Perceptions of Technology

1. How do you perceive Information Technology? Explain.

The technology for making movies was in place by 1895, but the true potential of movie-making was not realized until two decades later with D.W. Griffith’s 1915 full-length feature film Birth of a Nation. The narrative form and filmic techniques employed by Griffith may have ensured that movies were a viable art and entertainment form, but the rise of American film as a key industry was based on other developments of the first two decades of the 20th Century, notably World War I. The Great War placed the American film industry in a position of undi

sputed economic and artistic leadership (Cook 48).

According to film historian Donald Cook, movies were intended to talk from their inception, so that in some sense the silent cinema represents a thirty-year aberration from the medium natural tendency toward a total representation of reality (Cook 6). It is a misnomer to describe the silent film era as silent since live music accompanied the showing of each film, and the actors spoke on screen even though they could not be heard (hence subtitles). It would be more accurate to state that films were silent because the technology or know-how did not exist regarding synchronizing recorded sound with the recorded image. Out of this lack of technology, however, a unique language was created that is known as silent film. This paper will examine the history and evolution of American silent film through 1920, focusing on changes during World War I in terms of technology, uses

The music came from the concert stage; original film scores were a later development (except perhaps for some of Charles Chaplin’s films). An article published in 1918, How Music is Made to Fit the Film, discusses how music is set to a movie. Setting a movie to music was dependent on silent film era projection speeds. Before a film was shown to the public, a private screening was held for the musical director to do his work. The movie is projected at the same speed at which it will be shown to the public three or four of the leading characters are selected as vital to the action. Varying themes may be given them, character themes, in fact; or the basic principle of the play may be themed, theme of idea (How Music is made). At the time of a performance, a speedometer was used for synchronizing the music with the film. The actual projecting time often varied and the projectionist would sometimes have to change the tempo of the film in order to preserve the musical setting, so that the speed of projection was changed to fit the occasion (How Music is Made 58). Several years later, Hugo Risenfeld, a former managing director of the Ravioli, Rialto and Criterion Theatres in New York, credited the motion picture theatre with dev

The History of the Television Industry

The purpose of this research is to examine a business article written in 1937 with a view toward evaluating the credence and prescience of its predictions regarding the development of the television industry. The plan of the research will be to set forth the salient points of the article and then to compare its predictive content with what actually happened in the years following.

The ubiquitous nature of television in the modern period makes it difficult to consider that telecommunications technology is less than 100 years old, having been first successfully tested in the mid-1920s. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, rival patent holders on the technology relevant to the development of “visual broadcasting” (“AT&T,” 1937) were continually suing each other in court. In 1937, however, rival technology manufacturers Philo T. Farnsworth, an independent inventor, and AT&T (a telephone-technology company that held patents under agreement with the Radio Corporation of America, a major broadcasting company) settled their patent rivalry with an agreement whereby “either [party] is allowed to use the other’s patents–present or future–without royalty payment” (“AT&T”). The practical importance of that settlement was reported as enabling Farnsworth to proceed with manufacture of television transmission hardware installations that included hardware technology, such as vacuum tubes, patented by AT&T. The actual prediction contained in the Business Week notice of the settlement, hoit RCA), and ABC (a spinoff of NBC) in that its provenance was equipment manufacturing. The head of the company created broadcast programming as a method of promoting sales of Dumont televisions.

The radio presence of the other three networks was to put them ad a distinct advantage over Dumont, a fact aggravated by the regulatory climate of the 1940s and 1950s, which favored better capitalized radio broadcasters and which more or less arbitrarily established the television bandwidth for VHF, or Very High Frequency, stations at 12 channels along the electrometric spectrum. As a practical matter, that meant that the signals of adjacent channel numbers, hence stations and hence signals, could easily overlap. In any given local area, that meant that for optimal transmissions it was necessary to assign channel numbers to stations as nonadjacent as possible and to keep actual transmission locations at least 150 miles apart. A maximum of three stations would fit on the dial for technical reasons, although there is a view that ABC stations were generally a much weaker third broadcast presence in most markets until 1960 (Boddy 36). Any fourth station that did have a presence in a given market and that would lose out in such an area was usual Cinematography in the 1930s Introduction Cinema

Cinematography refers to the process in film of lighting a shot and achieving quality in the visual images that are captured (Giannetti and Eyman, 2001). The cinematographer in any film is also known as the director of photography and may be either an artist or a technician. It is this individual who is responsible for ensuring that the images appearing on screen are presented to reflect the mood, ambience, and style seen by the film’s director, producer, and writer as essential to conveying its meaning. The director of photography (DP) works closely with the director and interprets the action of the story in terms of light, shade, composition, and camera movement.

Other responsibilities include selecting the type of lens to be used for a shot, which influences the appearance of the image, and determining the camera’s position and angle. The DP rarely operates the camera directly; this function usually falls to a camera operator.

It is the purpose of this report to examine cinematography in 1930s Hollywood cinema and to identify the dramatic changes occurring in that era which literally, according to Dimendberg (2003), changed the very nature of the film industry.

