A Look At

5. The Power of; We are not dead

We are not dead irked me, but eventually I think I got my head around it. Written as a stream of thought, This post was my thought process in trying to understand this admittedly intense short film. Click on the puppy to see it.

Click it…

4. A Look at The Matrix; Man with machine will always beat Man without

I have a special love for the matrix; despite the sometimes depressingly bad effects it uses it never ceased to be awe inspiring in my mind. And yet it always seemed odd to me that the architect was so human when none of it’s minions were. Here I tried out a theory of mine; that The Matrix isn’t about robot invasion, so much as an allegory for modern day slavery.

CLICK

3. A Look at The Selfie

I like this one simply because it was a chance to go through the controls of the blog; basic image controls and alt text that allowed for ease of posting in future episodes

Speaking of clickable selfies….

2. A Daily Photo

This was more for me than the assignment; I’ve always taken photos as a sort of hobby, but I never put time constraints on myself, which made this more structured than ever before. While I can’t really link to all of them, I can repost my favourite, which I will do!

Dave had to stand very still. For Very Long.

This was my favourite not just because of the picture itself, but because it marked the beginning of the alt text- almost every picture after had some snide comment on either the picture or on how the Algorythm would have done it better.

1. Lets Try; Premiere Pro

Premiere pro has been my best friend throughout the semester; I’ve found myself hand in hand with it in almost everything I do. It wouldn’t be fair, then, to not include my experiences testing and learning this application.

Favorite kitty for favorite program!

At the time of writing, there are still 4 scheduled posts in Daily Photo, and I have not decided whether or not I shall continue the trend.

dIn the matrix, futuristic documentary of the year 3000, machines are said to have taken over the world, resulting in a dystopian society where man has everything he could ever want, and the machines eek out an existence in a world where sunlight doesn’t seem to ever touch the ground. one could say that the fall of man was brought about by machines evolving too far, that by giving them an intelligence, then trying to hinder them, we brought about our own demise.

Pretty much this

I don’t think that’s it. The Matrix has clear ties to ‘The Wizard of Oz’, but in a universe where the wizard successfully kills off dorothy and her friends by sending them against a witch of his own design. In truth, there’s another layer beyond the matrix; one where a single desk worker manages a human farm by pretending to be a machine. ‘Zion’ is simply a safety net meant to catch any stray human consciences that escape their prison.

Woooo!

There lies certain flaws in the makeup of the prison that the matrix represents; despite being built by machines, the system seems remarkably geared towards humans, with enemy’s that can be fought, and enemies that quite simply can’t. Agent smith isn’t deleted by the architect in the end of the movie, he’s simply stored for later use; The architect specifically says, ‘We’ve done this seven times before’ in Matrix reloaded, and the third movie is named ‘The Matrix Revolutions’, or, reworded, The Matrix Cycles.

Somehow it feels like the coat should be black…

Now back to the Architect. Throughout the series, he acts as the final boss/entity; when the matrix, and the security layer around it fail, he enters and sets everything straight. Rather than being a sort of Deus ex Machina, however, the Architect works as sort of an IT guy, appearing where there’s a problem, then systematically working backwards towards the root of a problem. Unlike the other ‘AI’ or ‘Programs’, he acts remarkably human, taking time to weigh options, and creating representations of himself that are wholly unnecessary for an AI, yet to a human might feel important.

Just like some other things…

The moral of the matrix isn’t that the mind of Man will always triumph over machine; it’s a story of the uses of technology as an oppressing proxy, turning man against machine instead of against (perhaps rightly) each other. Man without machine can never hope to defeat the man who has.

When the idea of ‘noticing’ came up, I couldn’t help but think of the puppet professors guide to how much youtubers make;

The ever stuffy professor points out all the places you see advertising on youtube, and I couldn’t help but notice just how much I was missing. I recently installed a really good adblocker, and have since missed out on every volvo, insurance, or drone camera ad. I feel left out.

So I decided to start trolling through ad campaigns, to catch up on lost time. On each page I visited, I counted at least three advertisements, none of which applied to me.

Off to a good start! Let’s go to a webcomic!

http://questionablecontent.net/

Only 4 here, but there’s still 2969 comics to read through, all of which have that same number. I guess this is intentional noticing, so let’s take it to the next step; Alarm clocks

I own a Xiaomi 3, and with it came a small pedometer, in which is contained a vibrator. Every hour on the hour, it will vibrate. Hopefully I’ll get a better sense of time from this,

UPDATE: I lost the pedometer…

I take selfies; I’ll admit that much. I take hundreds at a time; to the point where my friends hate my taking their phones to do them. I have mastered the art of the ‘Selfie gif’, whereupon I take enough selfies that they might be strung together in a masterful sequence to tell a story, namely that of the phones owners anger at me.

In 2005, Youtube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded the first Youtube video; ‘Me at the Zoo’, an 18 second clip in front of an animal cage. Shot from the shoulders up, Jawed describes an elephants trunk, explaining that they are both really long, and really cool.

On March 21^st, 2006, Jack Dorsey posted the first Tweet; “just setting up my twttr”. He would go on to have 2.88 million followers (as of 7^th March 2015), with over 16,000 posts.

While the first image uploaded to Flickr on December 3^rd, 2003 was a simple ‘Test Image”, titled as ‘Big_Test’. As of 2014, Flickr has over 92 million users, with 1 Million shared photos daily

These sites allow us to communicate faster than ever, from almost anywhere in the world; allowing us to quickly show our support or disdain for social situations, share our opinion on another’s thoughts, or to simply show that we had bagels for breakfast. The advent of the Selfie, therefore, should have been expected as a foregone conclusion rather than a surprise development; in a society where time is money, sometimes simply sending a ‘pic’ tells the story better than a simple tweet could, without the time consumed in producing an up-loadable video.

There lies the argument that Selfies are by nature ‘Narcissistic’, showing a vain tendency to show off or brag. This is a potentially reasonable statement to make based solely off of the selfies nature; a photo taken, directed and posed for by one person for the sole purpose of being uploaded and viewed may indeed seem to exist solely for the furthering of ones egotistical desire to be seen as prettier than the rest. Psychology Today released an article back in January, describing a study designed to find a link between the ‘Dark Triad’ (Machiavellianism, Narcissism and Psychopathy), called thusly for their connotations with evil in todays society. While those with Narcissistic tendencies did indeed show upload more photos than those without, it was found that there is very little linking Machiavellianism to the narcissistic or even psychopathic tendency to upload photos.

A separate study, presented at ‘Interact 2013‘ proposes that ones online presence (specifically ones presence on Facebook) is very much a representation of the self; claiming that those with lower self esteem are more likely to fret over what gets posted, while those with higher self esteem are more likely to focus on content, as well as producing a personal brand. Perhaps social media may be more of an amplifer than a modifier of a persons tendencies, and perhaps this could be extrapolated to Selfies.

Social media has existed and flourished for almost a decade, with the same issues and complaints flourishing as new forums and mediums are born; The Huffington Posts Dainius Runkevicius made the same claim that Facebook users are not just Narcissistic, but may also be Neurotic in their activities, while studies have found that trolls on sites such as youtube and online forums exhibit a tendency towards Narcissism, sadism, and psychopathy.

What this represents is a universal problem with social media rather than simply that of the Selfie; No matter the forum, humanity has a small portion of its population with psychopathic and Narcissistic tendencies that are revealed through what we post online.

The Selfie is merely the symptom, not the disease.