Digital Media
Lecture 1: Basic Concepts
Georgia Gwinnett College
School of Science and Technology
Dr. Jim Rowan
Refer to Supplemental text:







Lies will be told!
Mac vs PC, Ford vs Chevy…
Macs in a PC world…
Wikis are wonderful…
Introduction: Computers sneak up…
Telling the story: New technology…
The Scroll, the Book, the Webpage…
First: Stuff about the Mac
Mac vs PC
 MacStuff for the PC user

– Making a PDF by printing
– Forcing a program to quit
– Using Grab for screenshots
– Using Preview to change file formats
– Using PhotoBooth to take pictures
– Using TextEdit to create text
Second: Stuff about the Wiki

Ward Cunningham

About the wiki
– Parts of the wiki page…
• Differs slightly from
browser to browser
More: Stuff about the Wiki

Wikis keep their entire history

Wiki formatting
Now: Telling the story

The media used affects the way
the story is told
– Live performance
– Audio capture
– Video capture
– Written as a book
– Paint a picture
– Perform on stage
– Build into a computer game
New technology…
New opportunities

Alfred Hitchcock
– The Birds (bodega bay, CA)
– Old school… long, continuous takes
– Storyboard planning

Quentin Tarantino
– Pulp Fiction
– The speed of the cuts increases
violence of the scene

TV series 24
– With HD you can now have 4 screens
New technology
New affordances!

Don Norman
– Cognitive scientist
– Affordances come from ecological
psychology
– Adapted affordances to design
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_psychology
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Norman
Affordances of media

The scroll
– Only one rule needed to read this:
• End of line? Go to the beginning of the
next line

The bound book
– More rules than the scroll:
• Same rule as scroll plus…
• Bottom of left page?
– Go to top of right page
• Bottom of right page?
– Turn page, go to top of left page.
– Page numbers had to be invented
– TOC was invented to access middle
Affordances of media

The bound book
– History is kept as “editions”

The electronic document
– History can exist as versions

The web based document
– No history kept
• Go back and everything is changed
• Did it change? Are you at the wrong spot?
• http://www.archive.org/index.php
– But a wiki does!
More: Affordances of media

The bound book
-Index and TOC only
+You know when you are finished
Electronic document (like pdf) & the
web-based document?

+You can search the contents

Web-based document?
-You don’t know when you are finished
New technology adoption…
problems arise

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ
Next class…

2110-17
New technology adoption…
Follows a predictable path

New form tries to act like the old


Before Alan Kay


Newsreels “copied” newspapers
C:\ is all you got
Makes stuff Alan Kay at XEROX
PARC
–
–
–
–
The desktop metaphor
visible
Put things in the world not head
The best way to predict the future…
New technology adoption…
Follows a predictable path…
then develops it’s own vocabulary

Tell the story at the same point in
time but from several different
views
– The Thomas Crown Affair - 1968
• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063688/
– TV was around how long before they
had multiple screens like the TV
series 24?
Interaction?
Interactive?

That’s Human Computer Interaction
– Intermingling of computers,
engineering, human perception,
– psychology, affordance and human
performance
– Taught here as ITEC 4130

From my list of ancient cultural
references:
– Check box… yes.
– Radio button?
In this class this semester…
– We are interested in media forms
found on and transmitted across the
Internet, how they work and how to
manipulate them
– We will build them as projects
• Audio
• Still images
– Bitmapped
– vector graphics
– Moving images
• video camera
• 3D animation
The maturing Internet…
new affordances?
new vocabulary?

In the ‘90s it was a source
– You would “look something up”
– Businesses justified the expense this
way
Now it’s a transmission medium
 What’s next?
 Go bravely forth!

– It’s still the wild wild west out there!
In Summary




Media is changing
Internet is changing
Affecting us socially
Giving us new capabilities
– Mosquito ring tones?

Challenging our views of legality
– Copyrights?

Challenging our views of appropriate behavior
– Spam


Media provides opportunities for new
interactions and new ways to communicate
This class is about media and how it works