Blog Posts

Music has been controlled by the major record companies for decades now and while there are not as many around now, the ones that remain are even bigger than they were before. It is like a game of Pac-man where they gobble up their enemies while getting bigger and bigger with everyone they destroy. In 2011 the four major record labels collected 88% of the market share of recorded music and paid the artists only a fraction of that profit (Mediapocalypse, 2015).

As an avid gamer I have been immersed in some great stories through video games. I have played on nearly every console since the first nintendo console was released in the mid-eighties. While back then the games were pretty basic, they told good stories and I would like to believe I learned something from them even if it was improving my hand eye co-ordination. You will not get something educational out of every game but the further technology advances video games are getting more multi-layered.

Coming from a music background, it is very important to understand the rights that you have in regard to your work and also knowing what is fair use of other peoples work without infringing on their rights. When creating music I have always been interested in trying to use audio clips from movies or shows in the music to add another dimension to the song. I love how White Zombie used old horror film audio clips in their intros or breakdowns in songs to express themselves.

For our first assignment in our Digital Humanities module we had to write a Twitter essay or Twessay on openness with the rules that we had to use every single one of the 140 characters and had to have #DHUCCTwessay in the tweet somewhere. Twitter is a new experience for me and i have not used it before i started this module. So trying to construct an essay and put an argument forward in 140 characters seemed daunting.

So this is my first post on my newly formed blog. I've never had a blog before so bear with me while I get use to expressing myself in this manner. So first of all allow me to introduce myself, my name is Patrick O'Toole and I am from Galway in Ireland but I am currently living in Cork City. I have just started studying Digital Humanities and Information Technology in UCC. I shall be here for the next four years. Currently i'm settling in to my new surrounding here in Cork. I am really enjoying it so far and the course has been very interest as well.