1. Digital Media Lecture 1: Basic Concepts Georgia Gwinnett College
School of Science and Technology
Dr. Jim Rowan

2. Refer to Supplemental text:
Telling the Story; New Technology, New Opportunities
The scroll. the book, the webpage; Differing affordances
Wikis are wonderful; Thank you Ward Cunningham!

3. First: Stuff about the Mac
MacStuff for the PC user
Making a PDF by printing
Forcing a program to quit
Using Grab for screenshots
command/shift/4
Using Preview to change file formats
Using PhotoBooth to take pictures
Using TextEdit to create text

4. Second: Stuff about the Wiki
Ward Cunningham
About the wiki
Parts of the wiki page…
Differs slightly from browser to browser

5. 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

6. 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

7. New technology New affordances!
Don Norman
Cognitive scientist
Affordances come from ecological psychology
Adapted affordances to design

8. Affordances of media The scroll The bound book
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

9. Affordances of media The bound book The electronic document
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?
But remember that a wiki does!

10. 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

11. New technology adoption… problems arise

12. New technology adoption… Follows a predictable path
New form tries to act like the old
Newsreels “copied” newspapers
Before Alan Kay
C:\ is all you got
Alan Kay at XEROX PARC
The desktop metaphor
visible
Put things in the world not head
The best way to predict the future…

13. 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
TV was around how long before they had multiple screens like the TV series 24?

14. 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?

15. 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

16. 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!

17. 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