HAHAHA Fail!!

        Do you still remember the time when your parents or teachers told you not to tease or laugh at people when you see someone slipped? Guess what, you can forget about their good-hearted, kind advice. Instead of walking up to help that unfortunate person, you should quickly take your phone or camera out and capture this “precious” moment , then upload it to failblog.org, so that everyone in the world can laugh with you at the same time. Sadly, this has become one of the society’s favorite leisure activities nowadays. Going on to failblog and see how people fail in their lives.

        Since the day I knew about failblog, I have become addicted to it. Failblog is a comedic website that highly features pictures and videos of someone failing at something they are supposed to do, and captioned with the words "fail" or "epic fail", but sometimes there are some cases of "wins". The website has videos from advertising fail to a fat person who jumps on a diving board and hit his head fail, somewhat resemble to the show AFV (America’s Favorite Video).

        I think that this website has slowly transformed the way people treat these unlucky people. With all the new portable technologies that we have on our hands, we have been placing entertainment over sympathy. Take the fat person diving fail example I gave. Instead of stop recording and help the injured man, the person who is recording rather record the whole incident. If you notice, almost every fail video on failblog will at least replay the “precious” moment in slow motion once more, just in case you missed it. Although failblog has become an entertainment to us, it has slowly changed the perspective on how people in our society treat these unfortunate people.

        McLuhan will interpret failblog as a hot medium because it does not require much effort in filling in the details of a moving image. When you watching someone “failing”, all you have to do is watch the video and laugh or go “OUCH!”  There isn’t much conscious participation by the reader to extract value.

Most Viewed Fail on youtube

Here's a compilation of fail in 2009

iPad Fail

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsjU0K8QPhs&feature=player_embedded

Media Artifact

There is no doubt that music has become an essential part of our lives. When we feel stressful, bored, lonely, or depress, we tend to take out an iPod from our pockets, plug in our headphones and start listening to our favorite music, and let the music do its work on us. You probably think that the medium that I will talk about is my iPod, but the answer is no. The medium that I would like to share is my Sennheisher headphone. After reading Understanding Media: The Extension of Man by Marshall McLuhan, I no longer limit media to things that only deliver content, but also things that can shape the way individual perceive the world.

 Imagine an iPod that can only go on loud speaker, but cannot connect with each individual personally. You would probably be hearing a combination of your parents nagging, your friends’ conversation, construction noise outside your room, music from others, and finally your favorite music. There is nothing that can isolate yourself from the rest of the world when you wanted to, so that you can enjoy and calm your emotion. However, the invention of headphone can do this job perfectly. It is a medium only between your ears drums and your songs. You no longer need to hear your parent nagging, boring conversations, construction noise, and music you do not like when headphone can disconnect your surrounding sound with you and connect you with your songs. Just like the light bulb example that McLuhan demonstrated. Although a light bulb doesn’t have the content like a TV has TV shows or a magazine has articles, it is a medium that enables people to view spaces and objects during the night. With my Sennheisher headphone, it enables me to listen to music in a silent environment, and have more time to reflect on the music that I am listening to.

Define Media

Media have been around our daily lives since papermaking, the first medium, developed in China and spread through Asia and Arab by the year 600. As time progresses and technology advances, media are able to deliver messages or information to a wider range of people faster, and sending information more accurately. Nowadays, many people are starting to perceive media as the content they carry, but not the media themselves. For example, the issue of growing media violence concerns many parents in the society. They blame that the media are influencing the younger generation with too much violent programs and cartoons, causing them to behave more aggressively. In this example, parents are assuming the media are the violent contents that are delivered to their children. However, media are actually the middle-men, or the “middle-things” that connect their children with the violent content that producer produced. Therefore, media are channels or ways that can enhance human’s senses to the extent that a person can connect with the contents in the media and shape the ways individual perceive the world. This definition can be best supported by the article, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man by Marshall McLuhan.

In Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, McLuhan suggested that media is not the content that they carry, but the characteristic of the media themselves. He uses the light bulb as a demonstration of this idea. Although a light bulb doesn’t have the content like a TV has TV shows or a magazine has articles, it is a medium that enables people to view spaces and objects during the night. Otherwise, everything would be covered by darkness. He states that “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.” (9) Even though the light bulb does not contain any content, it has enhanced the sense of vision to connect with the environment around us, and shape the way people perceive the world in darkness.

McLuhan also states that people failed in studying media because they pay too much attention on the content of what the media is delivering, which veils the character and social effects of the media. Take the example of the light bulb. Light bulb was never considered as a medium because it does not deliver any content. But McLuhan perceives that any medium accelerates existing processes introduces a change of pattern into human behavior, will result in a social consequence. Therefore, it is the medium that will shape the ways individual perceive the world, but not the content of the media.

Before reading McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, I always perceived media as the content the media is delivering. However, after coming up with my own definition of media, I finally understand what media are. Media are like coals. When you look at the coal itself, you will never imagine that it is the main resources of our modern world. However, when energy companies burn and transform them into energy, coals become something that we cannot live without. If coal is the medium, then the potential energy inside the coal is the content of the media. The coal enhanced the living life style of human to the extent that people can connect with the potential energy stored inside the coal, and shape the way individual perceive the world.