Early experiences in motion picture technology included Eadward Muybridge’s sequential still photographs of horses jumping around 1877, followed by 1895 kinetoscope developed by Thomas Edison as a continuous loop of film that passed over a series of rollers and in picture trust, in Australia by Cinesound and Australian Films, and by leading studios in Austria, France, Italy, Germany, India, Japan, and South America (1930s: Technicolor and beyond, 2003, p. 2). Black (1995), agreeing that technology in the form of new lenses and lighting equipment helped to advance the field of cinematography n the 1930s, also pointed out that new collaborations of an artistic nature between directors and cinematographers also advanced the art. Specifically, cinematographers equipped with new technology became better able to employ aesthetic ideals than they had in the past. Perhaps most significantly, says Black (19950, both Hollywood directors and cinematographers of the 1930s approached film-making from an ideological as well as an artistic and commercial perspective, using their various skills to make political and social points alongside artistic statements.

This is particularly evident, says Black (19950, in films such as All Quiet on the Western Front, a war film that detailed the horrors of war in manner that made a strong anti-war message implicit for audiences. Cinematographer Arthur Edson was responsible for the dramatic use of light and shadow (known in art as chiaroscuro) that make this film

Technology Music Consumption

Impact on Consumption of Popular Music

According to one historian, “Technology has made its impact on every industry: fashion, entertainment, architecture, science, computers, and especially the music industry,” (Tech 1). Indeed, technology has dramatically altered the nature of the way music is created, manufactured, marketed, distributed, and consumed. Digital technologies have significantly changed the way musicians’ record music, the way record companies distribute music, and the way consumers consume music. From Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies to Mesh Networks, technology has also dramatically changed the way consumers consume music. The advent of the Internet and such technologies as those above has enabled music consumers to download MP3 music files. However, many P2P networks enabled consumers do download music files, both old and recently released music, for free. Websites like Napster offered access to thousands of computer users to swap music files for free. Such files included the latest music available, including many selections available even before being released for sale by the artist or record company.

Such developments have significantly impacted the way consumers consume music. By downloading music files for free, consumers forced the record industry and angry artists to completely retool the way music is priced, marketed, and offered for sale. The motivation for such retooling was decreased sales of CDs in record stow

8 cents for each time their song sells. In 2002, Strouse received approximately $250,000 in royalties for his songs (Bernstein 1). While not as popular for downloading as major artists like Brittney Spears or Eminem, Strouse did have a major hit thanks to Jay-Z’s version of Hard Knock Life which was based on Strouse’ song of the same title from Annie. According to online media measurement company Big Champagne, Jay-Z’s Hard Knock Life was downloaded 1.2 million times from July 2000 through May 2003 (Bernstein 1). If Strouse would have received royalties on this number of sales, he would have been paid an additional $46,000 in royalty payments (Bernstein 1).

Many artists and songwriters cannot afford such losses, particularly those who invest multiple millions of dollars to produce market and distribute their latest CDs. Despite such losses, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Verizon were resistant to disclose the identities of users in lawsuits of record companies and the RIAA. However, the information was disclosed as a requirement mandated by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which gave record companies the right to subpoena the names of users. According to one industry analyst, consumer became wary in the face

2. Choose a movie/TV show and discuss how technology is perceived in that movie/TV show.

The Walt Disney Company is an American institution closely identified with Mickey Mouse and world-famous theme parks. However, the company, which has had only two leaders of note in its long history, is a multinational entertainment conglomerate which has moved out of traditional “family” entertainment into providing entertainment for many different audiences around the world. It embraced new technology with its acquisition of ABC/Capital Cities in the late 1990s, and international diversity with its expansion first to Japan, and then France and now it has announced that it will be building a theme park in China. The company’s leadership, and its ability to transcend the tenure of its current leader, will be tested in coming years as the company encounters new challenges previously unimagined. This research considers the company’s leadership orientation, the challenges the company is likely to face in the near future, and recommendations on how the company can thrive in this new environment.

Founded by Walter Elias Disney and run by Walt and his brother Roy (who handled the finances), the Disney transformed American movies and entertainment in a way which few other companies have done. Disney introduced full-length animation features to the American public with Snow White, and brought out animated shorts featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and a host of singing animals and plants. Walt used his own charismatic and transformational leaders.

In the 1980s with the same family image and banal image that the Disney brand represented. Touchstone Pictures began producing films that Disney would not have produced under the Disney brand, including Down and Out in Beverly Hills, which was the first film released by the Disney company with an “R” rating (Grover 73). Later Hollywood Pictures was added to the company’s portfolio to release other “adult” pictures; Hollywood Records handles recorded entertainment. Eisner also returned the company to the tradition of releasing animated films; these were overseen by Katzenberg in the early years of the duo’s tenure at Disney. Movies such as Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast gave the company not only much-needed revenue and a return to its animation tradition, but also provide vast new opportunities for merchandising. Eisner oversaw the opening of Disney Stores, which are the first merchandising outlets owned and operated by the company outside the parks, and watched the company’s stock and his own compensation soar from the time he assumed leadership (Furman 1119B0986). Disney and the Future under Eisner, Disney embraced new technology, releasing films on videotape and DVDs and taking advantage of the marketing