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I found this a little unusual and not exactly what I was expecting for part of my Meta-Data links. But I thought it was relative and intriguing. The reading section titled "Half-Inch Tape Network" discussed the interaction between guerrilla tape and media and commercial cable programs. Points of interest surfaced about the development from the first television to cable to video cassettes and the underground distribution of tapes. "The half-inch tape network has strong similarities to the shape and ambitions of the Internet, which was being developed at that same time, and one might easily see the similarities between the 'alternative channels' created by the half-inch tape network and websites like YouTube" (15 of 20). This research lead me to find the launch of the VHS mode permitted to some YouTube videos in honor of the video cassette's 57th birthday. In the article(s) provided, each mentions something about the warping of visuals in the video, white flecks and a kind of buzzing that is featured. I have also provided a link to an example of the VHS mode on a YouTube video. Prigg, Mark. Mail Online, "Google reveals new 'VHS mode' for YouTube as video tape celebrates 57th birthday." Last modified April 16, 2013. Accessed February 5, 2014. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2309482/Google-reveals-new-VHS-mode-YouTube-video-tape-celebrates-57th-birthday.html. LINK FOR VIDEO EXAMPLE: http://youtu.be/wbesAd3YxaE?t=38s LINK FOR ANOTHER WEBSITE'S INFO: http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/15/youtube-adds-tape-mode-to-select-videos-in-celebration-of-video-casette-recorders-57th-birthday/

  After reading Alexander Galloway's Countergaming chapter from his book, I wanted to see some examples of artist-made game mods. I Youtubed video game mods and discovered a Youtube channel called 'Vsauce'. Vsauce is run by internet personality Michael Stevens who posts videos that discuss and answer questions about scientific topics, gaming, technology, culture, and more. The video I found about game mods was called Top 7 Video Game Mods: V-LIST #6. As a person that doesn't do a lot of gaming, I found it pretty interesting to see the mods in action. The coolest thing in the video was a guy who is building a working 16bit arithmetic computer. I don't know if it can technically be considered a mod at all, but it is pretty impressive regardless. The implications of stuff like this brings me back to the Galloway reading which ponders the future of video gaming and a as of now unrealized independent gaming movement. "Top 7 Video Game Mods: V-LIST #6 " Posted by Vsauce. Sep 30, 2010. Accessed March 19, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaTsPvyTCLQ

cnn.com Current site * Lots of bells and whistles. * Starts with a large take-over ad/video * 10+ video links on page * Shows a list of trends * You can scroll down the page revealing more content * Many brief story teasers of 1 to 2 sentences. * 10+ads and sponsors * Uses the word "Home" for initial page 2001 site * No ads * Only one photo, small size * Entire page fits on one screen * Far fewer links * All hyperlinks are underlined * No sound * Uses the word "Main Page" for initial page Same on each site * Area for search * Large lead story

Wired article debunking Amazon's Prime Air marketing ploy. Behind the seamless and seductively realistic design fiction video, numerous questions from fuel costs to air traffic congestion, unidentifed flying accidents, airspace regulation and so on hover on the periphery of this otherwise alluring prospect. Include a link to the actual video from Amazon. Watch it again after contemplating the externalities, or hidden costs, of such a seemingly seamless operation. It's little wonder what such high definition, cinematic realism affords Amazon. An intensification of scrutiny is needed from the viewer, a critical media viewing, to short-circuit blind faith in the realities promised in such depictions of the future Marcus Wohlsen. "Even if the Feds Let Them Fly, Amazon's Delivery Drones Are Still Nonsense" Wired: Business. Posted December 2, 2013. Accessed March 8, 2014. http://www.wired.com/business/2013/12/amazon-drone/

In Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling identifies RFID or "arphids" as key technological development that enables his imagined objects, "spimes," to function. This video, "Zapped!," by Preemptive Media, provides an easy to understand history of RFID tags, how they're used, for better and worse. The video concludes with the group's own tactical interventions using RFID equipped insects. My main impetus to post it here is to help illuminate the technology and, in doing so, make Sterling's Spimes concept more tangible. "Zapped! by Preemptive Media. Posted April 30, 2008 by Heidi Kumao. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIDClPlKHzE Accessed March 19, 2014

