So, here it is

My final project.

It ended up feeling a little rushed. Although it was cool to talk to Mondega for the whole last class, I was not able to get work done, and so lost a lot of time.

But my excuse is that I'm not a film kid. Camtasia is a little confusing, too.

Is Digital Media Bad For Us?

Ah, the question of the century- is our reliance on technology (especially the internet) bad for us? This is one of those answers that creates a paradox- if it is good for us, we won't really know (since we don't know what it would be like if we didn't have it), and if it is bad for us, we won't know until too late (for instance- if it starts to think too much, becoming the Terminator saga). But we can make fairly educated guesses.

For instance, the access to knowledge is great, since we love to learn, we can finally try to learn as much as we possibly can through the use of digital media- especially with sites such as Wikipedia (which is now a good resource, no longer a joke). And it is instant- we can get it right away, a great advancement. But instant gratification can cause a lot of problems. We lose our ability to focus on one thing, contemplate it, etc. to find it out. We also get too used to instant gratification. I personally feel like digital media (in conjunction with our culture of instant gratification) is actually the reason for why many more people abuse drugs these days. Yes, people have always done them, but not to the amount that people do now. We don't feel our best, so we take a drug and feel better right away. Not just illegal ones, medical ones as well (yes, there should be use of medical drugs to make you better, but a lot of drugs are prescribed for something that is easily treatable through time and/or willpower). But I digress

There is a philosophy going around that a scattered attention span is more natural. These people believe that when we invented writing and print, we changed our way of experiencing things, slowing down to contemplate. This philosophy states that we should have scattered thoughts- to always keep ourselves on our toes and look out for predators and notice all the food that we can. When we stopped having to be afraid of predators and started growing crops and cultivating livestock, we developed a sedentary lifestyle and could grow a longer attention span. These people basically believe that digital media is good for us by bringing us back to an earlier form of evolution.

Certainly there is a problem with the danger of becoming addicted to computers. If you spend all your time on one, your body will degrade and you will be unhealthy, dying much before you should. But if one can use digital media but still keep in good shape, they can do well with themselves.

In my personal belief, digital media means good, but can be abused greatly. I believe that we should be able to read, contemplate, play music, etc. without getting distracted. Digital media can be distracting, and can train your brain to become distracted very easily (just think of all the kids these days with ADD and ADHD- most people believe these are caused by television, video games, internet, etc.). If one can learn to find a balance, they would benefit greatly from digital media. Just like in Buddhism- balance is key, everything in moderation.

This is a copy...right?

Something rotten is in the state of America. Its name is copyright law. This little baby causes musicians, consumers, and unknowing standers-by all manner of big problems. It's not like the basic idea behind copyright law is inherently bad.... on the contrary, if someone makes a song, it should belong to them and they should be allowed to profit off of it. But the problem is that our copyright law is based completely on profiting off of whatever you copyrighted. Because of this desire to profit, we decide that we can sue people for as much as we damn well please (profiting more from this as well) if they happened to possibly take away any of our profit. There doesn't even have to be proof that they took away profit, just proof that they COULD have taken away profit.

So maybe the problem here isn't copyright law. Maybe the problem is that we are too focused on profit- we are too much a consumerist nation. If we were completely secure in how we were living already, having no desire to make more money and get more stuff, why would we care so much about people taking our profits? And why would people take our profits, if they are content with how they are living? America needs to change what the dream is. The dream shouldn't be a new car, a house with a white picket fence, 2.5 children, etc. The dream should be happiness with what you have. If a whole nation, especially one as important as ours, is happy and content, we would become a poster child for every nation to follow in order to reach global joy.

But this will never happen. Consumerism is like heroin- it feels great. But it is also horrible for you, and once you get on it, you can never really go away from it.

Traditional and Contemporary

So, given the assignment to mix something traditional and something contemporary, I decided to compare the difference in public service announcements. I've always liked PSA's from the early cold war era, finding them to be pretty funny. So I mixed one of my favorites- "Duck and Cover"- about how to protect yourself from a nuclear bomb, with a recent British PSA about texting and driving. I ripped the videos from youtube (being PSA's, they are public domain anyways), and mashed them together using a video editing tool, layering one's audio on top of the other's video. I have enough experience doing this sort of thing, so it all went according to plan. The only problem that arose was that, by mistake, I had left a tiny bit of clip at the 11 minute mark or so. This caused 2 and a half minutes of my finished project, then 8 minutes of silence and blackness, then a little bit more clip. I had just completely forgotten about leaving that there, but I fixed it anyways. I like this finished project- it could be better, but I don't exactly enjoy editing video, so I don't really want to spend too much time doing it.

