Category Archives: Assessments

Assessments, Networked Media

Video post

I was recently on holiday in Japan, and I took this video out the window of a Shinkansen travelling from Tokyo to Hiroshima. I wasn’t expecting to share this online so I didn’t think much about its technical qualities (I should have taken it in landscape and not portrait), but the result is a pretty nice little view of the Japanese countryside.

I’ve posted this to Vimeo for a couple of reasons:

  • My phone (which is what I used to record the video) can upload to Vimeo natively
  • Vimeo makes embedding videos in a blog ridiculously easy
  • I prefer it to the overcrowded, low-quality nature of YouTube

Anyway, here it is:

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Assessments, Networked Media

Anatomy of a blog

Blogging grew out of early publishing on the web, a mix of personal and news websites. A lot of this legacy still defines how blogs look and how they work. The header is like a newspaper masthead, the footer is similarly influenced by print publishing, and the column layout (including a sidebar and a main content area) is reminiscent of newspaper layouts. One major affordance of blogs is that they present posts in a kind of endless and ongoing timeline, in reverse chronological order, with pagination to limit the number of posts per page (like books).

The internet and the web are the other major influence on the blog format, such as the use of hypertext to including rich media and hyperlinks to other websites, or the use of widgets which bring content from other locations into the blog’s context. This is a result of the fact that the web is dynamic, with content stored in databases and presented to the user through the use of a content management system, with the look and feel controlled by templates. Authors don’t have to manually build every single page they publish, a lot of the code can be re-used or embedded from elsewhere. This turns the author’s focus to the content itself, rather than the context in which it sits.

This dynamism also enables rich metadata and posting properties (back-dating or forward-dating, viewing/editing permissions, drafting, etc.), none of which was possible in print media.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blogging ethics

The defining characteristic of blogs is that they are online, therefore public and accessible to people of all kinds from anywhere in the world. Though they share some characteristics with journals (chronological posting order, often filled with personal thoughts), it’s important to remember that they’re anything but private.

Online communication has allowed all kinds of voices to flourish and find their own space on the internet, including those usually suppressed or drowned out. This is good in many cases, but it can also shed light on undesirable groups and opinions that the world really doesn’t need to boost, such as hate groups. My own use of the internet has enabled me to find scenes and subcultures aligned to my interests (particularly in the art and culture space), but I’ve also witnessed some truly horrible things online. The overall effect is in my case a net positive, but for some people the internet can be a huge, unfriendly, frightening and unwelcoming place.

Today, social media websites are increasingly good at allowing users to control their privacy settings and decide who can see what they post, which is good in that it gives users control over their content, but it can also condition people to think they’re operating in a bubble away from the prying eyes of the world. It only takes one incident to shatter that illusion. The author Jon Ronson wrote a book about people whose careless posting on social media had a huge negative impact on their lives, called So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which does a great job of exploring the strange public-private dynamic of online spaces.

I’ve honed my online public persona for a number of years (on personal social media, on professional networks like LinkedIn, and on my own websites) and this blog is just another extension of it. I’m quite comfortable with the “voice” I’ve developed, though I’m sure that if someone Googled my name or trawled through my Facebook timeline they could find something I would consider embarrassing.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blogging and copyright

I posted an extensive set of notes on copyright last year — it’s still a pretty handy overview of copyright law in Australia and I’ve referred to it a few times since I posted it.

The basics are:

  • Copyright is automatic and doesn’t need to be registered, and even unpublished works are subject to copyright
  • Ownership of content can be shared/assigned to another (e.g. employer, or through licensing)
  • Copyright comes with moral rights of attribution and integrity
  • There are exceptions:
    • Fair dealing (research, study, criticism, news reporting, parody), though there are restrictions to what is allowed under fair dealing
    • Education
    • Libraries / archives
    • Cultural institutions and museums

These guidelines are particularly pertinent to bloggers who might use non-free media like images and videos in their posts, or for example critics who quote from works of literature or cinema in order to criticise it. Bloggers have to be careful not to use infringing material in their posts or they may be liable to prosecution.

I’m going to aim to stick to public domain or Creative Commons media in posts where I can’t use my own work.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blog security, spam and plugins

Security

Any responsible digital citizen needs to be aware of the threat posed by hacking, not just to them but to everyone in their contact list. Hacking can lead to two major issues: identity theft and loss of data, which depending on the victim and the severity of the hacking can lead to serious consequences for the company or individual hacked.

