Symposium 4
Symposium on monday was based on the 3.1 readings, Landow, George. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization, Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, and Graham, Paul. “The Age of the Essay.”
Here are some key points I got off from Monday’s symposium:
1. Different points come back to the same thing
The way we sort of look at text that isn’t linear all these different problems and issues keeping coming in with realation to hypertext text and conventional written text
2. Writing with the awareness with a part of discourse (check out my previous post on it)
3. Hypertext – Most of the time, the evidence can be provided in between the links instead of the texts itself. During the discussion, Elliot mentioned about one of the readings by Landow that when you are looking at a hypertext environment, it more or less imitates the way you think and act. It reflects how our brain works, how you would like to associate and shape yourself with experiences and contextual knowledge of the particular subject. Examples would be search engines & online stores.
4.This is the natural way we work, we network in our everyday life, since the virtual world is taking up a form, we find ourselves constantly networking our way through technology. Then again, it makes us think what we can do with technology other than just links creating links and hypertext.
5. Bolter’s reading talks about writing as a state of mind than technology, most of the time we dont think of writing a certain way, words wise, not structure wise, it comes natural to us, it is something that is ingrained in us. So when we write something we are not consciously writing just because of the technology given. He also stated that writing is something that is interiorized, so it makes us difficult to recognize writing as a technology. When we write, it give us thoughts to weigh our words, it gives us some sort of discipline, reproduce in such a way where it is less restricted, we can somehow move back and forth from different topics and conversations.
6. Linear structures in technology – moving away from it, and welcoming this new network approach and technological era, in order to allow the reader to get optimum experience from whatever you are trying to put across in your writings
7. In Graham’s reading, he discusses the issue on how writing is a mixed up with literature, how history and composition has something to do with literature and that what we learnt in school is more of applying the skill to write and not knowing what to write.
8. One good point that was brought up was that, even though Graham was being critical about how students have been taught on how to write essays, and how traditional it was… yet the article that he wrote came as a huge paradox to whatever that he was trying to bring across, being a conventional writer with structure.
9. How much respect is given to the person and judge based on the quality of writing?
I guess this is what I’ve discussed in my previous post about “structure of discourse and power” “Who can say or write what to whom in what situations? Who has access to the various forms or genres of discourse or to the means of its reproduction? Who am I to think out loudly? Is it true that the less powerful people are, the less they have access to various forms of text or talk? ”
10.The type of sources valuable in an structured essay are usually the evidence that are provided with analytic view rather than journalistic.
Aight I’ll leave you with methods which Incidental Comics posted. It’s just what we all need to get those creative juices flowing ^^ Although, I wouldn’t recommend you taking drugs, only if you must… hahahhaha
“The symposium then took a bit of a random tangent off in the direction of web search engines.” – Click here to find out more about what Tim had to say about this!