This brief video discusses how our senses are too limited to perceive everything is going on. The video suggests that technology has begun to form a sixth sense for us, one that tunes us into a reality that we cannot perceive with our own senses. Bizarre. qualcommsparks. "The Digital Sixth Sense." Youtube. 11 September 2012 Web

Here's a clip from the World's Fair of the late 1930s, demonstrating the "voder." This speech synthesizer is one of the inventions referenced in Vannevar Bush's essay this week. He was envisioning ways that it could be combined with other contemporaneous devices to make a sort of auto-stenography possible. The name is peculiar, a variation on the more familiar 'vocoder'. Operationally, it consisted of an elaborate mix of buzzing and hissing blasts of air and electrical vibrations, producing vocal formations by way of pedals and keys! It's voices are familiar, even iconic, but mostly by way of electronic pop music from the 1970s and 80s,bands like Kraftwerk amplifying the connotations of the robotic, and generally, the future. "VODER (1939) Early Speech Synthesizer. Youtube Video. 00:44. Posted by VintageCG on April 4, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAyrmm7vv0

A comparison of the New York Times website between February 18, 1999 and January 15, 2014 reveals more than a few amusing differences: the older site includes "on the Web" in the title, the increasingly user driven results on the modern page (most emailed headlines, personalized weather reports, customized alerts), the search function on the old site buried halfway down the page, almost as an afterthought. Most telling, however, is the great focus on the digitized version of the paper in the modern incarnation. Specifically, there are ten unique buttons on the front page offering unlimited access to the site, with new and improved usability. The shift from paper to digital media is clear here. Sales of the physical paper are low, as more people choose to access media via personal devices. Naturally, when accessed from one of these devices, the site redirects the user to a mobile friendly version - a stark, pithy version perfect for the instant absorption of a few headlines. In this way, the 1999 version of the site foreshadowed the NY Times' decision on March 2008 to use the second and third pages of its physical copy for article abstracts, as Nicholas Carr points out in his article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The front page is made up of only abstracts that lead to the longer, less efficient articles. The 2014 site has kept this standard, only now including user defined popularity in articles, as mentioned above. Overall, the trending is as would be expected - greater personalization, monetization of access, and interactivity (a few more imbedded videos). These changes speak to a larger shift in how the user access media - the decline of the paper copy and an old institution rallying to survive modernity.

thanks for the reflections on this news and information juggernaut! The long obsolescence of print seems clear in your observations here. A complementary study might look at the 'migratory patterns' of NYTimes readers in terms of their info-consumption habits, preferences and motivations for adapting to the screen

Radical Software was created in the 1970s by Beryle Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and Ira Shneider to create a network of video sharing. This site has PDF files of the Eleven issues published and distributed by Radical software between the years 1970 and 1974. The website also provides the history of The Raindance Corporation which was created in 1969 by a radical media activist and artist by the name of Frank Gillette. The general Idea behind Raindance Corporation was to created a collection of works and ideas for "implementing communication tools in the project for social change." The website also discusses in detail the intent of Radical Software and fight towards creating a world of free and accessible information.

thanks, this is an excellent example of primary source document, the actual artifact providing visual detail of its historical context that escapes easy translation. This site is equipped with a well organized search and browse function, too!

This animated video by designer Melih Bilgil provides a concise, relatively easy to understand motion graphic animation about the Internet's infrastructure. Key technological inventions are detailed with a series of highly legible icons that Bilgil developed while studying Communication Design. Faced with inherently technical and sometimes challenging descriptions of various networking protocols and systems, this narrated visualization is an effective supplement to the histories relayed in the Cybernetic Counterculture texts. Melih Bilgil. "History of the Internet" Vimeo posted 2009. https://vimeo.com/2696386 Accessed February 11, 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2GRAVpbDds Somewhat related

Documentation of one of several "satellite art" projects that emerged in the late 1970s and early 80s. Artists taking advantage of residency opportunities with NASA to access various telecommunications networks! Here a project of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, a platform for this duo's query "what can people separated by distance do together through technology?" --- this 'sculpture' is fascinating to me in the ways that it illustrates the allure of contact, the social practice of technology. Of course the novelty-spectacle of an activity that is now commonplace is also humorous! "Excerpts from a Hole-in-Space - the mother of all video chats" posted by Larry Press March 15, 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMVtE1QjaU Accessed February 7, 2014

