Posts filed under ‘media’
The lure of celebrity
Andrew Curry writes:
I think we sometimes under-estimate the power of the relationship between our increasingly audio-visual world and the rise of celebrity culture. And the second part of this story is about the way in which media coverage of celebrity is a classic form of ‘reveal and conceal’ narrative, where the audience is simultaneously invited into this world of money and power and exclusivity and also excluded from it. Media empires have been built in the space between knowing and not knowing. Some of the sharpest commentary on this world has been in the work of the artist Alison Jackson, who works with celebrity lookalikes. TED.com has just posted a revealing lecture she gave in Oxford three years ago. It runs just under 20 minutes – and some of the images she uses to illustrate her talk are not for the easily shocked.
The picture at the top is a publicity still for Jackson’s Channel 4 film, Blaired Vision, shown last year. She’s interviewed about it here. And yes, that is a Blair lookalike: she’s currently looking for Gordon Browns for her latest project, apparently.
29 January 2008 at 1:54 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
iCoursework
Lucy Pickard writes:
In an interesting classroom change, A-level media studies students will now earn 20% of their marks by podcasting or blogging, according to various newspaper reports (Education Guardian, Mail). Formal essays are to be exchanged for voice-presented video clips and informal, blog-based writing in recognition of the skills needed to succeed in media today. The Queen’s English Society was quoted as lamenting the loss of traditional essay-based coursework, but the OCR exam board maintains that the changes are in line with both the growing demand for a ‘more modern and exciting’ media studies qualification and recent media developments.
The image is from the business blogging site RSSApplied.com
Online couch potatoes
Becky Rowe writes:
Watching TV on your own or looking to indulge in the irreverent wit of a bunch of Guardian Unlimited readers? Then log on to the ‘Real time telly – talk about it now’ thread. The premise is that you can chat about what you are watching, whilst you are watching. Particularly good to spice up the solo viewing experience, or if your ‘witty’ comments have been banned by your sofa buddy, but you are still desperate to share…
This phenomenon came to my attention last Saturday when I noticed that the X-factor thread had become one of the most active on the GU discussion boards. Not only is a place to share observations about the contestants, or canvass votes for your favourite, but there is now a real sense of online community around the live Saturday night transmission. A perfect example of what happens when real (if you count X-factor as real!?) collides with virtual
Outing Dumbledore
Andrew Curry writes:
There’s a whole story here about fan culture and celebrities, and also what happens when authors don’t have to worry about what happens next. No sooner had J.K.Rowling mentioned at a reading in New York that Dumbledore was gay than the Dumbledore Pride site is selling the T-shirts – 7,000 before you can even get your wand out.
As Jason Kottke pointed out in his blog – the fan fiction floodgates are surely about to open. If Dumbledore, then who else?
26 October 2007 at 7:26 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Second Life interview
I know most interviews with site founders teeter on the grim line between marketing and hype, but there’s a surprisingly reflective interview with Second Life founder Philip Rosedale in today’s Technology Guardian,.
For those of you who haven’t got time to read it, the headline points are:
- Current turnover is $500m (and growing rapidly)
- The value of having its own virttual currency is that it enables micro-transactions.
- Retention of users is only 10% (they think because it takes 4 hours to get the hang of the place). If they can get that to 40 minutes they think that will rise to 50%
- The business model is less abstract than it appears: Rosedale describes it as: “What we are really selling you is computation. We are selling you CPU core. If you buy a 16-acre piece of land, which is about four city blocks, what you are renting is one processor.”
- They have plans to develop the avatars so they can function elsewhere on the web, outside of second life.
- And in response to a question about whether avatars can commit suicide, he says, ‘Yeah, in fact I think someone’s going to write a great dramatic book about that some day”.
Andrew