I’m lucky enough to have never fallen victim to hacking in any form yet – emphasis on yet. Ever since I read about Mat Honan’s digital life being destroyed by hackers – which they did for no other reason than they wanted to exploit his valuable three-letter Twitter handle for spam purposes – I’ve been meticulous about my security habits. I generate random passwords with high entropy, save them in a password manager so they don’t have to be easy enough for me to memorise, protect my password manager with a very strong master password, and never use the same password twice so that if I were ever hacked, the hacker wouldn’t be able to compromise my entire digital identity. I also lock down my phone – in a previous life I had the contact details of a number of prominent Australian film industry figures on my phone, and didn’t want to be the one responsible for losing control of them.

Based on all of the above, if this blog were to be hacked by someone all that would be lost is the content I’ve posted here. (And depending on your opinion of my work, that’s not much of a loss.)

The hacker wouldn’t be able to use my password from this blog to access my email, internet banking, or social media profiles. They couldn’t send phishing emails to my friends, send themselves money from my bank account, or post spam links on my Facebook profile. (Also, they wouldn’t be able to send themselves money from my bank account because I don’t have any.)

The last line of defence to data loss is back-ups, which restore a website to a previous state. In most cases regular back-ups are handled by the web hosting provider, in my case edublogs, but I can manually export my content through the WordPress control panel as well.

Spam

I’m old enough to remember the web before spam, and let me tell you: it was paradise. Now, spam is literally everywhere. It is embedded into the very fabric of the internet, and no website is launched without serious time being put into spam prevention. It poses serious threats for online publishers. Not only does it take a lot of moderators’ time to delete spam comments (or manually approve acceptable comments, depending on the comment system), when comments get through they can place some truly objectionable material on innocent websites. Spam can even get you struck off Google’s search results, which is a death sentence for a commercial website.

Ultimately, though, the arms race over spam is a losing battle. Botnets are too large and powerful, there is too much money to be made with shady medications and pornography online, too many people who will fall for extortion rackets. Spam has won, and all we can do is try to minimise its impact. I’ve chosen to disable comments on this blog, which was originally motivated by my belief that they actually add nothing to whatever discourse I’m engaged in, but it’s also a very effective spam prevention method. Spam bots can’t advertise on my blog if they can’t post comments. But for a lot of publishers, disabling comments is not an option for various reasons.

Plugins

One way to fight blog spam on a WordPress blog is to install the Akismet plugin. A plugin is a piece of code that modifies a piece of software so as to change how it works or add new capabilities not available in the default configuration. Today, most publishing software includes a formally supported plugin system that allows people who need specific or niche features to have them without requiring everyone who installs the software to have those features. The two primary sources of plugins are:

  • Officially released and supported plugins written by the first-party software developer (generally for niche features, e.g. Jetpack by the developers of WordPress)
  • Third-party plugins written by independent developers and made available in repositories or as internet downloads (e.g. Akismet)

Since this blog is hosted on RMIT’s Media Factory platform I can’t install Akismet, so I’ve taken a screenshot of another plugin I’ve installed just to show that I can do it:

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blog Case Study – kottke.org

Following on from my earlier discussion of blogs and what function they serve in media education, I’ve been revisiting a couple of my own favourite blogs and seeing how they fit into the blog landscape.

Kottke.org was founded in 1998 by Jason Kottke, an American web developer and writer who was an early adopter of many of the web’s nascent technologies, including blogging. I’ve been reading the site since around 2004 or so, when I was reading a lot of technology writers like Daring Fireball and others who would link to Kottke’s posts with unceasing regularity.

Its primary editor is Jason Kottke himself, and the site is officially “authored” by him, though there have been times when guest editors like Tim Carmody, Sarah Pavis or Adam Lisagor took over for days or weeks at a time while Kottke was on holiday or taking a break. The use of guest editors has ensured that at no point over the site’s 19-year lifespan has there been a significant dip in the amount of content being posted to the site.

In terms of content, kottke.org is simply an aggregation of interesting links from around the web, mostly under the topics of technology, arts and culture (and particularly where these topics intersect). Each post typically takes the form of a quote or embedded image/video at the top, followed by a paragraph or two of written commentary providing context and opinion. In this sense it is a typical “filter blog”, and indeed helped popularise that format in the blogging space.

