As the title says, the relationships between social life and media is the main point we going to discuss in this week. There is a shapely relation schema about the social media. I’d like to talk about connections at first. Social websites, like Twitter and Facebook, they linked to individual directly, people write their profile, show their motivation, and gain their reputation, and also their personality, status, sharing will attract the common followers,then a series of interaction is stimulated. Moreover, the most surface interaction way is conversation, members to members, members to outside,broadcasting. Meanwhile, communications take place  in community. In other words, this chain connected and worked  started from here. In my judgment, i believe there is a vital point among these medium, i think the part of “individual” is the basic role to make the relationship work. Individual finds expression in communication,it equals to individual can gather things together anyway.Like human beings’s role in food chain. Individuals built system for social life, they revise it, prove it, develop it, and keeps it runs.

We collected and edited our 80 clips of videos yesterday. We built a individual folder about Korsakow and pasted videos in here already. The most crucial step we gonna do is think about our essay, which should be based on the  Roland Barthes’ Text Theory.

Chapters I read this week:

“It is a fact that over the last few years a certain change has taken place (or is taking place) in our conception of language and, consequently, of the literary work which owes at least its phenomenal existence to this same language. The change is clearly connected with the current development of (amongst other disciplines) linguistics, anthropology, Marxism and psychoanalysis (the term ‘connection’ is used here in a deliberately neutral way: one does not decide a determination, be it multiple and dialectical).
What is new and which affects the idea of the work comes not necessarily from the internal recasting of each of these disciplines, but rather from their encounter in relation to an object which traditionally is the province of none of them. It is indeed as though the interdisciplinarity which is today held up as a prime value in research cannot be accomplished by the simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down — perhaps even violently, via the jolts of fashion — in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation. The mutation in which the idea of the work seems to be gripped must not, however, be over-estimated: it is more in the nature of an epistemological slide than of a real break. The break, as is frequently stressed, is seen to have taken place in the last century with the appearance of Marxism and Freudianism; since then there has been no further break, so that in a way it can be said that for the last hundred years we have been living in repetition.”

“The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts. In particular, the tendency must be avoided to say that the work is classic, the text avant-garde; it is not a question of drawing up a crude honours list in the name of modernity and declaring certain literary productions ‘in’ and others ‘out’ by virtue of their chronological situation: there may be ‘text’ in a very ancient work, while many products of contemporary literature are in no way texts. The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field. The opposition may recall (without at all reproducing term for term) Lacan’s distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘the real’: the one is displayed, the other demonstrated; likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse (or rather, it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself as text); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production. It follows that the Text cannot stop (for example on a library shelf); its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, it can cut across the work, several works).”

Reference:Roland Barthes, From work to texts, Translation Copyright 1977, Stephen Health

We meet some problem in our project, we have to start the project again, our initial idea was totally wrong. I agree with the perspective from tutor, we really ignored some key points when we plan our project, even we had a wrong logical order. After the long-time discussion in the lab, we are going to shoot new things this week, and also we have to catch up other groups work. It is true that we made a bad plan before, it gave rise to the embarrassed situation directly, we do not have any achievement can be presented in lab, even a draft. Here we go, i cleaned up my thoughts. As what the tutor suggested that we have to do shoot video without any “shopping list”, it is necessary to release our creation, focusing on objects in daily life, tiny things, whatever, lots of…!

1. getting the brief
2. deciding thinking what to film
3. filming/doing it
4. getting it out of the camera and looking at it
5. editing the material
6. exporting/compressing the piece
7. uploading to the interwebs
8. publishing it via your blog
9. learning the Korsakow software
10. designing the interface
11. SNUing (keywords and building the structure)
12. writing and adding text to each SNU
13. testing the work
14. redoing the designing/SNUing/writing/testing (iterative development)
15. exporting/publishing the project
16. writing about your work.               There are 16 terms should be conclude in our gantt chart, it means each of group member will take responsibility to a few of them. We decided to meet each other in this week to make sure each will work smoothly for their own part, and also present our process and plan in next week’s lab to gain the 5% bonus.

We started our final video project formally in the last lab which before our Easter Holidays. We experienced brain-stom in lab, there are about 10 keys words were figured out by us.

