A Remediation Of Ourselves

The perfect woman has been painted as an unapproachable, sexy, flirtatious, skinny, flawless creature that doesn't exist in reality. Bolter and Grusin write "Virtual reality therefore contains the contradiction that it is both Cartesian and anti-Cartesian, abstract and sensual, centered and fragmented, perhaps even simultaneously masculinist and feminist in orientation-all because, like other transparent technologies, while seeking to enact the male gaze, it also leads to a fascination with the many viewing and viewed positions made possible by the mediated self" (253).

Society has remediated the way a woman should look over the years. The size of a woman has been a distinct part of this "designation" of beauty. Marilyn Monroe was a beautiful woman who, in today's standards, would be considered overweight. She was the perfect image of what a woman should be in her day and the fact that the most recent years have created such a malnourished rude woman as a new role model should be seen as atrocious. Our culture changes from era to era and there's no way we can anticipate what will be seen as "right" for the next generation. Forming these images of perfection from any era will forever be a part of what virtual reality's purpose will be. Our society continues to designate what is beautiful and what is not. It will never stop.

Technology In Control

Technology is so crazy sometimes. I sat down one day and thought about how I got so used to using a small hand held phone. From this thought I began thinking about how I actually think that we all have been remediated ourselves to fit our present culture. Growing up in this society of technology dramatically advancing every few months has changed the way our brains think. Bolter and Grusin write "This is not to say that our identity is fully determined by media, but rather that we employ media as vehicles for defining both personal and cultural identity" (231). For example, cell phones have defined our younger generations a great deal. Just turn on any television station and wait for another kid begging their mom and dad for a phone so they can keep in touch with their friends. This "need" for human connection actually takes away from the human experience. The child is in fact distancing themselves from their friends at a young age because they will be "texting" their friends rather than hanging out with them.
Bolter and Grusin go on to write that "Clothing and jewelry treat the body as a medium in the sense that the body becomes the material ground that carries or bears expressive decoration; such decoration appears to respect the boundary between the body and the world" (237). I believe that this concept can also be applied to that of cell phone, internet and video game technology. Our society has become so dependent on technology and it makes sense that it has become a consuming thing in our lives.

Future

When we look back at the first production of video games there was such a great calling for people to upgrade in digital pictures and capabilities. Now it seems that we have reached a bit of a halt for the time being because Nintendo looked the other way and created a remote that can actually do whatever your body does.
Bolter and Grusin write "Although the remote control for a conventional set allows the viewer only to change channels, reduce the joysticks, keyboards, and trackballs of the games refashion and magnify the player's sense of control" (92). The player now has a better sense of control because the remote was fashioned to be able to bring the video games from the hands to the entire body. Just think about what the next big life changing advancement in computers or software might bring. I see a distant future in which we all will be touching the air with floating digital images. This would be useful when the time comes that we are no longer a physical world and we are all fully immersed in the environment of intense superficial and biological technology.
Here's a picture of what I believe might happen in the future.

Some Different Websites

I was thinking about how there are so many websites out there on the internet that are more useful than we think. There’s no way we will ever use all of them because there are so many and we are but human. Although, there are searches that we can do on Google or Yahoo that will help us narrow down our searches. We can search within search results for example. One such search can be for websites that are useful and aren’t well known. I searched for some websites and came up with:
http://games.gamejump.com/WhiteLabelWeb/index.htm

I think it might be useful for those of us who are attached to our phones.

New Thinking

It's hard to think about the moments in which the internet had only text located on it. Today we see it as a visual, kinesthetic and auditory learning center. I agree with Bolter and Grusin when they say that the introduction of images on the internet had two profound effects on the consumers/users of the world wide web. First, more people started to use the internet because of the images newly added and second, older media could be remediated to create better and more efficient programs. I believe that these two effects opened doors for new ideas to form on and about the internet as well.

I don't think that the internet would be the same without all the graphics that it has incorporated into it. The internet started with basic images from pictures and drawings that have been remediated and transformed into moving graphics and videos that can start talking to you when you enter a website.

A Movie For Class

Multitasking

Hypermediacy changes from age to age depending on social context. Does the same idea apply to multiple capabilities such as multitasking with technology? If you think about it most of us listen to music as we operate our car. That is seen as multitasking. I'll sometimes listen to music as I read. This too can be considered as multitasking. But how much does it limit us in the ability to intake knowledge? Can we still function to our full capacity or have we been limited in the amount of information we are capable of absorbing because we are multitasking?

Hypermediacy uses multiple ways of simultaneously representing an idea or concept. Through hypermediacy we can see that there are moments in which a person can have several different tabs or windows open on their computer. From this we can gather that a person can be multitasking while they soak up bits of information from each website while only paying a little bit of attention to each window they are connected to. Does this limit our comprehension when we multi task in this very technologically advanced age? Or can it be seen as a good thing that we can do so many things at once? I pose the simple question of asking whether this has been solely socially constructed or if it has become something that is necessary during our day and age making it important that we can participate in such tasks as being hypermediacy literate?