Author: Jiannan Shi

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Week 2: Photoshop Collage (Jiannan Shi)

Product:

A combination of city skylined of AbuDhabi-Shanghai-NewYork.

Description:

The first idea that comes to my mind to combine three images was to create a long landscape with the skylines of cities that NYU’s three portal campuses are located. Then, I started to search, and found these three photos:

(Abu Dhabi)

PudongSkyline(Shanghai)

new-york-skyline(New York)

After I created layers for each skyline, I met several problems:

  1. I need to stretch one of the pictures to be the background, but it is hard to get the sky and sea expanded in a similar fashion. Then I tried different tools in the toolbar to figure out how I can fill in the blank areas. My first try was to use the “Content-Aware Move” tool. But I found it too slow:Difficulty-hard to expand shanghaiThen I realized that I can select the blank area and fill in the color of “content-aware patching.” This is how I finally did:My solution: Content-Aware Patch
  2. It is hard to get similar lightings to different buildings in the skylines. After I selected all the things I need as new layers and put all these into the expanded Shanghai skyline, I found the New York and Abu Dhabi does not match Shanghai’s sun color (as the picture above shows). Also, although I tried to find the original skyline pictures in similar resolutions, there are still some places where the resolutions between buildings cannot match. To solve this problem, I finally decided to make the whole picture black-and-white style and blurred it.
  3. It is hard to make the inverted image of these buildings in the water surface when I combine them together. To make it look real, I used the healing brush in the toolbar to copy the building on the land into the water. Then, I used the content-aware tool to make the inverted images integrated with the water surface.  Since I cannot make sure all the images to be converted correctly and scientifically, I just cut down some portion of the water surface.
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Response to McLuhan “Medium is the Message” – Jiannan Shi

People may regard that it should be what we see in the content rather than the carrier of the content that matters and influences our actions. We might think that it is important to know how to use the medium, how to tell a wonderful story in the content of a film, but we seldom realize the value of film as the medium. McLuhan challenges our content-centered view and argues in a different angle that the medium itself should be much more important and valuable than the content that it carries. Taking the example of printing technology, McLuhan says that print in the 16th century “individualism and nationalism” (160). The medium is shaping our society in its very first beginning, and we should realize how powerful it is. He continues warns us that “if the formative power in the media is the media themselves, that raises a host of large matters” (161). If a society restricts itself within one or two forms of medium, the people’s life and sensation in such an environment would become fixed.

Reflecting on myself, I cannot live without my mobile phone not only because of the attractive content on social media but also because the mobile phone itself is becoming a necessary tool to live my life here in Shanghai. Ordering food, paying the bill, booking the taxi, and even making an appointment with doctors are all available on my phone, and they, without doubt, are convenient. I always appreciate the programmers, innovators, and content contributor on how their work in developing software benefit my life and change our lifestyle. However, I did not realize that all these works cannot exist without the development of internet, web, communication infrastructure, and mobile technologies. McLuhan gives me a new angle in seeing our surroundings, and an insight to treat medium with a more comprehensive understanding.

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Response to “Long Live the Web” and “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud” (Jiannan Shi)

Tim Berners-Lee defends principles of the web in his article “Long Live the Web.” He says that the Web is critical to free speech as a medium which is based on egalitarian principles. Berners-Lee mentions that universality, decentralization, open standards should be the principles and features of the Web in order to make itself powerful enough. The threat to these principles, includes the increasing tendency of internet censorship, consumerism, and the dictatorship of technology giants. What Berners-Lee mentions about the Web is quite cogent, but it would be more interesting to present his ideas in the Chinese context. Even though the Web could exhibit democratic values, the authorities treat it in a different way. The Web media, however, should be the mouthpiece of the Party and lead the public opinion, says CPC News. The threat of the universality principle is shown in the Chinese landscape as well. Berners-Lee mentions that it is dangerous to see “one search engine . . . gets so big that it becomes a monopoly” (82). In 2016, Wei died from cancer after he’s getting medical treatment from a hospital where he had found to be listed the top in the search result of Baidu.com, the biggest Chinese web searching engine, and it caused a social panic. It was found that the reason why that hospital would be listed top was that Baidu treated it as a commercial advertisement.

Ingrid Burrington discovers the geopolitics of the “cloud” in his article “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud.” Although technological and climate concerns are part of the considerations to build “data centers,” political concerns also need to be considered given the increasing call of data sovereignty. In the Chinese context, this article reminds me of the news on the data center of Apple in China. In 2020, a new data center will be open in Guizhou Province to dedicating itself as a holder of iCloud data for Chinese mainland users, according to Xinhua News. Although Guizhou province is not a technologically advanced or talent-attracting place to build a data center, the Chinese data of iCloud are to be saved here mostly because of political concerns.

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Week 1 – HTML Portfolio Page (Jiannan Shi)

Project: An HTML portfolio page for myself

Documented by Jiannan Shi

Webpage link:  http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~js9686/week_1/index.html

Date: Feb. 14, 2019

Description:

I made this portfolio for myself using all the tags we have learned in class and recitation. It went on smoothly when I was building this webpage, and here’s one thing worth documenting:

I made a navigation division at the top of my page, but I wanted to mark that the default “index.html” page is exactly the “Home” page in the menu. One solution that I found was to bold merely “Home” these letters, and leave the other items in the menu in the regular font. Similarly, when directing to the “Contact” page, the item “Contact” would be bolded and “Home” would be in the regular font again. By doing so, I made the navigation explicit about which page the viewer is looking at.

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Response to E.M. Forster “The Machine Stops” – Jiannan (Nan) Shi

E.M. Forster wrote “The Machine Stops” one hundred years ago, and we could see: people were still using “books,” and airships have not reached the space yet. Some scenes have already achieved in a different format for now:  we now are able to communicate in voice and real-time video with a person from the other side of the world through the internet, just as how Vashti did with her son. We are now also able to attend a remote lecture thanks to the internet. Yes, this is a work of prediction with a high possibility of coming true, but with a tone of warning. We always regard the development of technology a “progression,” and thank the “advance of science” over and over again. But we seldom question do we really need these advancements, and where would the advancements lead us to.

In the story, this is a world where technology is so advanced that it serves human, helps human achieve goals that they can never think of. One only need to press buttons to get food, play music, take showers, attend lectures. “Thanks to the Machine,” it becomes an easy thing to fly across continents and overlook the Himalayas. Thanks to the Machine, interpersonal communication becomes real-time across different places. Vashti does not need to move even one step or raise her arm for one centimeter when she wants to act something: technology would help her, and serve her. All she needs to do is to provide ideas to herself and the community earth. We might never consider it a bad thing to have one assistant who could help us do all the tedious trifles, don’t we?

However, this is also a world where technology is so advanced that it controls human, and human has to adapt to this world in order to give way for technology development. The only connection between human and machine is “the book of the Machine,” and human has no other right but to obey what the book says about Machine. When Kuno wanted to be a father, he was refused because he was not “a type that the Machine desired to hand on.” Being muscular is a demerit, since “he would never have been happy in that state of life to which the Machine had called him.” Travel becomes few and few, because “thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over.”

No matter how the means, tools, or technologies of communication change, let’s leave some humanity sustained in the place you and I are living. I would strongly advocate for this statement, at least in my state of mind for now.