Stop 1 of our project

1. Non-fiction

2. Insert Text ( Barthes)

3. Specific things we decided (size, low/high rates, visual effects, content)

Yes, I used “insert texts” to instead subtitles. Because there were 15 clips of video in total, and also they were come form 3 people, obviously, the style and the content were not same. Therefore, I gave each video a short description to distinguish them. In particular, I try to let the 15 videos become a whole “story”, it is more like a personal introduction, which related to his daily life, who is it, his home, some basic information. When audiences watch it, I hope they can try to feel it, the daily life of a normal overseas student.This is what I hope to achieve at the same time. In terms of visual effects of the text, my initial idea was using rolling texts, but the attempt was not really good as I hoped, due to the mess when video plays and text rolls at the same time, if I were a audience, I would be confused by that, therefore, I used the most easy and traditional method in the end.

In fact, I did not use any exactly “rules”. If I have to talk about at least one rule, I think it is the tree diagram, which is a mathematical method. The interesting thing is I tried so many times to combing the 15 videos, but ever time there was at least 1 video was not linked to others. Then, I tried to draw pictures firstly, and put in-key words and out-key words one by one as the tree diagram. I just used 5 categories, the same as the 5 video objects we shoot before. It let the process became easier. I think it must the most fundamental and traditional way.

I noticed there are 3 different places between our works. First of all, we put different texts into the video, including the size, the content, the colour of the texts. Secondly, I think we used different manners of arrangements, for example, 3 videos of a row or 4 videos of a row.The last but not least, our ideas were not different, I started the work with 5 objects, room, round , living things, myself, journey. As I know, others used different order, like starts with people, for instance, A’s video linked

B’s, and B’s linked to C’s, C’s linked back to A’s.

Does this project works successfully? I think the answer is of course. All of the video clips were linked together, no one was missed.The final achievement of this assignment is entirely similar with the examples which we watched in lab, it proves directly whether this project works.Moreover, I have to say the most significant thing which I gained from this project was I let an assignment became a kind of self skill. Although there still are some defects in this work, including the bad quality of scenes, the boring content, the shortage of creation, draw inferences about other cases from one instance, this is the reason why I think it is successful and meaningful. I was attracted by the sense of achievement, actually, I am using this software to make another combination video for my friend, I think this way is wonderful, using what I learned in daily life, even contribute it into my career, in the future. (545words)

Our Major Project is coming, take a glance of firstly, it is made up by group work and individual essay, which takes up 50% in this semester, it means i have to put a lot effort into it  seriously.

The discipline of this project is we make this without a strict structure,it is  not like essays, films ,we have multiple structures,in other words,  there is no grammes with cinema , the same as our hyper links.

To be frank, i am little bit scared of this project, because we have to use 60 clips, 60….wow..it is not a small number…we have to make up a new group which is different from Kfilm one, anyway, i have to face to it….no excuse…in study…!

This week, my plan is concentrate on Kfilm project and statement paper, and use my ester holiday to do some research on final project.

Im going to read some theoretical things now, good luck July,lol

Some readings are recommend to read before we begin it.

Aarseth, Espen J., ‘Introduction: Ergodic Literature’, in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 1-23.

Tosca, Susana Pajares, ‘The Lyrical Quality of Links’, in Hypertext ‘99 (Darmstadt: ACM, 1999), pp. 217-8. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=294911

Actually, at the begin of the lecture, when some pictures were drawn on the blackboard, i thought this week’s content must about biology. Nevertheless, it starts from this, i am not quiet sure whether can i understand like this way, one substance which we can see, the surface is stand for the internal structure. In other words, take an example, a student who always absent from class and do not submit assessment, we can take a abecedarian conclusion that he does not enjoy study, he is unwilling to do that. Maybe this example is a little bit unsuitable, but the crucial conclusion i s

Things outside are always things certain inside.

Based on this discipline to think about things, like relationships between questions & answers, term & content. I believe there will appear a new landscape. Therefore, as what my tutor said, let us make an attempt to have a conversation with outside, any different things from myself, people and ideas, culture, belief.

Work and Text, they likes ‘Method as Given/Fixed’ and ‘Meta Method’, when i took the first glance of this conception, i did not make  sense entirely. But it went to good way gradually…notes which took from Adrian’s  cur cards.

Work: Interpretation ‘true’ ‘ hidden’ ‘real’ meaning, Tue Formal Park, Serious, Authoritative, Fixed, Ordered, Logical, Rational, Closed,closer, Paternal, Mind

Text: Co-creation, exploration, Initiation always, A plurality of meanings, The bush, Playful,mobile, multiple.poetic,disruptive, knowing a an event-ongoing creative, open, Maternal, Body

Umm, i believe all of us understand less or more at the end of the 2 words, mind and body.

Yes, try to think about an emotional and changeable woman, and a man who has totally different personality, they are opposite, but they exist and develop together.

Work has strict rules, text is based on imaginations.

Anyway, if i am the red role this topic,  i am happy to say, i like it, ohh, i love it!