This week’s unlecture had a different feeling to it. Was it because I sat a bit closer to the speakers in the theatre room? Or was it because I understood a bit more about hypertext when I left the room. I liked the point of hypertext being the archaeology to information, that a small part of text can have connections with other pieces of text and be joined together to become something more cohesive and coherent. To apply hypertext to a film concept, I thought that was different and I certainly out of the (networked media) box thinking. If we treat text as film segments, it could be edited and arranged in multiple ways to form end product movies. It’s not about navigating the technique of arrange the film pieces together but instead reading between the lines and seeing the formal relations about the text being built.

There was an argument that I agreed with it, was that second year students had to read the previous texts in the first year. Instead of expecting a detailed and clever answer I was ready to write down, one of the speakers just answered the question like a sniper taking a single shot against his target. In this case, the target was us, the confused and frustrated students waiting to hear the answer. The speaker explained that we will revisit these past literacy readings in the future and that the 1st experience of reading with be significantly different from the 2nd time. Following on, the quote of the week (from the unlecture), “Context is fundamental to meaning.” Yeah, I can relate to that, if I watched a TV show without the proper viewing order, I miss out on relevant plot information and inadvertently expose myself to spoilers. I hate spoilers. The products of this quote are mockery and irony. When we read, there is a gap of meaning. This gap appears in different outlets – a small gap in pop culture and a large gap in literacy culture.

Hypertext is an unorganized, overflowing bowl of soup… that willingly embraces the “the mess” of miscommunication. Relating to hypertext, we can’t guarantee on the accurate delivery of a message. In order to make this message clearer and easier to understand, one must write to an audience no matter how real or imaginary they are. Another point that was made was that a blog post doesn’t exist until someone (a reader) views it. A blog post is just hiding within a database with a specific code, waiting for a reader to access it. The “audience of zero” concept was really thought-provoking, it meant that even if you don’t have a readership, it doesn’t give an individual an reason that they should not start a task like for example, writing a blog post.

Overall, I thought this week’s unlecture was more organized and flowed more consistently. Keep up the good work, Networked Media.