I LOVE HIGH TECH cars as much as I love science fiction so when the two come together, I smile.
You need to see the video (below the break) all the way to the very very end to appreciate fine advertising that capitalises on semiotics.
Continue reading "When Old Meets New. And Audi Too." »
Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Image from Viixen's Twitpics.
UNTIL INSTAGRAM, I was unaware of the thigh gap obsession. Then it appeared in my daily newsfeeds in the form of a quick test.
Derek Baird gave the test: "Stand-up straight with your feet together in front of a mirror and look for a space between your upper thighs. If you see a gap, you have the latest body image obsession teen girls are starving themselves to achieve."
And then Derek pointed me to how this teen girl obsession has a huge following on social media sites like Tumblr, YouTube and Instagram.
Derek explains, "The trend is fueled by digital media and magazines that feature celebrities with the elusive 'thigh gap'---which is, in most cases, the work of a highly skilled Photoshop guru and not so much based on reality."
I noticed how easy it is to subscribe to a steady pictoral flow of dangerous body image trend. I can read tweets from Supermodel Cara Delevingne about her thigh gap on Twitter and scroll through thousands of thigh gaps on Tumblr with images of ultrathin women in bikinis, hiked up skirts, and lingerie, all baring thighs so thin they don't touch.
Continue reading "Teens Watching Thigh Gaps" »
Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Mia Goldbach on the dial.
THE BIGGEST COMPLAINT we get from our junior infant (snapped younger in the photo) is she doesn't want to hear the news. She wants RTEjr.
We told her the news said she can watch, listen and play on a new RTEjr app so she's interested. She agreed to pull one of her apps off our family iTouch and tossed Snow White into the dead pool. Some day she might discover how to run the RTÉ Player and dive into 40 hours of content on any given day.
I like the idea that Mia can listen to stories or sing songs with an online presenter because I grew up with those kinds of things before we had a television in the house.
It looks like RTE have commissioned more than 100 children’s stories and that some of that content will port to mobile devices. I wonder if we can listen to the dedicated children’s radio channel on DAB or if it's a Saorview-only option.
Continue reading "Watching RTEjr Evolve" »
Bernie Goldbach in Cashel with Found Mixtapes.
I BELIEVE THERE is a lost art in creating a proper mixtape. And it's an artform that uses real cassette tapes to immortalise the sound track of my life.
In the Limerick School of Art and Design where I teach creative multimedia students, the steady march of technology continues unrelentlessly. I marked significant emotional events in college while listening to and making mixtapes. Last semester, only one in 20 students in my college lectures could explain how a pencil is related to a cassette tape. And that respondent had never rewound a cassette with a pencil but had seen someone do it in a movie.
I stumble across old mixtapes from the 20th century, often remembering the exact point on the cassette where the music is garbled from stretched tape or demagnetised segments. And I've handled a few of my 70s vintage tapes feeling that I'm part of a nearly extinct species that marked college days with the love and passion of crafting a real set of tracks that often came directly from an LP or from a radio station. I've digitised one of my found mixtapes below, trying to immortalise REM in the process.
Continue reading "Older Than Cassette Tape" »
Bernie Goldbach in Drogheda | Image from my Flickr photostream.
THERE ARE TIMES like these, on the heels of the suicide of Aaron Swartz, that cause me to think about the precious status enjoyed by copyrighted content. Years from now, I believe we will recognise copyright as an imperialistic concept.
Nothing I write and nothing I share in a higher education classroom has any value unless it's read and remembered. My course notes, essays, sample questions and readings have to be opened, read, discussed and shared among classmates. Only then does creative content become knowledge. In a related essay, Jeff Jarvis cites "the pioneers of rethinking content’s value"—Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow, Aaron Swartz—to make the point that "all creation is born of what came before". The realm of intellectual property has changed.
Continue reading "Knowledge is Never Content as Content" »
ONE OF THE MOST cherished discoveries in my life is stumbling upon the visually impaired community on Audioboo. If you want to hear the power of social networking, it's worth following a dozen blind people as they navigate through their days.
I went along and clipped a few minutes of audio (below) and also included the most popular sound clip from Audioboo, based upon its mentions in the year 2012 on the world's most compassionate social audio platform.
Bernie Goldbach in Clonmel | Photo of Irish Examiner.
IRISH NEWSPAPERS HAVE started invoicing agencies that link to their content. If this unwelcome industry practise creeps into academe, it could stifle the delivery of high-quality content.
