Category: Cici Liu

For some odd reason, as an adequate and frequent analogist, I interpreted the medium is the message through an image of medium being a certain spoon that feeds the content (food) to our face. However in this case, the spoon, the medium, that part is just as edible and dissolves into our mouths just as the food/content does. This is because, when we are consuming information, “content” nowadays, we aren’t just getting it without a medium to float it into our heads. Rather, unbeknownst to us, the content is in the form of print or speech, and we are swallowing it alongside the empty calories of the spoon.

My favorite line in this article: “For each of the media is also a powerful weapon with which to clobber other media and other groups” (161). I find this line significant because the medium which we use to relay content matters, to the extent that the medium (or plural, media) can damage us, go on to make us antagonistic to each other. Knowing this makes me see how medium is an impactful tool which we must hold responsibly. Now, in the digital age, we cannot escape media and we still have to retain the same level of awareness as before or else we will pay for our mistakes.

Intro: 

For this photoshop collage, which I title: f.lwer child, by a mix of spontaneity and spelling error, is a mashup of three individual photos. They comprise of a bouquet of flowers, an ELLE magazine cover, and shark infested waters. 

Image sources: 

Inspiration:

While in class, I believe it was last Monday, we were show some examples of photoshopped images, and one of them had these portraits where the head and neck from collared shirts were cut off, replaced by flowers, starting from their green stems. 
This gave me the idea that I could do something of the same concept with a bouquet of flowers, so found the first image of beautiful flowers that have this illustrative property. Then, when I searched ELLE covers, looking for portraits of women and found the photo of this lady with her bouquet-like hair style, I knew that I could make this work. Only when I realized later that I had to incorporate a third image, did I think of the shark invested waters image for the background. 

Process:  

In photoshop, I used mostly the quick select, magic wand, healing, and clone stamp tools. The quick select and magic wand would let me pick up an oddly shaped amount of the same color, such as the hair, and replace it with another image, such as the bouquet. The healing brush helped me get rid of the text in  various places on the skin. The clone stamp helped me do the same same thing as the healing brush, except I used it where there was clothing -the red shirt, to a better effect that the healing brush could not attain. Finally, for the shark background, I used a clipping mask for that layer so that I could adjust its colors without directly affecting the rest of the image. 

Final Thoughts:

Not a half-bad job for one of my first photoshop collages. No lie, this wouldn’t be my first time working in photoshop, but it still gave me more opportunity to get better at photoshop and really use it to my advantage. 

“Long Live the Web” by Tim Berners-Lee discusses the universality of the world wide web, while also expounding on the rights associated with the Internet and its users, and the threats posed to them. He states, “the primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is universality” (82). Everyone has not only the right, but the freedom to access any and all information via the Internet. In recent years, this ‘freedom’ has been threatened by cable television companies, social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and totalitarian governments. Berners elaborates on this censorship, especially by the Chinese government that prevents its citizens from accessing information that they have the right to access. Those in authoritative positions should not be allowed to determine the information that people can or cannot see. In Berners’ words, “like democracy itself, [the web] needs defending” (80). It is something worth fighting for, and something to which everyone should have equal access.

I was completely unaware of the magnitude of which ‘the Cloud’ affects global infrastructure prior to reading Ingrid Burrington’s “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud.” Companies wishing to build cloud infrastructure consider locations with a desirable environmental, political and financial climate. This affects not only how we access information online, but what we access, which relates back to the issue of censorship from totalitarian governments. Burrington states, “…to talk about the Cloud’s global shape and politics is to talk about the planet’s shape and politics.” This truly is a global affair that has a profound effect on our daily lives.

“The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster is a dystopian narrative on life in the future, during which humans are entirely dependent on, and even worship, “the Machine.” Humans live in a society in which human contact is frowned upon, as the Machine provides every resource imaginable.  Although Forster wrote this narrative in 1909 and intended it to be hyperbolic of the future, he accurately predicts the effect technology has on society. Modern technology is no longer supplemental to everyday life, but something upon which people are completely dependent. The relationship between the people of this dystopian society and the Machine compared to that of people and modern technology (computers, cell phones, the Internet, etc.) is uncanny. Although an exaggeration and a pessimistic perspective on technology’s effect on humanity, Forster is undeniably correct about our ever-growing dependence on technology and how it shapes our lives. Albeit extraordinarily convenient and efficient, the development of technology has some underlying negative components to many are unaware.