SYNC OR SWIM VLC MEDIA PLAYER
lot of teaching is about choice; sometimes A it’s about choices you get to make, and other times (read: most of the time) it’s about choices that someone else makes that you get to respond to. And, other times still, it’s about the choices that you aren’t even aware you have. The choice to move away from the default setting to something else: that’s the choice we forget about, settling instead for ‘good enough’ because it’s more convenient. And we do it all the time. Entire industries rely on you living with a decision instead of making a choice to change: power companies, banks, telecommunication companies, even that cafe that you go to every morning where the coffee is reliably average. There are always better, more suitable options – life is too short for bad coffee and Internet Explorer.
There are always better, more suitable options – life is too short for bad coffee and Internet Explorer.
In a recent article for , Jason Koebler explored the ‘rise of “good enough” media’, writing about a lot of the same concepts we look at in this section each issue: more sophisticated technology being placed in the hands of consumers. While the availability of this stuff is great (it’s made content creation easier for teachers – as well as everyone else – and afforded me the opportunity for my quarterly 2000-plus-word rant about my education gripes), Koebler’s idea that a ‘good was shot on his iPhone a day or two before the release of the album, and features a tongue-in-cheek message in garish green font. The image itself is fine, but it’s not one worthy of being the cover art for his album – more a message that you’d send to a friend than one you’d post publicly. Koebler’s argument is that we have become more used to this kind of DIY aesthetic, and that this is what makes it forgivable: this idea that you can lower the bar because someone else did. It’s the reason Year 9 boys give for hitting each other (‘I understand what you are saying, Brendan, but you can’t hit someone because they are annoying you. Brendan?! Are you listening to me, Brendan? I said that you can’t hit someone because they are annoying you’). But, as with that Year 9 boy, the problem isn’t in the acceptance of the behaviour; it’s in the skewed scale through which that behaviour is measured. West’s music isn’t made on a whim and released half done, so why is that acceptable for the artwork that is supposed to represent it?
