|
|
 Posted October 10th, 2007 at 3:39PM
Figured it was time to update the blog with some inane daily going-ons.
I’m currently trying to start freelance photographing for a local paper. (Will go into further detail if it goes anywhere.) I also want to start delivering their papers. Two easy ways to get into journalism without actually having to write anything.
But getting a job means tidying up my digital persona. Which means not bitching about having to write if I ever want a writing job.
I still have an alternate domain at surfingonarocket.com, which I’ll be putting to use shortly as a front page for me, myself. It’ll include links to my flickr (both my personal account and the new “professional-ish” account?), the blog, and – naturally – my resume. Which I’ve been working on lately.
Oh, it’ll be awesome. Just you wait.
Party on, Garth.
Posted July 31st, 2007 at 11:53PM
I recently got an issue of Fuse in the mail. It was the second issue of the glossy colorful publication that’s essentially promotional material for Ithaca College. But who cares considering they offered money to reprint an article I had already written for the IC View (where I interned last spring).
If you get a chance, pick up a copy of the magazine. My article on Second Life was the cover story and the spread is very sharp! Only one mistake on the copy too.
And if you can, check the latest issue and the next two of IC View, for more goodness written by yours truly. (I can’t seem to find a website for the view, since it changed names.)
Posted May 28th, 2007 at 5:46PM
I was assigned a story to write after graduating, with the college magazine. No contact info. Finally I get a phone number for the person’s parents. Call up, try to explain the situation, shot down within 30 seconds and hung up on. WTF?
What a prick.
I hate cold calling.
Posted March 9th, 2007 at 10:45AM
Looks like I’ve changed my name. The amount of “me” published and out there is set to double or even triple with the next issue of the IC Quarterly. (It’s not that I’ve written a lot for this issue, it’s that I haven’t been published much before this.)
My byline has been Zeke up till now, and it looks like it’ll remain that way with the ICQ.
I’ve assumed a pseudonym in my fledgling professional life.
hard. core. I just hope they all know who to make the checks out to. (This is a paid internship, right? No? What?)
Posted February 20th, 2007 at 12:08PM
Norton looks at the role of blogs in times of crises. After reading, I created a dichotomy of two broad forms that “crises blogs†(if you will) can take: the public or general interest, and the private or more narrowly focused. Norton tends to favor the former, and I would agree.
This distinction doesn’t have to do with what events are focused on, but how they’re covered. The “narrow-focus†blogs that Norton writes of are dominated by “missing persons†reports or similar content with limited value. She cites a variety of examples following the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia and Hurricane Katrina. The value of blogs dedicated to missing people is limited, chiefly because of the random, unfocused nature of a typical small blog’s audience. The readers of a blog following either calamity would likely be a distance from ground zero, since they would have access to the internet and the luxury of spending their time online reading blogs. Or, imagine the success rate of a television program like “America’s Most Wanted†if the entire viewership was in, say, China. (An exception Norton notes is one Slidell, Texas blog, following Hurricane Katrina. But the actual effectiveness (were any of these personal messages posted ever read by the right party?) is still questionable and left unanswered.)
As Norton points out, all “crises blogs†are not wholly irrelevant. A first-hand retelling of an event can be gripping and humanizing, something that can affect the reader a thousand miles away. This is the more public, readily worthwhile “crises blog.†The worth of something like this is obvious because similar writing already (and has for some time) appears in print. First-hand accounts are everywhere, from respected monthlies to weekly tabloids.
To this end, blogs have the potential to become immensely important. The value of self-published first-hand accounts has already proven itself with bloggers from the Middle East – Iraq in particular. The accounts of both Iraqi and U.S. soldier bloggers have provided insights into the distant conflict that the public has arguably never had access to. Whether or not this is taken advantage of is a different question. And of course, with the rising significance of first-hand blogs, comes censorship or outright propaganda masquerading as reality. What quality control mechanisms do blogs and the broad blogging community have? For that matter, what quality control does print media really have? Print media has better copy-editors. Claims beyond that are questionable.
Norton ends the essay on an upbeat note that I think is unwarranted. Can blogs become a new, immediate form for communicating during times of crises? Not yet. When the levees are collapsing, our first instincts aren’t to start blogging about it.
Posted January 30th, 2007 at 1:42PM
Writing Space Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (2nd Edition) Chapters 1-3, Jay David Bolter
Jay David Bolter is quick to announce the “late age of print.” This “late age” is determined by the uncertainty of the role of print media, in the face of alternatives. Bolter refers to film, radio, television – and most significantly here – “digital media.”
My initial reaction to this first chapter was to question his assertion that any of these are true, immediate rivals to print media. Film, radio, and television have been constants for the past 100 years. Have Americans begun reading less during this time? Arguably, sure. So OK, Bolter might have a point here.
However throughout this first chapter he overstates his point, of the eventual demise of print. On page five he points out that electronic versions of Brave New World and Jurassic Park have been purchased by thousands. This number is hardly impressive. He points out the existence of “specialized devices styled as electronic books” on page eight, but neglects to mention that all such ventures have been commercial failures. Six years after Bolter’s book, and we’re still reading it in print, and there is still no elegant solution to reading our “computer screens” in bed.
