Monday 5 November 2007

Death of the Author, Birth of the Amateur

Yes ok ok i admit i have neglected my documentation duties over the last couple of weeks and must get stuck in again. However in my defence i blame our theorizing. I have delved deep into the dark realms of the dissertation. After our Wikinomics article last week i did a bit of research and found an anti-Web 2.0 manifesto called "The Cult of the Amateur" by a bitter ex-Silicon Valley rep Andrew Keen. He claims we are sacrificing trustworthy information for a quick-fix of cheap empowerment. Now i don't agree with everything he has to say as his arguments are quite extreme at times, but it was certainly a good book to read at present, when everyone seems so blindly besotted with this user-created content movement. I have also been dabbling in some further reading of Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Messege" and "The Rebel Sell" by Andrew Heath and Joseph Potter, which critiques culture jamming activists such as AdBusters magazine and analyses the hipocrisy of such texts and how they simply fuel the fires of capitalism they are fighting so avidly against. So lots of diligent dissertation reading going on but the deadline is creeping up from behind like a paedo in speedo's so i must fix up and look sharp.

Anyhoo, stop living in the past. Now i need to focus, i need to do some industrial cutting and pasting in my sketchbook and i need to prepare my final presentation and figure out the best medium and method for demonstrating my ideas. I plan to produce an After Effects animation of the Netvision menu and applications, to which i will carefully choreograph a set of movements that sync with the actions of the Netvision menu on the screen resulting in what appears to be a movement-sensitive interface - much like the Wii controller and the overly referenced Minority Report. Sounds a bit too ambitious ey? Well, it probably is but i believe it to be the best way of displaying my future-of-TV-meets-the-internet concept.

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