Smartphones!

All my babbling about iPhone applications and such led me to the discovery of an app that I can use to write these blog posts directly fom my phone!!! After finding this and using it I thought to myself: "what don't they have for the iPhone?" then I thought deeper...

Only about 15 years ago cell phones became popular and cheap enough for mainstream society. They were not even close to capable of accessing the Internet. My iPhone can do all this and more it is the ultimate media device. It can stream YouTube, browse the web (at speeds much faster than a computer could in 1994), has 16gb of memory which is 32 times more than the first computer my parents ever bought... Technology is booming and the media has a direct feed through so many channels directly into your pocket! Where will it go from here? What will happen in the NEXT 15 years?? I can't even imagine...


-- Posted from my iPhone

Still on the subject...

This new style of media which combines mobile applications with social networking applications is insane. Esspecially with the iPhone...

Yesterday I was playing with yet another toy on my phone called "weird laws". It displays strange laws that are no longer practical but are still written down in law books in various states. If you like a certain law or think it's particularlly interesting or funny you can post it directly to your facebook status! I wouldn't have thought anything of this before this class, but now I've started looking at these things from a very different and critical perspective!

New media invading everything!!

I was on the T today and saw the newest McDonald's poster ad. Nothing surprising about seeing an ad for McD's on the T, what did surprise me was what the ad said. The photo illustrates the "new" third pounder burger and a large container of fries. Above this photoshoped masterpiece in bold white all capital type said the words: "They would friend each other" I couldn't believe my eyes. "Is that a facebook reference?" I started asking myself all these questions... Wow, what has everything come down to? Is facebook really that big of a part of our new culture that McDonald's, is using it it as their advertisement scheme? And all I could answer was: yes! Most people who know what the Internet is know about facebook, especially in my generation, which is the first college generation to have facebook since freshman year (5 years). I remember when I was going into college I got facebook, when it was the hot new thing, and you had to be in a college network to join. Now anyone can join, and peoples parents have facebooks, as well as celebrities, and even our president is on facebook. The site generated so much popularity in 5 years, and is already being considered common knowledge, and being used in a McD's ad.

I would have never even thought twice about this if it wasn't for this class but the media is part of everything. It is really crazy how these trends get so popular so quickly!

Media is creeping in to everything...

Well it's really no surprise, but I have discovered some crazy new ways that the media is creeping into our beloved iPhones... Before if you downloaded a free app from the App Store, it would either be a watered down version of the real application or have banner ads on the screen the whole time you would use the app. NOW they have come up with an even better tactic. Obviously people like the free apps more, simply because they don't have to dish out any of their hard earned money on them. However the software development company needs to pay their employees somehow, no one wants to work for free, so the way free things make money is through polluting their software with advertisements. This does not surprise me.

What DID surprise me is that when I downloaded an app called "most addicting game" (which I used to have before, when it didn't have any ads at all) I began playing the game that was already familiar to me. However every third time I lost the game would go to a black screen load for a couple seconds and then show me a full screen ad of some sort. After playing for about 5 minutes, about the 4th or 5th time the ad popped up, it said "Are you male or female?" and there was no way to bypass this without answering. So you click one, then the next time the ad page came up it asked what age group I was in, again without letting me bypass without an answer. Interested in if this would affect what ads would show up next, I kept playing mostly to find out, since I was tired of the game already. Sure enough the ads became more oriented to things that I would be more likely to buy, such as laptops, and men's deodorant, just to name a couple memorable ones. I was astonished by what they had done, not only are they playing ads, but now they are making sure that you actually care about the ads your seeing. I dunno, I thought it was crazy... and realistically a very good idea from a marketing perspective.

MTV Video Music Awards

So yesterday, I was forced to watch the MTV video music awards with my girlfriend. During the nonsense, I began noticing the commercials. Not only did they have nothing to do with music, television, or music videos, they were marketing fast food to the American youth. The one that stuck in my mind because it played every commercial break was the Taco Bell commercial.

In this commercial we have Evander Holyfield at the counter of a Taco Bell, and he orders some new crap challupa super shell crap, but he orders TWO of them! To which the astonished Taco Bell cashier says "but Mr. Holyfield one of these challupatacosupremes is enough for even a man of YOUR size!" This is when Holyfield steps to the side and informs the cashier that Mama Holyfield (who is Holyfield in a gray wig and a dress) needs one too, and they are not both for him.

The first time it was funny, however after the 3rd and 4th times it quickly got old. The media is selling junk food to youth utilizing false advertisement that Holyfield, a professional boxer, would ever eat there. Also, however comedic it was intended to be, they make it seem as though Taco Bell is a good place to take your mother for lunch.

Comm 229

So this is what it's like to blog... Well here we go, I'm staring up a bit late but, I finally got to blogging. Welcome to my Comm 229 Blog!

I don't know what to say right now so I'll leave it at this for now... I look forward to learning a lot about the media, and using this blog as a sort of media tool to express my ideas and feelings about comm 229, among other things. Bjorn is an awesome teacher, and I know I'll learn a lot!