Rough, Sandpapery, Unpleasant Draft

The physical building that Airsplat operates out of doesn't look like much.  It's a warehouse, a small office, several rows of computers, and not much else.  But this unassuming building is the home of the largest supplier of Airsoft gear in the country, and an example of a company that could not flourish the way it does without the Internet.
    Airsoft originated in Japan in the 1980s.  Guns were outlawed in Japan, but many people were still interested in them, so manufacturers started making realistic replicas of weapons that fired small, plastic BBs instead of bullets, creating a non-lethal weapon variant that looks and feels as much like the real thing as possible.  The guns were primarily either put on display, or else used in recreational combat simulations, similar to paintball.  Airsoft spread from Japan to other countries in Asia in the late 1980s, and by the early 90s it had arrived in North America.
    To me, however, the most interesting thing about Airsplat is
   

Brainstorming!

Okay so here goes.

Topic 1:The Fall Of The Newspaper

For my first person, I would like to interview a friend of a friend who writes movie reviews and a weekly opinion column.  This guy used to write for newspapers, back when they were a thing, but now does all of his stuff exclusively online for a variety of movie and news websites.  I think it would be fascinating to pick his brain about what the transition from printed news to online news was like.

Topic 2: Online Commerce

For my second person, I would like to interview a friend of mine who works at a company called Airsplat.  They are one of the largest providers of Airsoft guns and gear in the country.  (Airsoft is like paintball, but with little white pellets instead of paintballs so that you get all of the pain of being shot at with none of the clothes-ruining of paint.)  This company runs exclusively online, and does not have any physical stores, making their success a product of the digital age.

Topic 3: YouTube Success (And How Anyone Can Get It)

For my third person, I'd like to interview a friend who runs a small movie company.  His production company runs and releases their stuff almost entirely online, and he was actually discovered for his current position when a YouTube video of him and his friend went viral and was seen by the head of his current company.  I would like to talk to him about how sites like YouTube have made it possible for anyone with talent, work ethic, and a fair amount of luck to get noticed.

So there you go!  I'm gonna close with a 30 Rock quote, because it is relevant and because 30 Rock is wonderful.

"We didn't know what to do for them, but then I had a brainstorm!  It was a bad one.  Jenna had to put my tongue-guard in."

Awesome Things and School, And Why They Should Always Have Been The Same Thing

The documentary we watched today made me want to get my childhood back so that I could have been enrolled in that video game school in New York as a kid.  My school career pre-college was pretty much uniformly awful, as I'm sure is the case for most of the kids now at art school.  I know I personally picked Cornish because it was physically far from my hometown and ideologically far from the terrible schooling I had to deal with growing up.  Seeing all those kids (even that awful pretentious one with the long hair and a last name with more consonants in it than this entire blog post so far) getting the chance to learn through activities and games and not just textbooks made me super jealous.  I would have loved to have enjoyed going to school as a kid.  I think the big difference was that the children had creative outlets.  In our school district there weren't any extracurricular activities to be had until we got into high school, at which point the part of our lives where we needed them most desperately had already passed.  Having the opportunity to express yourself and get all of your thoughts and emotions and ideas out into the world in a medium that you enjoy is a wonderful thing for a child to be able to have, and it's a shame more schools don't have programs like the ones at that school.

Anyway, enough bitching about my childhood.  I guess I should clarify that the parts that didn't involve school were perfectly wonderful and I'm not just some crazy bitter old man.  My biggest "Hmmm!" moment in this documentary so far came from the man who said that "Addiction is just a word that is used to police society."  I thought the examples he gave about certain things, such as spending a lot of time on Facebook or in World Of Warcraft, being symptoms of addiction, while spending an equal amount of time rehearsing for a play or reading a book being noteworthy and wonderful things was really interesting.  The part that resonated with me the most personally was when he suggested that certain things that are viewed as addictions might actually just be symptoms of depression.  I've never thought of it that way, but it made a lot of sense.  I'm excited to finish it tomorrow and see what they do to wrap up all the examples.

First!

My first insightful moment of the class so far is that I need to bring a laptop to take notes on in the future because I cannot read my own handwriting.  It's going to make the rest of this assignment all kinds of fun.

Legitimate "Hmmm" moment #1:  Clay Shirky is a kick-ass name.  Seriously.  He sounds like a cartoon wizard.  Like, "You will rue the day you crossed Clay Shirky!"  Awesome.

Aside from having a name that makes me quiver with envy, he actually brought up some really interesting points.  I especially liked his idea of digital media as a "Triathlon" consisting of equal parts consuming, producing and sharing, even though that seems like it's quite a ways off.  Consumption is still the easiest part of the process, after all, and easy things are great.

"Hmm!" moment #2:  A Second Industrial Revolution

I loved this analogy, especially since Clay used it to draw lines not only between the life-changing aspects of the Industrial and Digital Revolutions, but also how overwhelming the whole thing can be.  The internet is an amazing and useful tool, but it's also a staggering amount of information and videos and jokes and comics and articles and music at your fingertips.  It's easy to just get lost in it all.

"Hmm!" moment #3: The Read-Write Culture

This last moment that made me go "Hmm" was the second video's main theme of turning digital from a "Write-Only" culture into a "Read-Write" culture.  I thought it was interesting how much the two lecturers had in common when it came to themes and ideas.  The second guy's slant was a little more "Think of the children!" but they both brought up a lot of similar points about fair use and the contributory process.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that.  Question time!

• How do you think digital media can be changed to put more of an emphasis on production and less on consumption? 
• What do you think of Second Guy's statement that "Extremism on one side creates extremism on all sides?"
• How can the copyright laws and the fair use laws be combined so as to create an environment that is the most favorable to hands-on production?

Also, final thought:  Clay Shirky pronounced Wikipedia "Wee-kee-pedia" and it never failed to make me laugh.