Blog 4: Visiting Artist Darrin Martin

Art is a way of creating new ideas and learning new things while television and the media is so structured and set in certain ways that it does not teach new things, rather everything is a repetition and the same stimuli that are trained to affect people in ordered ways. His critique is that media has stepped away from an intellectual form of entertainment and has degraded into something mundane and inconsequential.

I think newer media forms such as youtube have followed a similar pattern of originality. If one looks hard enough, there is always something interesting and original on the internet, but more often than not, memes are recycled to get mass views and instant accord. Trololo, recently has sprung up in multiple videos each with a different spin on the original video; from a Russian doing a weird singing style(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYU7oG2V7uc), to a cat meowing it while his butt is scratched(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdoHHK27RMM). New material is hard to come up with and old material has a viewer base already associated with it.

Personally I do not think social networking sites count as media in the traditional sense, because although they do portray an image to an audience and attempt to show them something, it is much less organized and influential. It is merely a means to find and track other people. His view as related to the networking sites would probably still hold true, since people tend to copy other people and try to fit in as much as possible. Not that there is anything wrong with that, since humans by nature attempt to group together and be social. And there is no better way of being social than agreeing with one’s peers in order to mesh with a group more easily.