Sep
19
My Fellow Bloggers Works…
September 19, 2014 | Week 8 | Leave a Comment
Caitlin wrote how confusing last symposium and I can’t say I blame her since I felt the same way. Don’t worry Caitlin you’re not the only one! Bonnie had done a super amazing job in simplifying, summarizing week 8 reading by Watts. You go Girl! Carli posted something related to the very recent stuff, people addiction and craziness to iPhone 6. Yea I don’t know what so great about it anyway…
Sep
19
Week 8 symposium – Craziness with hammers –
September 19, 2014 | Symposium, Week 8 | Leave a Comment
Have you ever tried of touching wind? Do you feel the frustration when you touch nothing?
Thats what I feel today, Adrian symposium is super confusing. I don’t even think I managed to scratch the surface.
He started clarifying the difference between digital media and network media. Adrian said that the meaning for digital media is oxymoron and it has changes everything it touched in relation to media. While network media, is more recent than digital and it has not been so disruptive.
That part is okay, it is easy to understand but here comes the tricky part. We began discussing this week first question about the neutrality in technology. This apparently taken from the Murphie & Potts reading.
We started by discussing about neutrality but here I don’t understand which understanding on neutrality that Adrian and the rest of professor is thinking about. Because for me neutrality means that things is balance and it does not lean towards one side, it stand in balance. but it seems here they have different perception about it. I think it would be better if they have define the concept of ‘neutral’ before they launched into the question.
In Adrian case, he believes that no technology is neutral and that specific technology has its own specific purposes and uses.
I don’t know, I myself find this thing very confusing. Can it really be not neutral? I mean there is always two side in something so aghhh I don’t know…
(Keep Calm and Leave Me alone, picture from The Keep Calm-O-Matic)
Sep
16
Fellow bloggers great posts
September 16, 2014 | Week 7 | Leave a Comment
My fellow bloggers are a great writers. George has written an amazing post on the Shields reading, I find his writing is easier to understand and I love the comment and understanding. Mia as always has an excellent view and content on her blog, this time her Duncan comment. Again I find it easier to understand compare when I read the readings myself. Simone critiques on last week symposium is fascinating.
Sep
10
Ugh Technical Determinism …
September 10, 2014 | Readings, Week 7 | Leave a Comment
In class today we were split to three groups to discuss about the reading by Murphie and Potts. Though we mainly just discussed the first two page, already there were a lot of theory and perception from so many different people. Though i’ve learned it before in my previous semester, I’ve found it interesting and more clarifying compare to before.
In my own understanding, technological determinism is how our culture, future, and society (or our life) is determined by the way technology developed. I find one of the passage in the reading interesting, “Technological determinism usually refers to the present, and unto the future…” I find that this is like when you found something now but don’t know the theory or use of it until the future and to reach that future, we as the ‘creator’ worked furiously to develop the technology needed and will determined the future of other people.
But technology is the one considered to be shaping the future, it is still the human shaping it. Why? Well because technology is still created by us, by our need, and by our selfishness to get quicker result. So in the end human still remain supreme, not some artificial intelligent.
Sep
10
Your intent!
September 10, 2014 | Symposium, Week 7 | Leave a Comment
This week symposium, I found it interesting when Adrian opened it with the question of intent. This takes me back to my other course lecture, International Human Right Law lecture on genocide. It is mentioned in that lecture that genocide is determined by the intent of a person, in this context, the intent to destroy, harm, kill, etc of a group.
For me this coincides with what Adrian mentioned in his symposium. Intent determines the context but not meaning. Meaning is so hard to shape since the way a person perceive something depend on how a person is being brought up and how their cultural knowledge. An example which Adrian used was the word for ‘Boy’. The word does not have meaning just because what it was, rather to more what it doesn’t represent. Which is why we know that boy represent male or young male or male homo-sapiens, because it sounds boy, not coy, soy, or other -oy endings.
(Intent Matter, picture from Scrapbook of Truth)
Sep
7
Books to E-books
September 7, 2014 | Readings, Week 6 | Leave a Comment
The Douglass reading for this week is long but interesting. He mainly talks how the future of books might be replaced by the hypertext book and be more interactive.
Death of books?
(The Death of the Book by Ben Ehrenreich by A litquake tumblr)
I believe that that is already starting. I’m an avid reader so I always keep up with the latest book published and so on. My cousin is also an avid reader but she prefer nowadays to read on her ipad since it is easier, quick, and easy to bring. Whenever I ask her about books, she will answer by “Go check it in … website, and download it. It’s not expensive.” This comment is actually very true, e-book is so much cheaper compare to hard-copy book and yes, it is so much easier to have it in one technology i.e. ipad, but for me hard-copy is still the best. There is something in flipping the page and actually holding the book that made me love reading. Compare when I’m on the ipad, I got so distracted in doing other things such as playing and browsing.
SO yeah, book will conform to e-book, that is something that will happen but will it caused the death of a book? I don’t really think so. Adrian himself had mentioned it before that books and hypertext live side-by-side and so I don’t believe in the death of book!