Creativity, Influence, and Ownership in the Digital Age

In reading some of the material given to us, I found a bit of interest in the idea of copyright- especially in Lenthem's "The ecstasy of influence." We all know about copyright, especially about people getting sued by things like the music industry for breaking copyright laws. But is copyright, well... right?

Of course we should have some sort of copyright law- without it, plagiarism would just become a part of life. But it may be a little bit too strict right now. Igor Stravinsky believed that "a good composer does not imitate, he steals"- this says something about what musicians have been doing throughout history. Someone will write a cool sounding line, someone else will think that it was awesome, and use it in their piece, etc. And how often do novelists and philosophers reference each other (directly or indirectly)? Think about how many books allude to something else. Isn't allusion basically just stealing? If Hesiod got his Theogeny copyrighted now, I'm sure a lot of people would be in a good bit of trouble for using names and events from it without quoting it.

We just really need to tone down this whole copyright debate. Did you know that the owners of Limewire are supposed to pay the music industry $75 billion? That's like... 4 times the national debt. Ridiculous.

Project Brief

Preamble

Through research into the Montagnard people, I intend to find new information about their involvement in contemporary music. I aim to learn what types of contemporary music they enjoy, whether there are any aspiring Montagnard musicians, and if so, hopefully experience their music. If time permits, I may even be able to mix my music with their music, working together toward the goal of musical achievement and enjoyment. As can be seen by the image on the right, both Montagnard musicians and I play music. Because of this, we should try to find out how the other party goes about this, and possibly play it together.

Data Mined

http://diacritics.org/2011/01/05/mondegas-for-the-people-a-montagnard-hip-hop-debut/
This is a review by diaCRITICS about a young Montagnard hip hop artist from Raleigh, NC who just recently got some public recognition.

http://www.mondegamusic.com/biography/
This is the same guy's biography.

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=1089009
This is the only other contemporary musician who was not a traditional music artist that I could find. Another hip hop artist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qd6gTVSEE8
This is a short documentary about a traditional Montagnard musician. In it he states that most of the Montagnard children don't really want to learn traditional music.

Need for Additional Information

I have a great need for more information. The internet only mentions one Montagnard musician (Mondega), and that is because he is the only one who has made it big at all. I need to meet the people who want to do music, are barely scratching by, have never been found, or are still in school. That's where my best information would come from. I'm sure that some of the Montagnard children (maybe those of high school age) want to do music; I want to know what types of music they want to do.

Framing, and then an unexpected tangent

In reading up on the idea of “framing” in the context of Digital Media, I found quite a few things to spark my interest. For instance, Donna Haraway explained how we are all cyborgs BECAUSE of the fact that we depend on technology. Without our technologies, we would be quite different as a society. I never thought of it this way before, instead thinking of cyborgs more as something like this picture on the right. However, we have become dependent on machines (for instance, the laptop that I am writing this on right now) to do our work for us. Sure, I could write this with a pencil and paper, but aren’t those both pieces of technology we have developed to help us communicate with one another? It seems that the only way that we could avoid our cyborg nature is to stop using anything outside of our bodies. But then, upon a little more thought, I realized that isn’t language just another technology that we have developed in order to communicate with others? Walter Ong brings up this idea as well, saying that talking and writing have merged into one way of communicating. However, both are definitely something intangible that we created as “machines” to do our bidding (in this case, to communicate). And have you ever realized that you think in a language? Nobody has abstract thoughts, it is all in a language, be it English, Swahili, or even music. Language is what gives us memory, what gives us thought, what allows us to be cognizant of our own existence. Without language, we would not even understand that we exist, that we are hungry, that we are tired, et cetera. So language leads to understanding, making speech possibly the greatest invention of mankind. Without it, we would have any way of recognizing anything.

Think about Buddhist monks who have reached nirvana. They never speak. They smile. Have they transcended the idea of language? Do they just experience sensation at all times? Have they completely lost their memory, shutting down (or perhaps activating more of) their brain, in order to just experience? If you have ever had a near death experience, you may remember a feeling, a sensation, a memory, that can only be described as bliss. You lose your concept of self, you see all color, hear all sound, feel all sensation. And it lasts for eternity (at least in your own head- it could just be a second in real life). But is this bliss truly bliss, or is it just ignorance? Is breaking down all sense of memory our initial or our final form? Or is it something that just happens by accident when you almost die (and maybe when you actually do die as well)?

I enjoy thinking on tangents like this- I read too much philosophy.