Ghost in the shell french cover art.

Ghost in the Shell refers to the concept of a soul existing in a machine. It is an exploration of the post human conflict. Post human is a term that refers to the point in which people don’t really need human bodies anymore. The mind exists in machine conflicts. This anime explores the deep philosophical ground of this notion, with a splash of science fiction action. It features a main character who is cyborg working for a special military unit used to deal with very dangerous situations that pop up in a world of disconnected consciousness, and people having their minds hacked.

The dialog seems to be a bit stilted at points, and mainly is used to explore philosophical notions. The animation is smooth and deeply detailed, as is common in anime. They also combine some rather well done computer animation and the transition is mostly seamless. In a cinematic language sense, the visuals are straight forward. The pacing is mostly done at an even normal time. There are some slow motion shots but because it is not overused, it has far more effect. they do like to play with odd angle shots. Rarely do you evenly look at any character. You are always just slightly off straight on. There are moments of visual contrast, such as a cyborg fight against a future tank in a classic old building with images of evolution and nature embedded in the walls. Machine gun fire chips away at a family tree of all animal life.

The sound involved is also striking. The sound scape is actually pretty stark in incidental sounds and background sounds. The music is impressive in its combination of the traditional asian element and instruments with choir arrangements and beats that are certainly inspired by more dancehall sounds. These are counter balanced by the more ballad like sections with the same traditional instrument sounds. There are several points where the film just wanders this future world with the music playing. it is like the music is singing to that world.

The film’s overall effect is solid. It has enough action and motion to stay in interesting. The philosophical underpinning is the real feature of this film and it is constructed to emphasize that underpinning. There is animated nudity in the film, but it is not sexualized. It is made plain, these are not salacious images. There is no sex in the machines. The beauty of the main character’s form is counterpointed by her coldness. This is to she is not human, she is more machine than woman, but the counter to that idea is despite being a machine, she is still very much alive with drives, insecurities and all the troubles of people. In the end, she becomes more than human. The evolution imagery of the earlier gunfight is born out as the character evolves into something new by the end of the film.

The history of online video is a short one, relatively speaking.  In that short time however, it has had a dramatic effect on society and media in general.  The business model of entertainment and news media has had to adapt.  A whole knew sort of celebrity has arisen;  a whole new kind of fame has been born.

The first streaming video service was from Real Networks in 1997.  The videos were crude and painful to watch.  The big problem was the lack of wide spread broadband.  The ability of the typical video consumer to watch these videos was limited.  It was further complicated by the fact that the Real Networks video player was rife with obtrusive extra software when installed.  This turned off many users.

The online videos began to really show up in 2004.  There were a few places experimenting with the technology before that time, but that was the year it began to gain real widespread use. They were encoded in flash and posted on individual websites.  The people who posted these videos on their sites began calling themselves Vloggers, as a play on the word blogger.   Broadband had become much more ubiquitous and the content had also matured.  The Jib Jab humorous flash videos concerning the 2004 election were very popular.  On the other end of the spectrum was the video from Al Queda of a soldier’s execution, which was posted on many blogs at the time.

In 2005 the form truly exploded with the site, youtube.  This was the first real video distribution network.  Anyone could post to it.  Anyone could post video content, easily, and have subscribers to that content.  This was a major step.  Add into this, the release of the first video ipod, and this method of content distribution became viable.  Networks of shows began to form in 2006 with Revision3 and Next Networks leading the pack.   They are still producing today.

By the time John Edwards announced his intention to run for president on youtube, in 2007, the revolution was really already underway.  Stars were beginning to appear online.  Lonelygirl15 became famous as a youtube sensation the year before and in 2007 another production received an enemy.  In 2008 people were getting millions of followers on Youtube.   People were making money from sponsors while still being the raw content of individuals.  Even some mainstream stars came to the internet for projects.  The Dr. Horrible Sing Along blog was a enormous success, with known names like Niel Patrick Harris and Joss Whedon.  In 2008 the Netflix streamin service was launched and it changed everything again once again.  Now through the internet, you could watch as many first run movies as you want  for a flat fee.  The selection was limited at first but it grew quickly and still grows.  The success has eaten into the raitings of traditional television as people are preferring the on demand content.

