The Resonating Interval: Exploring the Tetrad
This looks like the best site so far on Tetrads, with lots of examples.
Looks like I'll have to resurrect my "model of the month" slot on the main Daden web site; and spend the next few train journeys creating my own tetrads for new and old media.
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Bernard Lonergan [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
Lonergan generalized the notion of data to include the data of consciousness as well as the data of sense. From that compound data, one may ascend through hypothesis to verification of the operations by which humans deal with what is meaningful and what is valuable. Hence, a "generalized empirical method" (GEM).
Cracking philosophy web site too.
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Just reading about McLuhan in order to understand a bit more what it means when we talk about virtual worlds as being a "new medium". Cam across his concept of media tetrads - which appear to be a lovely model to use. And how I love models....
Marshall McLuhan: "The Medium is the Message"
Four Questions Applied to Media
We are concluding our considerations of Marshall McLuhan's pertinence with an examination of ideas found in his last work, The Global Village, published in 1989, twenty-five years after his monumental Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In his early works McLuhan focused on the rapid change in the five centuries since the development of the printing press and movable type, and the especially rapid developments of the twentieth-century. McLuhan died in 1980 and was beginning to see the first fruits of the television generations as well as the fulfillment of some of his predictions. He was deeply concerned about man's willful blindness to the downside of technology, yet McLuhan was not an irrational alarmist.
In his later years, and partially as a response to his critics, McLuhan developed a scientific basis for his thought around what he termed the tetrad. The tetrad allowed McLuhan to apply four laws, framed as questions, to a wide spectrum of mankind's endeavors, and thereby give us a new tool for looking at our culture.
The first of these questions or laws is "What does it (the medium or technology) extend?" In the case of a car it would be the foot, in the case a phone it would be the voice. The second question is "What does it make obsolete?" Again, one might answer that the car makes walking obsolete, and the phone makes smoke signals and carrier pigeons unnecessary. The third question asks, "What is retrieved?" The sense of adventure or quest is retrieved with the car, and the sense of community returns with the spread of telephone service. One might consider the rise of the cross-country vacation that accompanied the spread of automobile ownership. The fourth question asks, "What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?" An over-extended automobile culture longs for the pedestrian lifestyle, and the over-extension of phone culture engenders a need for solitude.
With the radio and television we have simultaneous access to events on the entire planet. However, television culture diminishes, or amputates, many of the close ties of family life based on oral communication. The simple act of turning on a television can reduce a room of people to silence. What is retrieved is the tribal or interrelated view of man. What it becomes or returns to is the global theater, where people are actors on a stage. One need only witness the event status of an airplane crash or weather disaster.
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Fascinating day today presenting and sitting in on a virtual worlds stretgy session for a major UK broadcaster. Some wonderful ideas coming out and would be great to stay involved with some of them. Again story telling (see Digital Futures and Digital Dinner posts) was a key theme.
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The second Click On programme was on tonight with me in Second Life helping BBC reporter Rajesh Mirchandani to interview Simon Stevens, a Second Life entrepreneur and celebrity who suffers from cerebral palsy.
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I cam very close to buying a digital photo frame the other week, but when I read that Kodak were about to release a WiFi enabled one I decided to hold off. Now seeing as it also shows MP4 and has speakers does that mean I can start to watch internet TV on it? Or can you hack it to show RSS feeds?
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Heard about this yesterday, and then again from BBC Backstage just now. Looks liek across between RSS and a Moog sythesiser. Great potential and could even replace/supplement my bayesian filtered RSS.
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PBwiki.com | Free Collaborative Editing & Publishing
Nice hosted Wiki service.
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CAIDA : tools : visualization : walrus
Nice 3D data visualisation package.
A version done using the "Tree of Life" taxonomy from NSF
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In deep snow today. Even so Advantage West Midlands Digital Dinner went ahead and was well attended. The content of the BT keynote was a bit old hat, and the demo video even worse. AWM announced a new Serious Games project to be hosted out of UCE which has got to be good news, particularly as I'm starting to do some work for the Serious Games Institue in Coventry.
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The first of the ClickOn BBC Technology Magasine radio broadcasts went out tonight with my short piece in it on the Connected home.
Listen to it, but I wish to point out that the background jazz did not come from my multi-room audio system.
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Quite a nice application that lets you assign images and sounds to a map and then wlk around the real location and have the media triggered manually or by GPS.
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Had a great day today up at Digital Futures - a new media event being held for old media people up in Manchester. The morning was mostly new media, talks from Channel 4, and some web/interactive media and serious games people. Even the presenter realised though that the Digital Future is actually a Digital Now (or even a Digital 10 Years Ago), and that new media is now just old media.
Over lunch had a chance to play with a Wii on a projection screen. Tennis was just like real tennis, very effective.
The afternoon kicked off with a Dragons Den type event. One pitch was fine (augmented reality using 2D barcodes in a digital viewer). The other was so laughable I thought it was sppof. After 10 minutes I had no idea what the two old media guys were talking about, and they even hid behind the old "NDA" protection. They'd obviously heard the word "2.0", but didn't really get it.
Then it was my turn. We were showing of the new Digital Futures build in Second Life. I was in a side room with my laptop and a radio mic. Jude was in the main room at the lectern, her laptop and SL view being repeated on the main screen. We met up on the south side of the island and I then took her for a tour of the site and all the facilities. The combination of SL and audio worked really well.
The day finished with a great presentation on Alternate Reailty Gaming, and the scoop that Perplexcity had just been solved.
Overall a great day. Interestingly the dominant message was about "stories" and "storytelling". That is what these creative types all do, and that is what they want to bring to Web 2.0 and Web 3pointD.
All the DF material is being posted to the web at http://www.digitalfuturesnw.com, and we will also be posting the material in world at the Digital Futures island.
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The Click Heard Round the World: Second Life machinima to air during Super Bowl
Great SL Arts blog
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