The second chapter is based on the idea of writing as a technology, and with the means (whether handwritten, with printing press, or electronic) having a measurable impact on what (and how) we write. This is logical. The printing press determined many things through its limitations – text was linear, with clean, straight margins and uniformity.
The most prominent argument against the demise of print is that, for even the most tech-savvy, nobody wants to read full-length novels on a computer screen. This is a product of various things, chiefly the limitations of the technology. Some of these limitations will be overcome in time, and others we’ll learn to live with. But if the media determines the content (which might make sense, although Bolter disagrees) then won’t the ubiquitous digital media change the way we read? Those other new(er) channels noted – film, television, radio – have either changed or reflected society’s shortening attention span. With digital media it stands to reason that shorter, more interactive (multimedia, if you will) will become the dominate form of expression. And, indeed, it already has.
Bolter explains these changes (and could have done so much more succinctly) on pages 16-17.
Writing technologies are never external agents that invade and occupy the minds of their users. These technologies are natural or naturalized only in the sense that they are constituted by the interaction of physical materials and human practices. No technology, not even the apparently autonomous computer, can ever function as a writing space in the absence of human writers and readers.
So the transition from novels and 2,000-word newspaper articles to short several hundred word digital texts accompanied with audio or video is what society wants. Whether this is true or not is debatable. The printing press created clean, minimalistic, uniform texts. Was this “wanted” by society, or was the ability to crank them out the real benefit, and straight margins only an acceptable side-effect?
Likewise, is the short piece accompanied by aesthetic designs want we want, or are we writing within the limits of the technology? Bolter would say we want it like this. The common rule of thumb among the blogging community suggests a standard entry length of around the size of, say, your average op-ed column; and not nearly as long as a detailed news entry on the NY Times. So is this a product of the media’s limitations, or the result of what consumers (readers) want? Anyone’s guess.
Posted September 27th, 2006 at 4:39PM
This post is being written five minutes before midnight, Tuesday the 26th. You’ll be reading it at some later date, as I’m at my apartment with no internet access. Hopefully I’ll post it tomorrow, but I can’t make any guarantees since my Wednesdays are always packed.
Today was incredibly bizarre.
I contemplated skipping my first class, finally decided to go, but arrived late because I slept in a bit too long. We were doing something online, on WebCT (if that means anything to any of my readers). There were no chairs left. The four or five of us who had arrived last (and mostly late) were instructed to go to the next classroom and procure some rolling desk chairs. There was a class in this room, so we dawdled in the hallway deciding whether or not to interrupt. Momentarily our professor came out, scolded us and told us this was why we could be late (looking at me directly, disregarding the fact that it was my first offense). I wondered to myself how my tardiness had an effect on the number of chairs in our classroom.
She barged in, perhaps proffering some weak apology, and rolled out the correct number of chairs to us. I would have been content to sit on the floor. It’s carpeted.
My second class, I spent reading the material for my third. Near the end, however, the professor here (an amusing French woman with a marked accent) made all of us write our names on pieces of paper, and stand in groups of four so that she could take our pictures. This was so she could begin learning our names, all forty or so of us. It’s a large 100-level lecture-based biology class that nearly everyone is taking only for general education requirements. The idea that she’d even attempt to learn our names is sweet.
The third and final class of the day was spent discussing writing groups, and this eventually came to the conclusion that Thursday’s writing group workshops would be entirely optional.
I spent the rest of the day desperately trying to catch up on some reading and other assignments. I’m barely treading water on that front. My Buzzsaw article is not even begun. But after trying to get to sleep, laying wide-awake, I began thinking of some wonderful and worthwhile ideas. A lot of my best thinking comes in altered states of consciousness, which that sort of half-sleep that you lay in before finally nodding off certainly is. Usually I just forget about these ideas, but at this point, I need them.
Many are possible topics of writing. In this final year of college I hope to write some decent stuff. I need to get published more and discover that there is money to be had in all of this. Among the varied topics that I’ve thought upon and will probably need to write..
Myself as the writer. This is not debatable, it’s a set topic that will need to be written. It’ll be good to delve into the topic more thoroughly and concretely than I’ve had to in the past. I don’t know about the potential for publishing, but it’s worth looking into. I’m going to begin taking the initiative on this front, submitting stuff on my own.
Myself as the politically-aware / activist student. This is a very good topic for the next assignment in another one of my classes. I do not know of possible publication venues, but there must be a place.
Weed & Canada: what now? This was a joke excuse to write a(nother) pot paper, but it got me to thinking. High Times would be the natural publication / audience. I wonder how much political, analytical stuff they publish. I’d have to advertise on IthacaFreecycle for wanting to borrow recent issues of High Times to see.
Definitive look at Iraq-America relations. I’d need to limit the topic to fit into any sort of size constraints, but it’d be a good excuse to do some research, historical / analytical mostly, about the modern nation-state we know as Iraq. Possibility of getting published is nonexistent, but it’d be personally beneficial. Possible topic for one of my senior seminar articles.
|
Tags: 
