R2 Reading Response

I really loved the Aaron Koblin TED talk (as in I sent it to everyone I know after viewing it). It reminded me a lot of a movie I watched back in high school. I went through an Ellen Page phase at some point and during that phase I was also taking a film class where we had to present on our favorite movie. It was called “The Tracey Fragments,” and I remember liking it because it was so out of order and jarring and a lot of it played like a music video. After doing a lot of research on the film, I realized that at the time of its release (years prior to my viewing of the film), the director actually put up all of the footage they shot for the entire film on their website, even scenes that didn’t make it into the final film. They encouraged fans of the movie to download the footage and basically have their way with it. I remember watching a bunch of different edits of the movie where people re-contextualized a lot of the footage and I thought it was the coolest idea at the time. 

Likewise, I found the Wikipedia TED talk to be fairly enlightening because, although I use it all the time, I have never really been clear on how the crowdsourcing part worked. However, I do think it’s an insanely brilliant idea because just about everyone you meet has limited knowledge of something and, if you piece it together, a pretty comprehensive bank of expertise is created.