Convergence Culture

A contemporary convergence culture is when new and old culture collide. There are several types of convergence such as media, technological, economic, social, cultural, and global.

As long as new technologies keep flying in and off shelves, there will always be obsolete technologies and their respective followers.

Take for instance a video game you can buy. These are the formats that I can list off the top of my head:

• Cassette Tape (beyond obsolete)
• Cartridge (apart from nintendo mobile systems, obsolete)
• CD (obsolete)
• DVD (facing obsoletion, still used for physical pc platform distribution)
• Digital Downloads (Very current, existing since the Xbox 360/Playstation 3 era)
• Blu-Ray (Current, used on Xbox One/Playstation 4)

Here are the game systems that I am currently aware of which have had a newly produced physical game:

• Xbox One
• Playstation 4
• Wii U
• 3DS

Of course, the game publisher has the discretion of which console they wish to publish a game on. Several publishers such as Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Microsoft Studios, and Sony Entertainment have entirely abandoned consoles from last generation (Xbox 360/Wii/Playstation 3). Why is this? The games being published are often times too heavy to run on a previous generation system. The last major release I recall seeing on any previous generation system was the Xbox 360 getting Rise of the Tomb Raider (and that was considerably heavy).

Generation exclusivity might also be used as a tool to entice players into a new generation. For instance, when I played Halo 5, I felt like it could fit well on the Xbox 360. It felt about the same graphically and technically, and if Microsoft wanted to, they could have easily ported it to Xbox 360. The only problem with this is the new gameplay mechanics, a nearly double length campaign, and well over 50 GB of additional content (at this point, I believe there is so much content that the current game size is the launch size doubled).

This is just like the decline of video cassettes. At first, when DVDs were considered the new luxury format, releases were relatively rare, but quickly speeding up. People who wanted to keep video cassettes could stay with cassettes, but eventually, video cassettes became phased out due to the increasing popularity of the DVD and the infancy of the Blu-Ray. The DVD is currently undergoing a similar phase, but they are at the beginning of their end. In a way, Blu-Ray can be considered a reincarnation of DVDs. The Blu-Ray can hold far more data than a dvd, has higher quality, is far more scratch resistant, and all Blu-Ray players are reverse compatible with DVD discs (ensuring nobody had to purchase their favorite films again). All of these changes are welcome, but it took me a little while to decide to switch. The primary reason for me converting was due to me getting tired of DVDs repeatedly freezing up and skipping.

Archives

What is an Archive?

When I hear the word archive, I think of a place you go to find information. According to The National Archives, an archive is a place where you can gather facts, data, evidence from letters, reports, notes, memos, photographs, and other primary resources. Archives are used for many things such as to store items as proof that something occurred or even explain how something happened. An example of an archive would be the Pennsylvania State Archives. The Pennsylvania State Archives purpose is to obtain, maintain the original existence, and make available the permanently valuable public records or the Commonwealth along with private papers relevant to the history of the state of Pennsylvania.

Why Make an Archive of Vinyl Record Covers?

Vinyl record covers are one of the first forms of artwork for media presented on a vinyl record, and vinyls date very far back. While it is very likely that there are archives of the songs featured, it is very unlikely that there is an archive dedicated to the cover art. These are especially important to archive, as these are printed on cardboard and can wear/lose their colors quickly. Also, it is worth making a scan of the back of the vinyl cover, as these are typically the only way a person can see the names of a vinyl’s songs.

Our Examples

We have chosen to show you four Vinyl Record Covers that make our case for why there should be an archive. Our first example is the legendary record cover for The Beatles album Abbey Road.
If you talk to anyone over the age of 16 they will be able to tell you exactly what the Abbey Road album cover looks like. It has been repeated time and time again by different people of all different ages, and different races. We have examined the cover as critiques as well, asking why is Paul the only one stepping on the white mark. Album covers like this and like my next example, Jimi Hendrix vinyl record cover Axis Bold As Love,redefine music and album artwork.

The Hendrix album cover is what is known as Afro Album Cover, which African American artists use. It is also historic because it is Jimi Hendrix, one of, if not the greatest guitarist of all time who’s life was cut way to short. Another example is the cover of the Kiss album Sonic Boom.

This cover artwork was done by Michael Doret, an artist who worked on other Kiss albums as well. This album cover has sort of a comic book look to it, with the large animations and bright colors.

Pink Floyd’s album cover for The Dark Side of the Moon is also a standout vinyl design. This album with a simple cover design was meant to focus on things that “make people mad.” It was designed by Storm Thorgerson, the prism dispersing light into color is meant to represent the band’s lighting and the theme of the record.

New World

My piece of electronic literature, New World, is a hypertext narrative. It is set in the future and follows the experiences of a young woman.

