I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while and it’s gotten lost in the chaos that is the paper grading/paper writing shuffle (my dancing shoes were a but scuffled and I’m now getting my rhythm back). In any case, the picture above is not a picture of my attempting to slay at Rock Band. Instead, it’s a photo (and a blurry one at that!) of what I saw while watching MTV two weeks ago. That’s from a broadcasted Rock Band competition.
In the past, I’ve written about MTV’s strategies to move toward a more participatory model of entertainment. It’s interesting to see the simulacrum of this newer model of participation. Yes, you can still go online and interact with the contestants, discuss the show, and offer other online splatter to the digital mess. However, let’s think about this… Music? Check. Television? Check. Except that, oh yeah, no one is actually playing a real instrument. Sure, the drummer is drumming in time and the singer is fluctuating his or her vocal cadence appropriately (and the guitar and bassists are – like – thumbing that bar-button at the right time), but is there actual musical talent in this? Not necessarily. In any case, I’m fascinated by this latest development. It reminds me of the “Replica Replica, After W. R. H.” component of the Machine Project Field Guide to LACMA.
On a final note, you’ll notice from a few links in this post – like others – that I’ve been frequently linking back to my own previous posts. This isn’t necessarily a tactic of self-promotion or some weird meta-ones-up-manship. Instead, I’m interested in how I can network my own ideas together a running kind of dialogue. I’ve come to accept that I don’t write linearly (to this respect, adopting Scrivener to complete this quarter’s writing projects was an absolute life saver!). I remember taking the four-part English CSET exam while getting my teaching credential. Over the two or three hours I spent taking the test I randomly shuffled between the four different test booklets and corresponding answer documents. I recall clearly (which for me is a rarity these days!) finishing all four tests within minutes of one another: adding a sentence here, bubbling in over here, crossing off another option in this booklet, etc. I know that research proves one cannot multi-task. However, I’m not sure I can even uni-task all that well … parsing my thoughts out one blog post at a time and finding the line (thin as it may be) back to point of origin may be the best setup going for me at the moment.