Tag Archives: network

Hyped on Hypermedia

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A dove is a small bird.

It is a member of the Columbidae family of which includes approximately 310 species around the world.

However, when searching the word Dove on the internet you will find that the pages you come across are not simply restricted to its context as bird.

Dove is also the renowned name of a global personal care brand, chocolate manufacture and is the universally recognised symbol for peace, derived from the christian religion.

As a result of this symbolism, the dove has also become a popular design for body tattoos.

The above is an example of hypermedia, a piece of writing that comprised of many chunks of interlinked texts consisting of both text and imagery. As you can see the text may have one common denominator, such as the dove, which relates the various links. However, readers are not bound to a particular sequence and may browse through information by association, following their interests by clicking on a highlighted keyword or phrase in one piece of text to bring up another, associated piece of text.

As we can see here, although the above passage is about the word ‘dove’, through each of the links, and the different content found through each link, we realise that the passage holds a a very diverse range of information and is fact perhaps more unrelated than related.

Irrespective of what you wish to search online, hypermedia is inescapable. The way we communicate online is now through the use of hyperlinks. Hyperlinks allow us to connect with each other on a global scale and allow content to be extend on in new and unique ways by enabling a connection between multiple separate ideas, concepts or information that   may then create a new perspective or approach.

Additionally, as a result of the network like configuration of hypermedia, the environment it creates is inherently non linear. As expressed in this week’s reading, the development of hypertext has displaced the literary problems created by the axial structure of linear text. As online readers, we now have no beginning or end to a text, and better yet, we are able to interact with media that holds no barriers.

Validity, Credibility, Ability and a Little on Elliot’s Hair

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Today we started off the lecture talking about Elliot’s trip to the hairdresser…a seemingly mundane, personal hygiene and appearance maintenance task, but no! He managed to very relevantly bring it back to the issue of how can you trust the validity of the internet? The answer simply is, that most of the time you can’t. Unless you know how to navigate through the copious amounts of pages and posts to find which ones have academic or a reputable authority, a number of links to other sources and, how many people have actually referred to this issue. That is, like what Jason mentioned, until you see how many people have written or posted about it and on what platform. For me, this issue was very relevant as only this morning had I seen the articles on Robin William’s death, and just like Jason, I too initially regarded it as a hoax. Too retrieve the truth on the matter however, I waited for about half an hour before making a post to two of my personal social media sites – Facebook and this blog. And in that time, I searched 3-4 websites and skimmed through my Instagram page and Facebook newsfeed to validate his death.

Before finishing this week’s discussion, we touched on the differences between print and network literacy, and in the eyes of some, our current inability to comprehend the technicalities that are imbedded within network literacy despite our generational reputation. We compared and contrasted the understandings that people hold of print literacy yet does not exist within the form of network literacy. Do we need to understand how toner in a printer works to fully understand print literacy? Is this the same as understanding how a website is developed in order to become network literate?

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