Even today, the trend is growing. More and more internet productions are going up.  Recent Surveys have indicated even 40% or more of people over the age of 50 are watching online video.   With Netflix and youtube available in living rooms through the tv and in mobile formats as well, the digital video revolution is completely mainstream.  The ubiquity of it is unquestioned now and the question is no longer if online video will kill traditional television distribution, but when.

Cnn article “Is online video the future of television, may 2008. by Thom Patterson

http://articles.cnn.com/2008-05-01/entertainment/tv.future_1_online-video-web-sites-youtube?_s=PM:SHOWBIZ

A Decade in Hisoty of online video by Andrew Baron

http://dembot.com/post/310798115/a-decade-in-history-of-online-video

The History and future of REal Networks, internet video magazine

http://www.internetvideomag.com/Articles-2004/022324Real.htm

The History of ONline Video, The Blog Herald, october 2010, by Franky Brankurt

http://www.blogherald.com/2010/10/27/history-of-online-video/

Audio Drama had a brief, but influential life, died, and seems to rise once more in the digital age.  Early radio stations were hard pressed to find enough content to fill the airwaves.  The recording industry had not yet reached the industrial fever pitch it would one day have.  A lot of the music produced for radio was done live on air.  Several people in Europe and America seemed to have struck upon the notion of doing plays on the air.  These early plays were essentially stage plays done in front of a microphone.

In the 1930’s, the Merchandise Mart Radio company in Chicago began to produce the first plays designed from the ground up to be played on radio.  Soap Operas were born here, as well as the horror show, Lights Out.  The form offered interesting storytelling tricks you could not do in traditional acting, pure voice work, rich soundscapes not effected by the audience or actors making noise,  and narrative tricks like having the characters internal dialog and their external dialog.

The radio drama became a stapple of radio across the country and around the world.  People sit and listen to the stories.  It was not unlike what television evoked, but every person saw something different.  The power of the medium was best demonstrated by Orson Wells and the Mercury Radio Theater company.  They produced a modernized version of the H. G. Welles classic, War of the Worlds. The changes they made were make it sound like the events in the story were a news story breaking into the broadcast.  The results were, unexpected.  People tuning in, mistook it for a real news broadcast.  In the neighborhood of a million people across the country thought the broadcast was real.  In Washington State, a small town lost power during the broadcast, which drove the panic into over drive.

The story of the panic just drove the popularity of radio drama’s.   Shows like soap opera’s and The Shadow became part of the American media landscape.  In the 1940’s many people would gather around the radio for news from the war, and then listened to the radio shows for an escape.

In the late 50’s and into the 60’s the television began to supplant radio in America.  There were still shows being produced, like Zero Hour and Firesign Theater, but the popularity was dropping.  By the late 70’s and onward,  radio drama was effectively dead in the US, with only a few public radio hanger ons.

England on the other hand kept the tradition alive and even today;  they produce a number of productions a year on several networks.  The form still draws successful and honored actors in England.

In America, radio drama is being reborn, online. Enthusiasts from across the country and around the world discovered podcasting in the mid 2000’s and realized it was an ideal  method of distributing radio drama once again.  What is more, modern audio editing on a computer, meant that actors no longer had to be in the room together.  An actor in Tennessee can be in a scene with someone from New York, and mixed together by a sound editor in New Zealand.  There has been an explosion of podcasts delivering this unique audio form.  The radio drama rises again to entertain once more.

Dunning, John On the air: the encyclopedia of old-time radio Oxford university Press, New York 1998, web

Oboler, Arch  Windy Kilocycles Arch Oboler’s Analysis of Radio Drama in Chicago(Including Some Thoughts on Chicago Television)

Originally published in Theater Arts 1951, reprinted on the web at http://www.richsamuels.com/nbcmm/windy.html, web 20 March, 2011

Lichtig, Toby The podcast’s the thing to revive radio drama, The Guardian 24 April, 2007, web 20 march, 2011

The Mercury Theatre on the Air, website, web 20 March, 2011

History of Photography

The history of photography can be viewed through many lenses.  It can be seen through it’s effect on art and reporting.  It can be seen through its effect on the society and how we identify ourselves.  One way which is particularly interesting is the very tangible benefits of having a physical, accurate lasting image to reference. It has had trans formative effect on a few fields that rely on solid and accurate information.

