Presentations, always fun.

Presentations this week lead to a broad view of interactive media, varying from components of one or many devices to the highly complicated devices themselves. Really, it shows just how broad of a subject interactive media is, and it's one that grows almost daily. New technology seems to pave the way for making NEWER technology, making one wonder if it's ever going to be possible to hit a ceiling with our inventions and developments.

On that note it's strange that people are hung up on making so many of the same thing with slight differences... different color mice, rhythm games with different names, different but very similar smart phones. It seems that a company's time could be better spent making an even better product rather than someone else's product in red with a different logo.

Interactive Media is Interactive. Yup.

It seems I missed a blog assignment, which considering I was gone on the day we normally get them makes sense. That means this blog is the result of fishing through other peoples' blogs and trying to get an idea of what was posted. Mostly we seem to have interactive media either defined or some aspect rambled about. Either way I'm writing, right?

Interactive media is kind of an oddly shaped umbrella. Obviously blogs, games, social networking sites, and in truth the internet as a whole fall under interactive media. On the other hand, at what point is it considered interaction? Are we interacting with the TV? It isn't responding to you, other people aren't communicating with YOU using it, and the only thing you can change is the channel with a clicker... and the hue and saturation I guess. Still, it's definitely media, and multiple people around the world can end up talking about the same thing because of it. Same goes for radio. So is it interactive even though it's not the media itself you are actually interacting with? And come to think of it, why isn't extroactive media a term?

As I Think about As We May Think

The article "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush is famous, and repeatedly referenced in the major of Mass Comm. For the most part it describes loosely a lot of the technology we take for granted today as new and revolutionary ideas of the future... which at the time is exactly what they were. He managed to describe ideas of connecting knowledge that today is incorporated into almost every single website in existence, and spoke of storing things like it would be an incredible feat to collect a set of books into something the size of a matchbox while now that is constantly being done by elementary schoolers with a thumb drive.

While the article itself isn't exactly thrilling and I feel he rambled on about specific and very uninteresting parts of his ideas for way too long, it's fascinating to look at the time it was written and not only what he was predicting, but how far things have come even since then. From there looking forward even further to what could happen to the next several years becomes a very exciting prospect.

The article was introduced with his speaking about people developing tools and producing a great deal of information without the ability to consume it, however, and ironically the main advancement he was trying to describe which ended up sounding like today's computers has ended up making it even more difficult to do just that. Computers hold a huge ammount of data along with all the other storage devices running around, and they share data with other computers, and other people on computers via the internet. Between linked sites, random google surfing, blogs, newspapers, rants, independant websites, and all the other virtual venues out there it's now in truth impossible to stay updated on everything even within one small interest area. Along with that it's getting progressively more difficult to tell fact from fiction sometimes.