Aug
26
Amazing Posts
August 26, 2014 | Week 6 | Leave a Comment
So part of the participation task is that commenting on our friends works. I have the chance to read Mia’s amazing concept when she talks about how media and architecture are similar to one another. Her writing is superb and it makes people to want to read it. Despite not really understanding some of the words she was talking, I was fascinated with her view on it. I think her example of one of the famous architecture building, Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is very interesting and the concept how it doesn’t have a center makes me wonder and ponder.
Karlee has found a good article which relate to our week four symposium which is about validation of information. And yes it is a very good info that makes it easier to find whether the information we have found is valid or is it just a hoax.
Anna has written about technological determinism which she put it very simple and easy to understand in which I’m very grateful seeing as I couldn’t really understand about it during last year semester.
Aug
26
Symposium 6: I’m so confused!
August 26, 2014 | Symposium, Week 6 | Leave a Comment
Today symposium is like a merry-go-round, it made my head spins. The context of today symposium was quite deep and it could be debated over and over depends on how deep someone knows about it.
There were 3 questions. First, Can technology progress independently of art and culture. There were a variety of answer for this one but I sort of agree with Adrian’s answer. He said that technology, human, art, and culture is inseperable. People lives based on culture and with that means technology and art comes from our perspective based on how we live on our culture and tradition so it could be said that technology is born based on people culture therefore it could and would not seperate. But there are some arguments about how technology differs from tools, I guess it does make sense too but i have to say I have no arguments for that as my understanding of this whole things is still limited.
Second, What is the untapped potential of hypertext? Will we ever be satisfied with it? Here is where my headaches starts, Betty begins with the explanation from Nelson who we could also call the father of ‘ Hypertext’. He coined the term predated the world wide web existence. He describe Hyper as an extension so what he means it that this whole information keeps on branching everywhere, never ending. However the world wide web hypertext is just doing a one way street that connects two information together but should something happen to one information, the other has no way of knowing. So Nelson understanding of hypertext is completely different with the hypertext we are seeing in the net. Real Hypertext can go one way, two way, have object attached, rules mentioned, but in WWW it is just one way.
He also had the idea of hypertext being transluscent? I do not know whether I typed it correctly. Basically it means when we are trying to link something from our blog, there is a little conversation in the background by the program to communicate with the website to borrow that certain information. It’s very confusing but Adrian said it similar to embedding. Hypertext supposed to be completely distributed, has rules, and original owner is credited properly. The web is the diluted form of hypertext.
So you see where my headaches come from….
Aug
25
More Hypertexts and A web is not PRIVATE!
August 25, 2014 | Readings, Week 5 | Leave a Comment
One of the main reading for week 5 is by Landow who mention that how hypertext first started off for print dissemination to hang annotation and commentary. This is what we do nowadays when we write blogs or a web, we put the reference list or certain information in writing in the form of hypertext, rather than putting it in order in reference list or at the bottom of our page as foot-notes. In my opinion this makes it easier for other readers to get to certain information easily. Namely press that hyperlink word and you shall be delivered to another page with specific info!
An interesting part in the reading is about Weblog. Here the context of diary is completely turn around, it is something that is not private, is public and anyone can see it. I have to say that I do not really agree with this point of view as I myself keep a diary and I do know that I would like to keep the content to myself so the idea of anyone knowing what I write is very disturbing. I think it is very important to keep the line between what you can write for the public and what information that only you yourself know.
Sometimes I don’t even know why people would publish content or information which in my opinion is private and the rest of the world need not knowing it. I mean don’t they realize it is the web? It is something that everyone, I mean it every single person in the world, would be able to view and see your stuff. I strongly think that there should be a very distinct line to know what to publish and what’s not. Despite the common thinking that we are all normal people and that people won’t snoop into our stuff, the fact that our stuff is out there will be stumbled across upon by somebody and you know what they say, once people talks there is no stopping it.
So be smart and use hypertext to your advantage as it will make your life easier and secondly be aware of what you post in the web. If you need to write something private, do it in a book rather than a web where people could and will find your stuff.
Aug
19
Literacy in writing or printing?
August 19, 2014 | Readings, Week 5 | Leave a Comment
One of the reading for this week by Bolter, talks about the difference in writing by hand and writing by machine/printing. He mention that we lose a part of our identity when we type rather than when we write, here he discussed how some of our personal nature is somewhat lost in the ever growing typography field. While when we hand-written something those are like our signature, we leave our marks and signs where we wrote. One of the quote I like is by the old roman rhetorician who said that when we wrote, we can’t keep up with our thoughts so we have the time with our words. I find this fascinating and somewhat true since when I want to write what other people say, I sort of struggle. However Bolter mention how we are losing our ‘marks’ in paper with the development of quicker typing.
Mia mention how the idea of Japanese and Chinese writing intrigue her where children/people who learn those language will work really hard in learning how to write certain symbol and characters and alphabets. I myself is born with that background so I never really thought about this. When I was little at school we will have this special book to practice and learn our calligraphy for alphabets as to have a good legibility and neat writing, as well with Chinese lessons I remember having so many practice book as the way to write Chinese character is complex like you have to start with certain lines first or the dots or certain angle to draw the line. But again, I never really thought about it so when other people pointed out that they don’t really learn that, I find it quite surprising.