so, this week’s readings were a bit heavy, mainly because to me, they were so old and, lets say “outdated” technologically, that sometimes i found myself getting lost in all that talk of hypertext. i mean, i’m just assuming hypertext is a hyperlink coz i know what a hyperlink is (well,not really but kinda)

but i know its not. and then it just started talking about the Xanadu program and all i could think of was that huge Xanadu mansion from Citizen Kane because we were forced to watch that movie over 50 times in VCE for media. reading through the document and all the talk of introducing hypertext and saving files online, i was just thinking, “how old is this?”. then i passed the sentence saying that a new product called “CD’s” were coming out and i realised just how old it was, it’s really crazy just how much technology has changed in the last 30 years.

what was interesting was just the innovations and ideas that people were created based off this very, dare i say primitive, system. that already the ideas were being created of storing multiple files on a computer or online rather than on floppy disks, this forward thinking is what got us where we are in technology today. the predictions about the fate of print were interesting too, because although print is not completely dead, it looks to be heading that way with the advancement of our technology.

i think the main ideas to take away from the reading is not necessarily the technological stuff (because lets, face it, we’re way past CD’s now) but more the ideas behind it. how to improve and expand on what we have and make it better and more accessible and simple (yes bad grammar, but that’s the beauty of the blog). coming back to design fiction, its not what we can do with our technology, but what we could do that takes us into the future.