As the senior creative multimedia lecturer at the Limerick Institute of Technology, I write content in the form of Acrobat documents, e-books, Powerpoint files, public Evernote links, Google documents and Slideshare presentations. All of these documents gain a share of their relevance through occasional hyperlinks to Irish newspapers such as the one shown above in this blog post. Based on a billing mechanism developed by the National Newspapers of Ireland, I could be liable for payment simply because I put links into a bibliography section of an academic document. Since I cannot honour a demand payment, I am modifying the hyperlinks to ensure they do not point to the newspapers. Furthermore, I am removing most of my academic material from public view since I know Meltwater, Google and other crawlers have discovered it during the past three years.
It's an issue that has merited discussion on This Week in Google and on For Immediate Release, the premier business podcast where I've left a comment.
Continue reading "Irish Papers Charging for Links" »
Bernie Goldbach in LSAD-Clonmel | Image of our digital native.
THINKHOUSE PR SURVEY results clearly show a comfortable relationship between Irish youth and mobile phones. They are "very firmly co-dependent". [1]
Thinkhouse discovered "mobile phone ownership is getting younger" because "most of today’s teenagers (15-18) ... got their mobile phones between the ages of 11-15." From what I see in primary schools, the age of a pay as you go phone has dropped below the age of 10.
Since a lot of smartphones are being handed down to young people in family homes, it's no surprise to discover that "83% of teens own a smart phone." We count on more than 90% of our creative multimedia students owning a smartphone before the end of their first semester since we distribute a large amount of course material through online channels easily synchronised with smartphone applications.
It surprises me to discover the Thinkhouse PR teens showed more iPhone ownership than Android ownership (59% for iPhone).
It doesn't surprise me that most of the young people in the survey use their smartphones in all sorts of places. I saw that with Bebo teens a few years ago. [2]
Given the dominance of smartphones in the pockets and purses of young people, I hope schools around Ireland have a crisis notification plan in effect that involves more than sending out bulk text messages. From all accounts, young Irish primary and secondary school students refer to their phones for information more than they read written notes or listen for broadcast updates. Schools and clubs don't need to produce new versions of their websites to serve these information requirements but young smartphone users need to add schools to their smartphone notification centers so they can quickly get and share newsworthy information.
2. Previously -- "A message to Bebo Teens" on my blog, March 7, 2007.
Bernie Goldbach teaches social media for the Limerick Institute of Technology in an Honours Creative Multimedia Degree programme.
Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Photo of our family photographer.
I LEARN BY WATCHING. And I watch our five year old learn a lot by doing.
I'm keeping a Flickr photoset of "Life as a Junior Infant" because I wish my mom and dad had made one for me and for each of my four brothers. Back then, it would've been more difficult because we didn't have cameras we could tuck into our pockets to record our worlds. Mia uses a Sony Xperia (in the photo), a Nokia Lumia (in the video) and an iPod Touch (for Busy Bees audioboos). Sometimes I see what she's doing throughout the day because I've set the devices to automatically upstream to Google Plus (Picasa) and Dropbox. She has a creative touch and her ingenuity deserves to be studied by parents and cousins.
Continue reading "Watching Over the Shoulder" »
Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Happy Cat from Turntable.fm.
AN INTERESTING BUZZ is happening in community audio that you can hear and see in content tagged as #audiomo. And as in all vibrant community projects, several real initiatives are bubbling out across time zones.
Based on the snippets of thought, soundscapes and stories that I've already heard a few days into the Audiomo project, I've told my Lumia phone to remind me just before noon on Wednesday (12.12.12) to record 12 seconds of content on the 12th month of the 12th year. As Dizzy Thinker suggests, I'm going to upload it to my Audioboo account and tag it #twelmo. And probably cross-reference it another way as well.
I'm a sucker for listening to stories and that's the biggest reason I've let the spirit of community audio divert me into hours of content emerging each day that people around the world are sharing, mostly in three to five minute chunks of time. I can hear accents from every major geographic region of the United Kingdom, American accents from places I once lived, and a smattering of Canadians from Toronto to British Columbia. This home-grown content makes no apologies for background noises, audio quality or rambling thoughts. It's pure, unadulterated community audio and fascinating at its source--mainly through smartphone apps. I'm part of that flow, posting stuff effortlessly to Audioboo.fm/topgold.
Continue reading "12 Seconds on the 12th of the 12th of the 12th" »
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