A year ago I posted a link to the New Zealand Short Films web site where, strangely enough, you could watch NZ short films online. Now you can download some of them as MPEG-4 files for your iPod. The MPEG-4 files should play in Quicktime on PC and Mac too.

I’ve taught at various times on the different genres present within the biblical texts and there are some students who find the whole concept of genre really hard to grasp. So several times I’ve set up a game show in class with student participants called “Name that Genre!” I’ve taken a variety of different pieces of music representing different genres, loaded them into iTunes, given each participant a squeaky toy as a buzzer and run a game show – with the appropriate prizes of chocolate, of course. It works as a fun, general introduction to the concept of genre. Which like the concept of metaphor is alien to some people’s reading of the text. (See Douglas Coupland’s neologism “Metaphasia – the inability to recognise metaphor”)

In the process of the game though it becomes clear that the concept of genre is often a pretty fluid one. One person’s jazz is another person’s blues or another person’s gospel. And this gets hotly debated at some points. It’s the same too with the biblical texts. A gospel passage might be “gospel” genre to one person and “historical narrative” to another, or there’s debate of what kind of “lament” a psalm is, or why a “prophetic” text suddenly switches into “wisdom” genre.

I was thinking about this the other day when trying to sort out some music in iTunes. It only allows one genre to be assigned to each song. But what if I want to assign more than one genre to a song. In the end I’ve set up smart playlists that filters the comments field attached to a song. In the comments field I list the genres I want: for example, **jazz**, **blues** and then select using those “tags”. It’s clumsy but it works.

Another example of human beings being colonized by technology – an MP3 player/swimming goggles combination. See SwiMP3.

Fitting right into today’s writing efforts is this older (Jan 2005!) article about Markus Giesler who works in the area of high-tech consumer research. The article picks up on some of the themes from my own research, albeit from a business perspective.

“IPod and user form a cybernetic unit,” said Giesler. “We’re always talking about cyborgs in the context of cultural theory and sci-fi literature, but this is an excellent example that they’re out there in the marketplace…. I have seen the future, and it is called the cyborg consumer.”

From Wired News: My IPod, My Self by Leander Kahney (Wired News, 2005-01-28).

Was skimming through Playlist.com: The best iPod-related products of 2005 and saw a link to Senuti. This is a really excellent little (free) Mac OS X application that allows you to look at and retrieve the content from your iPod through an iTunes-like interface. So if you iTunes hard disk goes belly-up you should be able to recreate it from your iPod.

See Senuti (where there are some other nice little apps too). In the Playlist article there’s a link to a Windows app that does the same thing and is also free.

I read this interview with DJ and music producer Peter Tong because I was following an iPod/Apple thread (see Wired News: Pete Tong: Apple’s Gone Wrong?) and the following quote about DJ-ing stood out

The thing about technology — the same as I learned with the advent of CD — if you stop using old technology and move immediately to the new, your DJing dips. Maybe that’s a good thing, but my thing is to try and blend the two. Everyone I’ve seen who has just begun doing it ends up doing things they would never normally do, just because they can.

Seems to me to be true of many things – business, church and faith, even cooking. Being able to create something new within of the transition area. So rather than abrupt paradigm shifts where you throw away everything you previously did and embrace only the new ideas, you take all the experience, knowledge and technique from the old ways and remix them with the new to make something novel and unforeseen. And if you’re doing that you can connect people from different paradigms and together create a new community.

iPodNN | Podcasting raises church attendance. I guess that it depends on the quality of the content delivered. If some of the services and sermons I’ve heard were podcast I’m sure it’d have the opposite effect.

Wired News: Beyond Porno: Free IPod Content has a list of various podcasts (audio and video) as well as other material for your video iPod/iTunes.