This song has a way to really get into my head. I’ve had the soundtrack for “The Future is Unwritten” in the cd player of my car for the past week or so and it’s just a great little tune. When I have time I’m going to find more from Tim Hardin, it’s been too long since I’ve discovered new music, something I just haven’t concentrated on lately though something I love to do. Leave it to Joe Strummer to reawaken it in me.

I was born on a native american reservation, which is generally a life sentence of poverty at best. The reservation I lived on for the majority of my life was not as destitute as some. We have electricity and indoor plumbing, we have a modern(ish) town. My tribe opened the first Indian casino though we do not reap the benefits of most other tribes that are in the gaming business. The county my reservation is located in consistently has the highest unemployment rate in Michigan, not an easy task, and it is known in the Upper Peninsula and beyond as an area where drugs are plentiful and there is rampant alcoholism.
This is what I grew up in and what, as a young person, you see for your future. The school did not tell us we could go beyond the town. Students were encouraged to take the welding classes because that was one of the main industries in the area until about 6 years ago. Underage drinking was ignored or joked about by teachers and faculty. This is the environment I was learning in, an environment that encouraged me to assimilate, not to try to better myself or my community. It was common to have someone tell you that you would never be able to leave or make a better life for yourself. I believed this for quite a while and started to accept that I would stay there and have the same kind of life as everyone else. But I would look around, I would see how much people complained about their jobs, the desperation they had and always had in the back of my mind, the hope my parents had that I would be able to do something more than they did. Towards the end of my senior year of high school I figured out that I would do something to make it out, not just for myself, but for anyone from my town or a similar area. I wanted to show people young and old that if you come from a town crippled with alcoholism, drug abuse, unemployment and a self defeating attitude, you can improve your lot in life.
But there was a problem, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I got accepted to Michigan Technological University and Northern Michigan University, despite my low GPA I finished high school with a 2.3 or somewhere around there and it was good enough to be the exact middle of my class (of 48 if I remember correctly). So I went to MTU the fall after my graduation, like you’re “supposed” to do, a college education is the key to success and all of that. The only thing was I had no idea what I was going to college for. I was enrolled as a general engineering student though I knew I did not want to be an engineer of any kind. I actually put undeclared in the major field of the application but I guess someone decided that I meant general engineering by that so I decided to give it a try since I had not other ideas about what I wanted to be.
The environment of the university was something that I was not prepared for and I do not mean inside the classroom. I can say upon reflection that MTU is different now than when I first attended in the fall of 2000. I was not prepared to be surrounded by people who came from radically different backgrounds than me. I did not feel like I belonged on the campus and in a few cases heard negative comments about economically disadvantaged people, which still happens today but it makes me angry instead of uncomfortable now and anger is a source of fuel for me. Combine this with my disinterest in engineering and I quickly decided to leave the university. After four long days of being a college student I decided to drop out, but before I could drop out at the time I had to go talk to the Dean of Students about why I was leaving. The talk with Dean Melton was easy but while waiting to speak to her I was bombarded by questions by the woman at the desk about why I would want to drop out. She did not seem to understand the idea that I did not want to be an engineer and practically insisted that I was “just home sick” even though I told her I still lived at home. Overall she was very condescending to me. Dean Melton on the other hand immediately accepted my reason that I did not want to be an engineer.
I had escaped the university but was still motivated to do something positive in my life. However being surrounded by the area I was fighting against did not prove to be the best environment to figure out my life, at least not quickly. I took a “career assessment test” to see what would be the best path for me to follow. The results told me that I was very intelligent and I could “succeed in any field I chose”, not what a directionless 19 year old was looking to hear. I took to reading books that piqued my interests, nonfiction books mostly about politics and American society or about popular music, to keep myself close to learning. I also began delving further into music.

To be continued…

Video games are becoming more and more works of art as Jenkins argued 10 years ago. Games are developing richer and deeper story lines, one could argue that the big time games have more depth of story than the big time movies currently do. I will say that I think Grand Theft Auto IV has a storyline with more depth and thought than the Transformers movies that have been giant hits at the box office. I have never finished GTA 4 but that has been due to time commitments I never finished the first Transformers movie because I could not stand it. Video games get a lot of bad press from people who have never sat down and used the technology or from people who don’t see how something “childish” can be art, people had argued the same thing about Rock n Roll music but there are few people today who would say that form of music offers the audience nothing. Video games will eventually gain wider acceptance as the art they are when those who are ingrained with them gain a larger voice in society.

Tim O’Reilly has a different view of what Web 2.0 means, he sees it as the movement towards web applications. He sees Web 2.0 as something that is based on services and how they are set up and presented to the public versus how it was done with “Web 1.0″. This puts the idea in the realm of being about the companies using the new technology to create services were there is no longer a need for the prepackaged software but more providing services to the user that appear to be of little cost to them. The Google (which seems to be the standard bearer of Web2.0) example is the best highlight of what he is trying to say, provide people with a servie where the important thing is not about buying your product but using it and getting the information of their usage to streamline the service better and in turn attract more users and repeat the cycle. Google presents itself as user friendly and gives itself the feel of a collective work rather than the work of a few, even if the collective work that is done is small it still gives some users the feeling that they have a level of input and say in the matter of developing new aspects of the technology. That seems to be a big part of this definition of Web 2.0, having a more community feel to the Web and the applications on it.

Another idea of what Web 2.0 means is presented by Henry Jenkins. His theory is that Web 2.0 is nothing more than a business model. The recent Facebook privacy outrage helps make his point, the companies that embrace the online community idea are really just there to gather information about the users to sell to the highest bidder while alos allowing the users to generate the content for them so they do not have to do any of the work as far as keeping the users coming back.

On the other hand the wealth of knowledge available to me gives me a lot to chose from for the video. There is no such thing as having too much information. I just have to find what applies to the idea I am trying to put forth the best.

The audience for this work will be first and foremost, my professor Wendy Anderson and my fellow classmates in HU 2642 Introduction to Digital Media. The secondary audience will be anyone who may come across the video on a site such as youtube should it be posted there.

The context will be fitting because the digital realm is filled with short videos, not always informative or dialog creating but filled none the less. There are plenty of people who make little videos to express the way they feel about a topic so another one will be right at home.

When working on composing for communication it is important to develop ideas of who your audience will be, what context they will encounter your work, and pretty much how they feel about your work. If you do not look into these subjects before you start developing your composition you will probably not be able to effectively reach your audience. You need to understand who it is your talking to and what their want out of a composition of the style you are working on, what they think about the subject matter, etc. If one does not consider the audience or context of their communication they will likely have a failure to communicate.