New Year's Resolutions

I think that making resolutions is like making wishes: it's best not to report them to others until they've actually come true. This picture actually shows my New Year's resolution from last year, which was to learn how to take advantage of the mobility of new input and display devices that allow highly portable recording and play functions so that I could generate more of my own content and wouldn't be tethered to my laptop when viewing and editing digital files. Considering that I've owned a personal computer since 1981 and have had e-mail since 1989, I've been a remarkable Luddite when it comes to other electronic communication apparatuses and media players.

I acquired all of these relatively common consumer items during this past calendar year and learned to use them competently, so I could make and show multimedia like this year-end film on the go. They are clockwise from the top right corner: 1) a mobile phone, 2) a digital camera, 3) a digital voice recorder, 4) a portable USB drive, 5) a video iPod, and 6) a video camcorder.

As Henry Jenkins has observed, however, many of these devices have redundant features. Several shoot video (#1, #2, #6), take still images (#1, #2), record sound data (#1, #2, #3, #6), display images and video (#1, #5), play music (#1, #5), and store 2-40 GB of digital files (all of the above).