This 5 minute edit of a digital ethnographic study by Michael Wesch is an excellent visual introduction to particular techno-social affordances and constraints of the Internet, echoing some ideas from lecture about hypertext and is useful to understanding the broader technical behind-the-scenes through the first decade of internet--- a helpful supplement to thinking about net.art and other forms of production online "The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)" Youtube video, 4:34. Posted by Michael Wesch, March 8, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Working between speculative fiction and documentary forms, duo Soda_Jerk explores Afrofuturism in a series of interrelated video installations. Excerpts from "Race for Space," "Destination Planet Rock," "Armageddon in Effect," and "We Are the Robots" are here on their site. The series seems a good supplement to the documentary by Akomfrah. Soda_Jerk digs further into histories of figures like Sun Ra and groups like Public Enemy, working as media archeologists or archivo-cyborgs, patching together new mythos using digital compositing and sound design. Soda_Jerk "Astroblack: Race for Space" 2010. Accessed February 21, 2014 http://www.sodajerk.com.au/video_work.php?v=20120921063755

Here's a tour of a MUD in action. Every time I read the Dibbell article I wonder about what this sort of 'gameplay' looks like. I decided to search one out on Youtube. This video provides a voice-annotated tour that illustrates the Multi-User Dungeon in its starkly abstract textual form. The impersonal nature of text as letter-forms distributed across a network, aligning with the affordances of anonymity, but there's also the thrall of live communication. Words are powerful and the seductive qualities of connection transcend the medium at hand. "Let's Show! MUD: Part 3: Grand Finale" Posted by FrogurtX. June 29, 2009. Accessed February 27, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQJ2xG0LdVo&list=PLgVWAwe9s2rJhafD0gv2mo-W9d0bvh6sl

Through the Rhizome website, I found Net.artist, Cornelia Sollfrank. Sollfrank with the help of four other artists, created a program that would comb the internet for content and then assemble it into a sort of collage of text and images. This is the Net.art Generator. It seems to me that the project is a comment on the proliferation of net.art at the time and whether or not certain net.art could even be considered art. The piece also seems to question authorship and appropriation. There is also a link on the site to a video of the generator in an art show somewhere, being used. "A smart artist makes the machine do the work" Sollfrank, Cornelia. Rhizome.org, "The Net.art Generator." Last modified 2011. Accessed February 21, 2014. http://archive.rhizome.org/artbase/33601/. Hasty, Nick. Rhizome, "Rhizome." Last modified 01 17, 2011. Accessed February 21, 2014. http://rhizome.org/.

Zotero is a plugin for Firefox (or stand alone program for Safari and Chrome users) that integrates bookmarking, old-fashioned note taking, and utilities like bibme.org into a single, user friendly interface. A button imbedded in the corner of the browser saves a website into your Zotero catalog, and does its best to peel off all the available metadata and organize it into convenient, easy to see categories. It enables the user to organize sources with full notations and (very exciting) export them into a bibliography in whatever style you prefer. As an added bonus, it can also catalog media: .pdf, images, audio, video. Your library lives online, affording very easy access. Additionally, there is a group function in the case that research need be shared. This program is a very fine add-on to our more accident prone organic brains and beats the hell out of cocktail napkins and self-addressed emails full of cryptic links any day.

Drexel University's Essay Writing Strategies did a great job illustrating in Layman's terms a simple step by step procedure for writing a paper. I found a ton of Youtube videos and instructional writings on how to be a good writer, but they were boring and difficult to engage with. I felt this spoke directly to start with a "shitty first draft" and gave great pointers on formatting, revising, and even just getting started. The author of this list of strategies provided thorough insight into questions you should be asking yourself to make a solid, structured essay. For example, after getting the "shitty first draft" out of the way, the author suggests beginning the first draft and to do so, it's helpful to start asking yourself questions about your topic. From there, those questions can help point you in the direction of your thesis where the author offers: "Work on the big picture first - don't get too committed early on. Plan to experiment and try completely different versions of your essay. Don't be afraid to toss out drafts that aren't working." Although these seem straightforward, and this pertains to application essays, I think they're great pointers for any paper developing and prove to be helpful for this essay on net.art. Drexel University, "Essay Writing Strategies." Last modified 2014. Accessed March 3, 2014. http://drexel.edu/fellowships/applying/essay/strategies/.