Month: November 2013
An Expression about Reddit
That corky icon isn’t the only thing I enjoy about this site; it’s in its own words hot, new, and controversial. I will also say it’s social, interactive, and is able to bring many online cultures together!
Wikipedia says Reddit is a social news and entertainment website that allows you to create an account and contribute material through text or links. Its users are called Redditors, and once material has been submitted one can vote on if they like it or not; this is known as upvote/downvote. Also once users leave comments, those comments can also be upvoted or downvoted.
Topics of interests are known as “‘subreddits.”‘ Wikipedia states there are over 5,400 subreddits, and these deal with anything from music, unexpected, to my favorite subreddit, memes.
- Courtesy of reddit.com
When I searched “meme” on Reddit, I was amazed by how many subreddits are generated throughout the website. I could choose from many memes, like funny, gaming, advice animals lol, trees plus many more! It even asked, “about 137,080 results in 0.251 seconds… satisfied?” Yes!
For this weeks assignment my classmates and I will be having a Reddit statistics contest. So before submitting my work, I made note of some of the Reddit contributing rules for memes. After clicking on the meme category, funny, in its sidebar its list of rules for submitting a link or text were:
As you all can see in rule #12, memes are not excepted! 😦 Hmm, I thought to myself, which of my posts should I submit? I’ve decided to submit my post Even You Can Do it Too! Please leave comments on another post you think I should submit to Reddit, take part in my previous polls, and stay anxious for my upcoming posts!
CHEEZburger for the Meme Lover’s Soul
Hey bloggers, for this weeks posts I’d like to share with you websites centered around creative culture online. For this post I’d like to introduce to you the CHEEZburger website. It’s a place where you can find hilarious memes, gifs, contribute, and test your knowledge.
What I enjoy most about this site is there’s so many categories of memes you can choose from. Branched to those categories are different topics too. You can laugh hysterically from animal memes, celebrity memes, trending funny memes, fails and wins memes, gamers and geeks memes, and also the know your meme encyclopedia. It even has some of its memes written in Spanish!
By providing many subcategories this site shows how popular memes are. Besides presenting an excess amount of memes and gifs, it also includes creative culture online by providing widgets that allow you to follow them on Twitter and like them on Facebook.
It also allows you to contribute by being able to make an account with the site and create and submit your own memes! Contribution is something I enjoy about create culture online because anyone can become involved and express themselves through this outlet. On that note for my next post I will be presenting to you the Reddit website, and will also contribute my own work to the site.
Feel free to rummage through CHEEZburger’s site, and leave a comment of a funny meme you found!
Steven David Johnson Interview
By Karla and Alicia
For this assignment my fellow classmate Karla Hovde, and I are to interview a leader in the field of our blog topic: Creative culture online. We decided to interview our web design professor, Steven David Johnson. We thought he’d be a great candidate because of his extensive knowledge on web design and online art.
“Steven David Johnson is a freelance photographer as well as a visual and communication arts professor at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.” For more information about Johnson, visit his website.
*When did your interest in web design and online creativity begin?
“I got interested in digital media in general in college. So we had a really early version oh Photoshop when I worked in the audiovisual department as a work-study job. It was called Photoshop 1.0 and I would play around with it, and try things out with the black and white laser printer. By the time I got to my senior show Photoshop was a little bit more developed, and I ended up being the first student to do anything with Photoshop. My professors were really interested in this new thing, they were teaching me mostly traditional media so they asked me to put together a binder that had all sorts of resources related to digital media. How do you do it, how do you print things out? Then I ended up going to graduate school, Savannah College of Art and Design, and my major was called computer art, it would be called digital media now. At that point the interest was still pretty young, so a lot of the interest in visual culture and graphics was around CD-ROMs. Everybody thought that was the big thing, there’s a program out there that still exists called Director, that a lot of people were using. So I was creating multimedia projects with that, with a lot of interactive activity. I did take one web design class in grad school, and I started to see the potential for doing that type of work on the web. It turned out while I was still in grad school I was offered my first job back at my alma mater as the university Webmaster. That increased my skills in that particular area.”
*Was there a specific person, or project that influenced you?
“On the really creative side there’s a project I remember that wasn’t actually on the web but it was on a CD-ROM, it was called Scrutiny in the Round. It was this artist project where there was a lot of collaged imagery, and you could explore it and as you clicked on different aspects movies would spring to life, you would visit different rooms, it was this interactive immersive experience. The aesthetic of that had a big influence on me.”
*Which aspects in your websites are influenced by other creative people or projects online?
“These days a lot of my web presence has to do with photography. I think a project that’s been influential to me particularly in relationship to conservation photography, is called Meet Your Neighbours. It’s a project started by a couple of photographers, one of them is named Clay Bolt. What he tries to do is get people to go out in their neighborhoods and do a catalogue photographically off all the creatures that are living around them, and present that in a really unique style with a very spare white background. Part of what the website does is it enables technology, it tells people how do you setup your photographs like this. It helps to create a database of the images that are out there, and it helps to connect people. So I think there’s a collaborative community aspect to this website, and there’s a technical tutorial aspect.”
