Convergence
Web casting is a perfect example of technology convergence. Imagery, video, music, speech all converge to produce a form of communication. In terms of media, convergence can take on many definitions or examples. Usually, convergence occurs when multiple products come together to form one product with the advantages of all of them. In the 1990s there was a trend in mass media where convergence represented the aggregation of many media organizations.
Remediation
Coined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, remediation is the process of re-introducing a form of media or medium. There’s a double logic at play here – proliferate and erase. The message is constantly reworked and updated – also, the messages (like those on the internet) often refer to each other. Usually, when the media or medium is remediated, the media or medium becomes aestheticized. That is, the media is made to look better. An example of this is “That 70’s Show” or the EMP as a shrine to the 60’s.
Video Camera Lenses
Higher end cameras have lenses that contain (or allow) manual control over aperture, focus, etc. Also, lenses are differentiated between those that are interchangeable and/or wide angle and those that have fixed or a 3:4 aspect ratio. Lastly, the optical zoom is preferred over digital zoom (by people in the know).
Technology Fact – Cameras: Ins and Outs
There are several methods that a camera uses to accept and dispense information. The general ins and outs relate to audio, video and the digital signal to the computer. The audio connectors included the XLR, RCA, and the 1/8th inch mini-plug. The video connectors include the composite plug, S-Video plug and the BNC. The digital connection to the computer is usually either the Firewire cable or the USB cable. In more recent times, both Firewire and USB connections have been upgraded to Firewire 800 and USB 2 (respectively).
Further Fact - Biography of Marshall McLuhan
Marshal McLuhan was born in Edmonton Alberta (Canada) in 1911. McLuhan started is university studies at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University where he studied English, geology, history, Latin, astronomy, economics, and psychology. In 1933 he obtained his Bachelor's degree and won a University Gold Medal in Arts and Science. In 1934 he earned his Masters of Arts degree from Manitoba. He then moved to Cambridge University where he earned his second Bachelor’s degree, second Masters degree and first Ph.D.
After he left Cambridge in 1936, McLuhan taught for a year at the University of Wisconsin, and then, following his conversion to Catholicism, he joined the faculty of a Jesuit institution, the University of St. Louis. There he married a Texas drama student named Corinne Keller Lewis, with whom he had six children. In 1944 he returned to Canada where he taught for two years at what was then known as Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, before finally settling at the University of Toronto, his home for the rest of his career. Here he met a political economist named Harold Innis who had discovered that certain media of communication are time based and certain media—more portable and ephemeral—are space based. Working with this hint, and discovering simultaneously in the works of James Joyce, notably Finnegans Wake, a critique of radio and television, McLuhan articulated his perceptions of media as extensions of the human body, and of electronic media, in particular, as extensions of the nervous system, imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions on the psyche of the user.
Aided by a Ford Foundation grant, McLuhan and a few collaborators, notably the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, produced a periodical entitled Explorations—consisting of eight issues, from 1953 to 1957— laying out these perceptions. The articles by McLuhan in this periodical remain the best introduction to his work.