Since 2005, writing for kottke.org has been Kottke’s full time job. He is an extremely prolific writer, with between one and ten new posts going up on the site every single day, and it is for this reason that his site has remained popular since its founding. No more than a day goes by without new content being added to the site, so readers can continually come back and find something new and interesting to read.

Kottke has a long track record of drawing attention to prominent artists, technologies, services and products long before they become popular in the wider world. There was a time when Kottke was among the web’s most influential figures, particularly in technology and culture circles, and his posts spread far and wide across the internet as bloggers added their own thoughts on the topics he would write about. This is one of the main reasons I enjoy reading kottke.org and still read it today: feeling connected to the newest and best things happening in the worlds of technology and culture.

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Assessments, Networked Media

Blogging

The word blog refers to both a medium and a practice, as explained in this week’s reading1.

From a technical standpoint, a blog is a collection of entries (called “posts”) presented on a website in reverse chronological order, with each post having a title, timestamp, author, permanent link and often complex taxonomies like categories and tags. Blogging as a medium builds on hypertext technology (the basis for the world wide web) to allow authors and publishers to link to, and be linked from, other blogs and websites, thus creating a series of interconnected, networked sites all engaged in the practice of blogging. Hypertext also enables authors to embed rich media like images and video into their posts.

Blogging as a practice evolved in the late-1990s era of the web, as an outgrowth of personal websites where authors would create diaries, autobiographies and interesting links for their friends to enjoy and comment on. Blogging is an ongoing, cumulative process which requires a blogger to periodically and regularly create new posts for their blog, as well as curate a theme, voice and style that makes their blog unique.

Within the blogging medium one can identify a number of unique genres: personal diaries, filter blogs (curated lists of links), political blog, etc. Politics is a common topic for blogging, as are culture, art and technology. The most common form of blog involves an author taking information from elsewhere on the web, quoting from it (or embedding media from it), and adding a short amount of text with context and their own opinion. Crucially, their post will include a link to whatever article or media is being discussed in the post, allowing readers to follow up and read the original source for themselves should they wish, creating a mesh of links and content that criss-crosses the web.

Content creation is central to the idea of using blogs in media education, according to Adrian Miles2. Blogs, and the practice of blogging, allow students to document their practice, reflect on their experiences, comment on each others’ work and collaborate on projects together. The public nature of blogs forces the student to think about how they present their work to an audience, and requires that they synthesise their learning in such a way that it can be “explained” to that audience (real or imagined).

Having used a blog in the context of media education for a year already, I have found that it has helped me immensely in consolidating my learning. It has also broken down barriers of ego and control: since a blog is more about the creative process and less about the finished product, I feel less self-conscious about posting unfinished or experimental work that might not be perfect. I’m looking forward to using this blog for the rest of my degree and building on what I’ve already created.

  1. Rettberg, J. W. (2008), Blogging, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 17-30. ↩
  2. Miles, A. (2006), “Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning”, Australian Screen, 41, pp. 66-69. ↩
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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 12: Wrapping up

Quicker than I ever would have expected I’ve come to the end of my first year at RMIT. My PB4 film is coming along nicely, though I haven’t shot anything yet, but it’s the most ambitious project I’ve ever done and I will be ridiculously stoked if I manage to pull it off and produce something at least halfway decent.

Being in this studio has galvanised a lot of the disconnected thoughts I’ve had about cinema over the past few years. Though genre is not generally a lens through which I have ever analysed films, I think having a fundamental understanding of what they are, how they work and how they interact can only be a good thing. If you’d asked me for my opinion at the start of this semester I would have said that genres are so fluid and ever-changing that they don’t actually exist (at least, not in any way that could be given a concrete definition). But through reading and experimentation I’ve found that there are some low-level, essential differences in the ways films operate which confirms that, at least on some level, genre theory is a rich avenue for continued exploration.

I’ve had a pretty great time in the studio, too. In my first weekly update I said I wasn’t expecting to be able to make a Western this year due to a lack of resources, but as it turned out not only did I make a Western with no resources, the way I explored that particular genre helped my understanding of genre theory better than anything I’ve ever read or done before. I think that’s a pretty good summation of the studio as a whole — what at first seems too complex to take anything away from is in fact a deeply layered and engaging learning experience, if you can find a way inside.

