The Japan Society in New York is celebrating Yasujiro Ozu’s 110th birthday by screening his 1960 film Late Autumn. They are hosting a raffle of great Ozu prizes for all ticketholders, including exclusive commemorative materials from Shochiku, as well as a special reception afterwards.
Thursday, December 12, at 7:00 PM.
In class last night, we didn’t get to screen a thirty-minute film produced for RCA on how RCA basically invented television all by itself. It also invented color and world peace. Here’s the video, produced in 1956 by the William Ganz Company.
In the film, you see RCA taking credit for inventing television, including interviews with Vladimir Zworkin and David Sarnoff.
This video is from the Prelinger Archives, available at the Internet Archive.
In today’s class, we covered Clay Shirky’s book The Cognitive Surplus and how the Internet has made possible production on a level never before available. In an article from 1999, Shriky actually addressed this issue. He called it “RIP The Consumer, 1990–1999.”
For Shirky, the Internet made every consumer a potential producer, thus the passive consumer as we know it would become extinct. Judging from your response to Shirky this week, it seems like many of you would disagree with this techno-utopian artifact from the past decade.
Morozov linked to this article on Twitter last week, and I posted it in last week’s course notes.
Another important aspect of Shirky’s argument is to determine what motivates all this production and all this cognitive surplus. Why are people wasting their time putting this stuff online? He lists two types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic. He explains this motivation in a 2010 TED Talk.
If you’ve heard the example of the Israeli day care center, you probably read it in the best-selling book Freakonomics (2005).
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At the beginning of class I referenced TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. Although Morozov gave a TED talk and was a TED fellow in 2009, he wrote a scathing review of three books published by TED. The review is worth a read because it’s really less of a book review as much as it is a condemnation of techno-utopianism.
Aside from governments using internet technology to spy on you, LG has been apparently logging data on the vieweing habits of its owners and sending those logs, without encryption, back to LG’s servers.
Everyone should follow Morozov on Twitter. Here’s one of his recent tweets.
There's only one way for Rob Ford to redeem himself now: learn how to code.
— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) November 19, 2013
One juicy nugget he uncovered was an article on the death of the consumer by Clay Shirky, who we will read next week.
The Yale University Art Gallery is screening two Bruce Conner films generated by the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1961: Report (1967) and Television Assassination (1975).
The screenings will be followed by a discussion with Marisa Nakasone, Marcia Brady Tucker Senior Fellow, Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, and J.D. Connor, Assistant Professor, History of Art, Yale University.
Thursday, November 21, 5:30 PM
Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street (at York Street)
New Haven, Connecticut.
As my presentation on radio technology was longer than I had expected, we didn’t have time to watch the Ken Burns documentary Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (1991). You can watch this on your own in one of the following ways:
Or if you can read the book by Tom Lewis on which the film is based.
If you watch it, here’s a few things to note:
The Awl speculates and reminiscences about the touchtone telephone.
When Your Fingers Did The Walking:
On this day fifty years ago the people from Bell Telephone (another one that I guess you had to be there for) brought out the touchtone model, which was another thing we used to have before you’d swipe your germ-encrusted fingers on a glass screen to make contact with someone else who you are probably only texting with because who talks to each other anymore? Anyway, you could press buttons to dial a call! It was AMAZING.
Is It Illegal To Unlock a Phone?
According to the claims of major U.S. wireless carriers, unlocking a phone bought after January 26 without your carrier’s permission violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) whether the phone is under contract or not. In a way, this is not as bad as it sounds. In other ways, it’s even worse.
Your second paper is due today.
Before you submit, please review my guidelines on how to quote, paraphrase, and cite sources. I will hold you to these standards.
Please remember to bring a hard copy of your paper to class today. Do not email me a file. If for some reason, you can’t print your paper, send a PDF via email so I can print it for you. However, if I do so, I’ll deduct a half-grade for my printing services.