking a step out of the world. The next point that was made that I related to was when Tweng noted, “It may be a comfort, but the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep: Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived.” I and many others can attest to the fact that night time is the time when we are the most vulnerable to succumbing to our addiction. It is almost an end of the day ritual that we participate in. And just like how during the day you can get sucked into your phone as the hours pass by, the same goes for night time. We constantly lose sleep over just trying to check up on what everyone else is doing. It is concerning that an entire generation is dealing with the same addiction all at the same time, but hopefully in the future we can find ways to mend our broken minds and start living life to the fullest.
Media Consumption
When it comes to media consumption for my generation, I would say we are hooked. The sites that I use the most are probably the most common ones. The top 5 on my list are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter. After looking into the details, I was surprised to find that Facebook not only owned Instagram, but they own 64 other companies as well. They are a powerhouse when it comes to media content. Looking into YouTube, I knew that this website was owned by Google, but I did not realise how much else they owned as well. As of today, Google (Alphabet Inc.) currently owns over 100 other companies. If Google and Facebook teamed up, they could probably take over the world. That brings us to the issue of how much is too much power? I find it concerning that the internet seems to be such a monopoly, and that if any of these top companies decided to make changes to the way they run things (privacy policies, paid subscription, etc.) it would completely change the way we interact with media because it would effect so much of it. Just as Ev Ehrlich notes in his article Break up the Google-Facebook-Amazon Web Monopoly, “Our society has always protected itself from monopolists, be they utilities, railroads, oil companies, or financiers, acting against abuses while preserving innovation and economic growth. Most of those early monopolies followed the same pattern as The Web Trust — after an initial burst of competitive activity, the landscape quickly became dominated by a handful of monopolistic giants.That problem is repeating itself in force within the Internet system, largely because so many of these platforms — Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like — are really “networks” that connect users to each other. The larger they get, the more indispensable they become to users seeking to reach each other — they are “natural” monopolies.” More people should be concerned with this and working towards breaking up these monopolies for the sake of maintaining ethical and unbiased media platforms where people are free to share all kinds of ideas.
Sources:
Copyright & Remixes
Copyright laws are understandable, artists should have control over the things that they create. Recently though, we have seen more and more cases where these copyright laws have been holding people back from creating their own works and using others works as aids. Just as Dan Hunter notes in his article Why cash and copyright are bad news for creativity, “copyright is a legal system built on a premise that tends to reduce creative output, rather than increase it.” We have seen time and time again that when people have the freedom to use someone else’s work and change it and make it their own, great things can come of it. For example, the movie “It” was recently redone and it was a box office hit. Even though the storyline was the same, they were a lot more creative with the filming and they made it even better than it was before. By taking away the freedom to remake things, copyright laws are taking away our opportunities to take something good and make it even better. Just as Adam Conover says in his video How Mickey Mouse Destroyed the Public Domain, “Remixing the works of the past is an essential part of how we create new culture, and this same process brought us so many of your favorite characters.” This is what the public wants as well, because without those freedoms we wouldn’t be able to have things like “Ice Ice Baby,” the newer “King Kong” movies, and all of the “Romeo and Juliet” remakes (most importantly the Leonardo DiCaprio version). Copyright laws tend to be ridiculously long as well, just as Joe Nocera noted when he said “More than a century ago, copyrights lasted for 14 years — and could be extended another 14 if the copyright holder petitioned for an extension. Today, corporate copyrights last for 95 years, while individuals retain copyrights for 70 years after their deaths.” Stifling these creative minds is doing more harm than good, and while there are some decisions to be made about monetary compensation and revenue limits, we should definitely start having more open conversations about this in congress instead of just shutting everyone down. As Lawrence Lessig said in his TED Talk in 2007, “Never before in the history of human culture has it been as professionalized, never before as concentrated. Never before has creativity of the millions been as effectively displaced.”
Sources:
https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity#t-147701
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/09/business/09nocera.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiEXgpp37No
http://theconversation.com/why-cash-and-copyright-are-bad-news-for-creativity-34696
Advanced Technique Photo
Lars and the Real Girl
While I do love Ryan Gosling, I did not love this movie. It was super uncomfortable to watch, and I felt like the storyline was really slow. The filmmaking was alright, but I didn’t feel like it was anything spectacular. There were about 5 locations where most of the scenes were shot: the house, the church, his workplace, the doctors, and the forest. I think it makes the scenes more intense since it’s so isolated. The most intense scenes were when Lars was having a mental breakdown in the doctor’s office about his sister in law having her baby and that’s where you learn more about his own mother’s death, and when Bianca “died” when they were out in the forest by the lake. The underlying theme for the whole movie was how a whole community can come together over something, and how that experience softened everyone’s hearts. Great theme, kind of lame/uncomfortable movie.
Lars and the Real Girl
While I do love Ryan Gosling, I did not love this movie. It was super uncomfortable to watch, and I felt like the storyline was really slow. The filmmaking was alright, but I didn’t feel like it was anything spectacular. There were about 5 locations where most of the scenes were shot: the house, the church, his workplace, the doctors, and the forest. I think it makes the scenes more intense since it’s so isolated. The most intense scenes were when Lars was having a mental breakdown in the doctor’s office about his sister in law having her baby and that’s where you learn more about his own mother’s death, and when Bianca “died” when they were out in the forest by the lake. The underlying theme for the whole movie was how a whole community can come together over something, and how that experience softened everyone’s hearts. Great theme, kind of lame/uncomfortable movie.
Portrait
Misc. Other Work Things
Between working on the Carpro set, making welcome graphics for people coming to see the studios, editing various videos, and (almost) streaming to Fox Live News (we got bumped because Sean Spicer left the White House and that was bigger breaking news)
Laurel Drain 