I used the Project Briefs to progressively drill further and further down into genre theory, stripping away the high-level semantic inscriptions and focusing more on the syntactic — basically, I’ve tried to find out if a genre is still recognisable even when you strip away most of its accepted tropes and hallmarks. The answer — at least in my rudimentary experience — is that it’s mostly possible, but someone with more skill could probably take the concept even further and boil each genre down to its bare nucleus.

Finally, one of my lasting takeaways from Exploding Genre will be a newfound (or re-confirmed) appreciation for filmmakers like Drew Goddard, Joss Whedon, Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino, all of whom manage to make sophisticated meta-commentaries about a genre or genres, while completely satisfying all of the requirements of those genres. To create a film that both deconstructs horror tropes and is also a perfect expression of those tropes is an amazing achievement.

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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 11: Homage and hybridity

Our last week brings everything we’ve learned in this semester so far into focus, stepping outside the characteristics of a single genre and instead looking at films that play with genre itself.

This is a nice full-circle connection to my first post for Exploding Genre, in which I analysed A Mighty Wind (2003) as an example of a metatextual film. Such films simultaneously adhere to and deconstruct genre tropes and conventions, laying bare the underlying structure of a genre while also acting as a successful expression of it. It’s remarkable when it’s done well, such as in A Mighty Wind, the television show Community, or this week’s screening, The Cabin in the Woods (2012). That film was a revelation to me when I first saw it, so sophisticated in playing with the inherent absurdity of so many horror conventions but still reverent of those conventions. And actually scary! Even the cheap jump scares that are present in The Cabin in the Woods are handled in such a way that even though you expect them to come, and you know exactly what the filmmakers are trying to do, they’re still scary.

Jackson (2013)1 contends that audiences of such metanarratives sit in an “in-between space” that lies between the reality of the film and reality reality, which adds a completely new layer of experience to the film. The five main characters in The Cabin in the Woods are manipulated by technicians aware of horror cliches, and those cliches are made “real” in the story world, but it falls upon the audience to try to figure out what’s just “real” and what’s actually real. So the act of watching the film really hits audiences on three levels: the basic narrative and its fictional/visceral/corporeal response, the meta acknowledgement and manipulation of horror tropes, and then the “in-between space” that blurs both of the above into a third level of reality. It’s all quite sophisticated and I’ve developed an even deeper respect for Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon (and Edgar Wright, whose films operate in much the same way).

It’s a shame I didn’t get to experiment with intertextuality in my own work this semester, but I feel that homage and hybridity is advanced level filmmaking and I’m not quite at the stage where I would be able to pull it off successfully. Maybe next year.

  1. Jackson, K. (2013), “Metahorror and simulation in the Scream series and The Cabin in the Woods” in Technology, Monstrosity, and Reproduction in Twenty-First Century Horror, pp. 11-30. ↩
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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 10: Action

It seems obvious when you see it written like this, but “the action sequence is one of the defining elements of action cinema”. But what actually is an action sequence? When you really think about the term it’s actually quite nebulous. Purse (2011)1 defines the action sequence as “dramatic physical action with a dynamism and intensity that marks it out from other sequences”, but even that definition leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The hockey sequences in The Mighty Ducks satisfy those criteria, but I don’t think anyone would describe that film as an action movie, or those scenes as action sequences.

While all action films must necessarily have action sequences, does the presence of action sequences necessarily make a film an action film?

Surprisingly, I’ve had more trouble pinning down a concrete definition of the action genre than any other this semester. Clearly, some films are self-evidently action films, like this week’s screening Ronin (1998), which is about 120% car chases. (Surprising fact: John Frankenheimer directed French Connection II.) But the sheer number of films considered action films is so vast, and there are so many variations in content and style between them, that I find it difficult to consider what the “canonical” action film might be — that is, the one that demonstrates all the hallmarks of the action genre. Perhaps one doesn’t exist.

I love this quote from Purse (2011): “Rather than assuming the action sequence’s aesthetics are somehow obvious, we should analyse each sequence with an open mind, eye and ear; and that understanding the impulses behind the content and presentation of the action sequence is important, as is an alertness to the often surprisingly nuanced ways in which such sequences can be communicative in narrative and representational terms.”

What I extract from this quote is that the action sequence is a multivalent concept, which shifts meaning depending on its application — much like any genre trope, or indeed genre itself.

  1. Purse, L. (2011), “The Action Sequence” in Contemporary Action Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 56-75. ↩
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