*What have you learned from studying online art?
“One of the things we looked at in class was not just about the visuals because you can do visual design in any medium, but some of the things that are unique to doing online art sometimes have to do with databases. The fact that you can pull information in that’s dynamic, so we looked at a site in class called We Feel Fine. Which is making an art project out of Twitter feeds, and basically creating a big database that can be represented visually and its constantly changing based on new data. Being able to visualize for example emotional states, that kind of thing just doesn’t really happen as much in other media.”
*What have you learned about the culture of creativity online through designing websites?
“It tends to break down some of the traditional hierarchies and gatekeepers. For example, this Meet Your Neighbors site. 20 or 30 years ago, to get that imagery out to the world, you might have to go through a big agency or a big publisher. And now a couple of photographer friends can decide that this is important work, so we’re simply going to do it. That’s garnered all sorts of attention. Being able to collaborate with people all over the world is great. Some of the collaborators have never met in real life, but they can still get their imagery out there. I’ve been able to interact with Clay Bolt, one of the cofounders through Skype and I’ve never actually met him, but I feel like we’re beginning this collaboration. That is so different from just a few decades ago.”
*What categories of creative culture online do you fit into?
“That’s evolved at different points in my career. Sometimes it’s more of a visual arts gallery audience. These days it tends to be a bit more about photography, conservation, and advocacy work related to the intersection of photography and conservation. Scientific and photographers communities primarily.”
*Are there specific projects or creators that continue to inspire you, that you think more people should know about?
“Meet your Neighbors is a good one to highlight.”
*What would you recommend for a person just beginning to explore creative culture online.
“Study Digital Media at EMU. That’s a hard question to answer when you’re so immersed in it because that’s what we address in our classes all the time. It’s hard to separate out “take our classes” from what we cover in the classes. There are many online galleries, and there’s a resource called Rhizome, which is a really good meta-list. It has lists of digital galleries and individual artists’ projects. So that’s a pretty good resource for seeing what is out there in the digital art world and the world of online creativity.”
F.A.T. Lab’s Contribution to Creative Culture Online
Hello bloggers, for this post I will be noting an established leader of CCO (creative culture online).
F.A.T. Lab.
“What is there to be afraid of when we’re all in this together? When we all feel empowered, in control, able to participate in and guide culture? There is only fear when we feel disempowered, when we lack understanding,when we are censored, when we lack input or control and are instead being controlled.”
-F.A.T. Lab participent, Kyle McDonald
#F.A.T. Lab is more than a “research and development lab,” it’s an organization that is in favor of strengthening the public domain through captivating technology, & media intake. It stands for free art and technology. The “Fat Network” consist of artists like musicians, scientists, Bornas, engineers, and even lawyers. It supports open licenses which means they exclude secrecy, and engage in open entrepreneurship along with copyright monopolies and patents, as stated in the About of its website.
They conduct projects like, the “Obama Google Glass Prism Mask.” During a protest in Tiergarten district, Berlin, they wore a cut out-portrait of Obama “sporting” Google Glass :which was made by Prism.”Obama was impressed by its cutting edge features…Throughout the day he was spotted in different historic locations of the city. The press was all excited about getting the first pictures of Obama with Google Glass.” When they say they saw Obama throughout the day, they actually mean they saw F.A.T. Lab members lol. They even have a link on their website where you can make your own Obama prism glass mask.
Another one of their projects is called “Liberator Variations,” which confronts an interesting case of owning an unregulated 3d printed weapon, or living in a society where guns are completely banned. This project is a combination of CCO and a dose of reality.
“On May 6, 2013 a small pro-weapons organization called Defense Distributed shared a useless plastic gun called “The Liberator”, available for anyone to download and potentially harm themselves with. Assuming they have access to both ammunition and a very expensive 3d printer.A few days and 100k+ downloads later, the US Department of State got scared enough to order Defense Distributed to take down the file. Enthusiasts promptly moved the file to a torrent, tracked by The Pirate Bay, making it harder to regulate and creating significantly more publicity. Pirate Bay users could only maintain interest for approximately 4 pages of comments…The government’s reaction, and most peoples’ reaction to the Liberator, seemed primarily driven by fear. The fear of an undetectably lethal society, where forbidden objects can no longer be regulated. Where “society” itself breaks down, because access to 3d printers somehow tear up the social contract that keeps us at a distance from the objects that we can use to harm each other.” To find out F.A.T. Lab’s view on this topic, check out “Liberator Variations.” Also follow F.A.T. Lab on Twitter!
Thank you for reading this week’s post on CCO, for my next post I will be interviewing another leader of creative culture online. Stay tuned so you can hear this director’s explanation as to what called him to indulge in and contribute to CCO, what he partakes in, and what he would recommend to someone just beginning to engage in CCO.
Harnessed Energy 