Astronomy
In astronomy, it has always been a game of watching and patience. It was meticulous observation through and through.  The problem was recording the observations.  Even as late as early 1900’s many astronomers would try and draw by hand what they saw through the telescope. It was painstaking to say the least and ripe for human error.  An unsteady hand and you mark a planet where there is none.   That changed with the introduction of photography into the work. daguerreotype photos were used at first but were difficult to work with. The later improvements made the work easier.

Clyde W. Tombaugh was one of the people who helped show the merit in using photographic plates instead.  In 1930, after studying for thousands of hours and millions of stars, he find one that moved.  A faint dot that you have to look really hard to even see, was shown to have changed position between two images taken weeks apart.  That faint dot came to be known later as Pluto.

Photo plates of Pluto transit, image from Wiki images

Edwin Hubble was another pioneer astronomer and his use of photography helped change the view of the universe.  Using a powerful telescope on Mount Wilson, Hubble took exceedingly long exposures of faint light sources.  These light sources turned out to be galaxies.   Up until that time, the leading thought was that the Milky Way was the only such stellar body.  With the discovery of the galaxy in the images, they found the universe to be far more vast than anyone expected.

Intelligence work
The social effect of war photography can’t be understated.  Seeing the effects of war can have a powerful effect on people at home away from the fighting.  The other effect of photography on war is more pragmatic though.  It helps with the planning of war.

When planning the D-Day attacks of World War 2, photos and post card pictures were used to plan attacks. With newer photos taken from boats, aircraft and on the ground by spies, the allies knew where the German defences had been built up and what supply routes needed to be destroyed.

The Cuban Missile Crisis in the 60’s was also build on photographs.  U2 planes flown over Cuba began to show distinctive signs of missile sites being built up.  Using the intelligence gathered in these photographs, the US confronted the USSR over the missile build up a mere 90 miles from the us border.  The use of similar photos confirmed the missiles had been moved out and helped end the crisis as well.

reconisance photos center, National Security Archive, The George Washington Universit

Law Enforcement
Wanted posters of course had existed long before the photograph.  Rough drawings and etchings would show a rough approximation of a wanted man’s appearance, but it was not exactly accurate all the time.  Photos were added in the late 1800’s to great effect.  Suddenly, the images were very recognizable and harder to fool.  Having a wanted poster was a form of celebrity, but not one you wanted.

John Dillinger was one of the most notorious bank robbers in US history.  His exploits were the stuff of folk legend.  What is more he managed to slip in and out of places without being recognized.  That all changed when the FBI got involved.  They produced a nationwide wanted poster of the man including a pair of very good photos.   He was so bothered by this, he sought out an underground doctor have “back alley” cosmetic surgery done to alter his appearance. In the end it didn’t help.  The surgery nearly killed him and he was brought done anyway.

John Dillinger Wanted poster, From the FBI archives

Even today photos change law enforcement.  Crime scene photos preserve conditions as close to the time of murder in exacting detail.  Photographic databases allow suspects to be identified from shots of the crowd, bank teller machines, and stills taken from video cameras watching crimes as they occur.

Photographic tools have changed culture in social and and economic ways, but also in very real solid everyday ways.   Without it, criminals would be a little harder to find, wars would maybe be a even more drawn out, and we would know that much less about the universe.

bibliography

I chose as my media, games.  Specifically, I chose table top RPG’s such as Dungeons and Dragons.  This is a media which is both print and interactive. These are photos of dual games running at the same time in the local game store, Organized play.

Entering the store

prep and shopping

Book on the table

Game Master

The game is afoot.

The story is running

Meanwhile

The other game master

brings a bit of color to the tale

The perspective

The photos were taken the Living Forgotten Realms event at Organized Play in Knoxville, TN.

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