Disruptive Behavior.

On the matter of whether or not blogs are a Disruptive Media: I don't really know.

To be completely honest, before this semester, I never viewed blogs as a serious tool. I mean, I had my livejournal, but I only ever just used it as a place to write up my daily thoughts and happenings, because I'm too lazy to push a pen across a notebook. I'd never really thought of blogs as a major "media source." The '04 election, I found myself clicking around the political blogosphere, yeah, but I never really thought of the articles I read there as being "real news," just people's thoughts, even if the news being written up was, for the lack of better words, news-worthy.

Here's the issue, though: even if a news story appears on the blogosphere, and eventually awareness becomes great enough that it appears in major news sources, it is no longer this sort of "underground" information, its a major news story. So, now the major exposure it gets is through the filters of the media conglomerates. So, the actual version of the story gets to the masses with a different spin.

It's sort of like how we talked about the rise and fall of the independent movie in class yesterday. Nothing stays "cutting edge" for long. And by the time it reaches the masses, it certainly isn't cutting edge anymore. It's been gobbled up by one of the Big Seven, and reduced in meaning.

I don't remember who it was who said in class yesterday that the more they hear about how the media industry works, the more jaded they become, but I kinda have to agree with him. It's kind of abysmal, the state of affairs. Especially now that the FCC is "clamping down" on "indecency." $500,000 dollars for an indecent broadcast? Meaning, as much money as the tuition this year for everyone in the class if I got up infront of a camera and spoke about my disgust for this Fucking McCarthyism.

Something has to come in and shake things up. Is it the blog? I'd like to think so (see the above), but don't think so. Unfortunately the only people who read blogs are the people who read blogs. If that makes any sense. I'm afraid that none of this makes any sense. I'm kind of in full-on rant mode, and I'm told that it can be quite incoherent (remember the time we were talking about authenticity in music and I went raving for about ninety seconds without a breath?)

Anyway, I have learned a lesson about web-safe colors. See, on my icon project, I had used Illustrator to do the actual shape of the thing, and then saved the PNG to my webspace. I forgot, however, to save the AI file. So, when I decided later that I wanted to change the color scheme, I had to do so without the original AI, and since I know Photoshop better, I used that. Unfortunately, on the monitor I was using (on a crappy older mac in the basement of Simkins Dormitory), it looked like I had managed to get every pixel in areas I had turned from red to black. Turns out I missed a few. Hopefully, I'll be able to fix it before you, Chris, get to it.

posted by Baylor at 1:43 PM