An Exercise in Effective Listening

In this hectic, schedule-driven life, sometimes it just takes a moment to stop and listen to be aware of our surroundings. In class last Monday, we tried this exercise by going out to various spots on campus to pick up on environmental noises that might ruin a recorded interview. We were instructed to stop, shut our eyes, and listen intently to our surroundings, recording everything we might hear. Spencer and I sat at a concrete bench in front of the MUB circle, a relatively quiet area, right? ...you would be surprised.

These are the sounds I heard:
- traffic passing on Main Street
- car, motorcycle engines revving
- chatter from passerby
- footsteps
-keys jangling
- the hum of ventilators outside the MUB
- birds chirping
- distant highways
- jet airliners flying overhead
- music
- police patrol officer directing traffic at the town intersection

The People that Make UNH Work: Phil the Bus Driver

Phil Rollins has been a bus driver with Wildcat Transit for 17 years. He makes his daily routes through Portsmouth, Dover, and Newmarket every morning. Newmarket is his favorite route and Friday is his favorite day of the week: its the only day he gets off early. He does not take sick days. He does not take vacations. He is picking up extra hours this year so he can go on a long-overdue vacation this summer to visit his sister and cousins in Wisconsin.

"I'm not the best, but the best don't mess with me."

My (In)Experience behind the camera lens

I think the advent of the tech-savvy have a lot to do with this multimedia boom. Something, I don’t claim to be. But I guess I wouldn't claim to be completely technologically incompetent either. here’s the breakdown on my journalistic materials and experience in multimedia:

GE A1455

Stats: This camera has a 14.1 Megapixel, 5x optical zoom. 18 MB internal memory. HD It uses 2 AA alkaline batteries.

Pros: This camera was a great choice while I was studying abroad. Its compact, lightweight and very user friendly. It has easy scenario settings for beginners and manual settings for more advanced users. It uses 2 disposable AA batteries and its much easier to swap out batteries while you're on the go versus frantically searching for a power source for a rechargeable battery.

Cons: I have to say, it eats batteries like candy though. A set of batteries will last a day or two at optimum use. It's also very sensitive to light. Bright light affects it negatively and distorts the image sometimes and sometimes the color is not always vivid even in sufficient light.


Olympus WS-400S

Stats: This handheld audio recorder records over 272 hours of high-quality sound.

Pros: One thing I love about this device is the "USB direct" feature. A USB drive slides right out of the bottom without any cables to fumble with or software to download. Very easy to use and stores a ton of audio.

Cons: This thing is extremely sound-sensitive. A good and bad thing in a recorder. The WS-400S picks up on things I hadn't even heard at the time: background noises, people talking across the room, echoes, etc. It should only be used in a silent (other than the interview) room, otherwise you're bound to pick up white noise.

These are my two primary means of capturing multimedia news. I have some recreational experience dabbling in InDesign, Photoshop, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Media Player, and Microsoft Office software. I took a high school class in photography and spent untold hours fumbling with wet, slippery film in a dark room. It was for my final project that I built my portfolio on macro shots. For some reason, I've always been fascinated in seeing (and photographing) the world through a macro-sized lens. I'm interested in photography that allows us to see the world in a different perspective, and the every day things in our lives from a new, refreshing view. I think that's important in still photography: to see things from a different perspective we would not otherwise have conceived.

What's the difference between a Canon and Video Barbie? It turns out not much.

Multimedia news has boomed in the past decade, even in the past five years. Youtube. Twitter. Facebook. Blogs. Live video feed. Digital cameras. The World Wide Web.

Sure, there are a lot of things circulating out there on the Internet that we wouldn’t exactly call newsworthy. Any idiot with a Facebook account and a digital camera on a weekend night can snap half a dozen pictures of her drunken friends at a frat party and call herself a “photographer” now. And it seems like nowadays anyone with a blog and an opinion can call themselves a “journalist.” But I guess I’m just skeptical. I don’t really care what some washed-up actress is tweeting on her Twitter account nowadays. And I start to question the direction of humanity when “Dramatic Chipmunk” gets 23,276,586 views on Youtube.

But the Internet has its time and place. And for the most part, the Internet and multimedia have undeniably redefined how people get the day’s biggest headlines.

Real multimedia is being a direct witness to history in the making. It’s witnessing gritty black and white images of Neil Armstrong softly land on the Moon’s white dusted landscape. It’s seeing the flooded streets of post-Katrina New Orleans. It’s seeing the Twin Towers crumble before your eyes. It’s hearing Obama deliver his inaugural address at the steps of the White House.

In our first multimedia class, we started exploring this idea. It’s scary to think how many times a day you are photographed, video-taped, and generally being recorded from surveillance cameras to someone’s iPhone. It’s not that I’m out there doing anything deviant and I’m not a superhero in disguise with a secret identity to preserve, but I’m not keen on stalkers having it easier. And I’m not a fan of having little to no privacy. It kind of makes me paranoid, or if not full-out paranoid, a little more on edge. It’s like Big Brother is watching you. 1984 stuff.

Sandy showed us some of the pieces of technology that can be used in multimedia: phones, cameras, Apple products and… a Barbie?

I think I’ve seen it all now. Its Video Girl Barbie doll and she records up to 30 minutes of AVI video through a camera lens discreetly disguised as a necklace. I thought five-year-olds texting on cellphones was obnoxious. Now, these same five-year-old girls can videotape you without you even knowing it?


Creepy? I think so.


But the Video Girl Barbie brings up a good point. Technology is an age-defining staple of our everyday lives now. Even little kids are getting in on it.

And that’s why, in the end, this technology is important. I’m looking forward to this class, even if I’m not the most tech-savvy journalism student on campus, but I’m hoping to expand my repertoire of journalistic skills and multimedia is going to be a big part of that process. Let’s just hope software doesn’t crash or a digital file is mysteriously lost. Because my computer likes to have meltdowns and that’s something I can’t have happen to me this semester. Technology can be fast and convenient sometimes. But it can definitely be a pain other times. We’ll see how I fare.

And for the difference between a $1800 Canon DSLR camera and a Video Girl Barbie? Check it out.