Electronic Literature

My original work of electronic literature is a google map essay of the 2016 post season baseball. I play baseball here at UPJ, and am very passionate about it. So my story is a true story of actually events that took place no more than a month ago. My essay is titled The GOAT is Lifted, and when ya read you will see why!

My 15 Favorite Rollercoasters- A Google Map by Jacob Bacci

One of the few joys in my life that does not involve screens is Rollercoasters. If you noticed the title of my tribe’s blog, I named it “Millenial Force”, since our tribe had no other ideas, and as the blog designer, I chose to give a callout to my favorite coaster, Millennium Force. Since the major part of this project is a list of fifteen of my favorite coasters (I actually would have put more in, but I decided 15 is a plentiful number, and it sounded nice for a list.), I would like to list all of the theme parks I have been to and any coasters I did not go on (Denoted by DNR) and when my latest visit was:

2016: Cedar Point, Kings Island

2015: Kennywood, Six Flags Magic Mountain (DNR: Ninja, Goliath), Disney’s California Adventure/Disneyland (DNR: Goofy’s Sky School), Legoland Carlsbad, Seaworld San Diego

2014: HersheyPark

2013: Busch Gardens Williamsburg, Disney World (Florida, All properties), Universal Orlando (Both properties) (DNR: Dueling Dragons- Chinese Fireball)

2012: Dollywood

This list is made for the reason that I know people can be opinionated on coasters, and you might have been on a coaster that opened after (or closed during) my latest visit (I.E. Dollywood- Lightning Rod). Also, we have probably been to different parks, so I might not have yet rode a certain coaster (I.E. Six Flags Great Adventure- Nitro). I have not listed any coasters that are no longer in operation as of my latest visit, and I will not be listing any kiddie coasters.
Also: If I seem biased to Cedar Point, let it be said that everyone can have a bias. Now go back to your HersheyPark and Kennywood bias!

Here is a link to the finished project, a google map containing the 15 coasters I have loved the most, in no particular order.

Here is a playlist of all 15 coasters Point of View videos (what a coaster looks like from the front seats). I have made sure to find videos where the camera does not shake around. The only one I could not find a really good video of was California Screamin’. Don’t bother trying to listen to the soundtrack, as it is easily overpowered by the noisy coaster. Since it was the last ride on the list, I added the soundtrack as a bonus video.
A word of advice before you go into the playlist: If you do not want to take any chances on motion sickness, DO NOT WATCH ON HIGH FRAME RATE! If you get sick due to high frame rates (like me), I am guaranteeing you that these videos will make you vomit!

As a bonus: Here is a photo album of my reactions to all of the Kings Island/Cedar Point coasters that I listed.

Angelina's Electronic Literature Component

My Google Maps essay, Just 3 Days, is a true story about a spur of the moment trip that my family and I had taken to Rome, Italy.  I decided to do the Google Maps essay for my piece of electronic literature because it made it very easy for me to make the reader feel as though they were experiencing this trip with me whether it be the stressful feeling of running around the airport or the amazing sights of Rome.

Text Mining

Michaela

To find out what the common trends were in the latest posts in our blog, we copied all of our blog posts into Voyant, which is a program that will pull out the most used words, and figured out which words we used the most in our individual posts regarding social media, as well as all of our posts as a whole. My individual results largely represented the results of our entire group. To the right is an image that shows my most used words, which were media, social, virtual, and identity. Virtual and identity were tied for third.

Dylan

When I used Voyant to inspect my blog post on social media, it showed me a lot. Voyant showed me that, when I am talking about a certain topic, I tend to say the topics name a lot. For example as you can see through my link, I use the words social, and media a lot throughout my 474 total word post. I believe that Voyant is very helpful because it shows you what you are saying, and if you are repeating yourself. It helped me out in this post, because it really showed me in my writing that I was getting the point of social media across.

Jacob

When I created a corpus (or text examination) of my recent blog post about personalities online, this is what I found. As I had predicted, I had different results than my teammates, with my most common words being:

Like (10)

Just/Online/Personality/Things (6)

This was no surprise to me because I have a different writing style than my teammates. I prefer to write long example posts, while my teammates prefer to write shorter examination posts (which holds true for several of our group posts as well, which I usually write afterthoughts on the topic). I took a conversational approach to this post and my corpus ends up with little matches to my teammates’ corpus. I found it interesting that I incorrectly predicted my corpus, but I am pleasantly surprised by the results.

Angelina
Just as my tribe members had done, I used the website Voyant to see what the common trends were for my most recent blog post about Social Media. By copying my blog post into this website, I was able to find things such as my most used words which were media, social, identity, virtual, and post. These top five words represent my blog post well because it was about social media and our virtual identities that are created through them. The photo below was captured from Voyant. All of the words in the photo were used in my most recent blog post, however, the words that are larger in size are the words that were most used.