Theme #3

Every form of technology that's gone digital has been transformed by its users/audience.

With today’s advances in technology, we can alter almost anything that becomes available to us digitally. We visit sites such as youtube or Google and can find all these videos or photos that have been changed and altered to fit the creators style. On youtube, there are hundreds of fan video that are edited to be one main stream of “best kisses” or “favorite moments from Gilmore Girls” without actually changing the original episodes of the shows they were taken from. Since the episode were put online, they can be changed into whatever the creator chooses. Photos can be drawn on and changed to show something that never happened. Two movies can be edited and formatted to make the viewer believe they are one.
However, film, radio, and television before becoming digitalized were not able to be changed in any way. You could watch the episode of your favorite show, the movie in a theater, or listen to your favorite Christmas song without being able to change any parts of them. The only way to truly catalogue something in the old days was to write in a diary, as Mary Dyck did, and remember the wonderful parts of the things you were fortunate enough to view. This has been changed due to the world becoming more advanced in forms of technology and being capable of putting just about anything onto the internet.
This is what Meyrowitz was talking about when he says that technology allows us to have access to situations we normally wouldn’t be in. On youtube, you can find anything from any period in time from the latest movies in the theaters to JFK’s assassination video. Through facebook, we have access to people’s profiles and information on celebrities. Without the Internet, we wouldn’t be able to access any of these things without going to great lengths of trouble and research. We’d have to make a trip to the theater or look up files in history archives. It’s inconvenient and the Internet allows us to be able to access things easily from our home computer.

This video below is just an example of the many videos littering youtube with varied and altered movies.