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Posts Tagged ‘media’

In my Media and Communication Theory class, we ahve been talking about how our society has changed significantly due to technological world of communication. This stuff fascinates me so I figured I would share it with all of you.

People seem less concerned about good sources, and no one necessarily needs to be an expert in order to be considered a legitimate source. I’m guilty of this, as I have used sources in term papers that are from other college students that they used in their term papers.  I have no idea where they got these thoughts from, but they sounded legitimate enough to me.    As we live in this digital age, we are slowly introducing a new generation of experts, and yet we do not know who is editing these things.   Who are these experts?  What is considered scholarly?   For example, Wikipedia supposedly has 1000 editors that confirm everything that is upload on to their site, and yet you only have 3 days of training in order to become a Wikipedia editor.

YouTube is a prime example of what is going on in this digital age.  We, as the consumers are now becoming the producers.  We do not have to be talented or knowledgeable to be famous anymore, and we don’t need thousands of dollars of equipment to make an album or make a movie, and we can just upload these things on to the web hoping that it will exceed above and beyond the rest.  This is why FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc…are hurting financially.  People who used to watch those experts make shows such as ER are now watch Red vs. Blue on YouTube instead.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to watch the video below. I cannot think of a better example of what is happening in our consumer driven society.  It is an hour long video, but it is well worth watching as it is very interesting.  Enjoy.

Today, I was looking to add Boxee back onto my AppleTV.   When Apple released their last update, it cleared my AppleTV of anything that I had installed on it.   This was frustrating enough, as you would think that Apple would be willing to let others make their product better.   Long story short, you have to use a flash drive to install any software onto an AppleTV.   This involves partitioning the flashdrive.  I think you can see where this is going.

Since I have have done this before, I was just flying through the process of getting the files assembled into a folder on my desktop.   I hit the installation button and the partioning begins.   I noticed this process was taking entirely too long.   Then, it hit me.   I partitioned my external hard drive.   No, not the one with all my Time Machine Backups.   I partitioned the one with all my media: photographs, 90 gigs of music, and a bunch of movies that I converted to MPEG4.    I was close to having a mental breakdown.   Technology did not fail me, I failed technology.

So now over the next few weeks, perhaps months, I have to regather everything.  Luckily, I had about a third of my music backed up on DVD-Rs, the other two thirds is on CD-Rs or CDs.   My work/school files I have regathered from the servers at work, saving me some valuable time.  I can only begin to imagine that after I regather everything, I’ll also find that I’ve lost something else.

This has quite literally been the most difficult year for my technological dependency.   I’ve had computers crash multiple times, and have been able to get back up and running in a short period of time.  Well, not this tiem.   I’ve had terrible luck, and its almost all been my fault, not the wonderful world of technology.   Looks like I might be purchasing a Time Capsule for my Time Machine, that way I can have two media hard drives, one as a backup.   This is ridiculous.

Moral of the story, if you’re going to install things onto a jailbroken device, make sure Karma is on your side, and take the extra time to pay attention to what you are doing.   Taking that extra time to go over the installation process could save you a lot more time in the end.