Amy takes joy to the metaphor used to describe a narrative plot as being like a knitted scarf, rather than a spider’s web. Typically, a plot is more like a scarf because the beginning and end are both visible, as well as the transparency of a sequence. However, what if we were to take advantage of the affordances of web 2.0 to develop an interactive plot in which multiple plot points were dispersed throughout an online network and an interactive approach, varying from user to user would be required to navigate the plot. Would this make a plot more like a spider web? Keeping in mind the difference between story and plot, Network media enables the ‘start’ of a plot; the way in which a story is told, to vary throughout online media, as Amy recognises. Thinking of an online network as similar to a spider web sounds immediately plausible, however a spider web entails a core centre to the structure of the web, i.e. the spider, when in actual fact an online network its structured around multiple nodes that are empowered through interconnectivity, rather than a singular node (spider).

Rebecca racks her brain to define ‘neutrality’ – a very difficult task. I agree with her acknowledgement that humans create connections between everything, meaning no aspects of our world can be completely neutral of all other aspects. I think this comes down to the human brain’s tendency to create associations, therefore we form connections between aspects that dismiss any neutrality. However, is it possible that there are elements of our reality that we are completely unaware of? Something that is not detected by human senses and is therefore neutral in relation to us? Given everything we perceive and absorb as the world around us is purely a collection of electronic signals translated by our brain through sense, potentially there exists neutral elements of our environment that are undetected by the human brain?

Kiralee dissects our tendency to read information from start to finish, whether book form or online media. It may not only be due to a hard cover book’s promotion of such a method, but more historically, cultural practices throughout the last several hundred years in not only how to read information but also how to write it, has embedded such a methodology into the form of human communication. I agree that this method must stem from a historical event, but I believe this may be the accumulation of many cultural and social practices throughout history that come together to form the modern methodology of readings, just the same as walking or speaking. Although as mentioned before, it is important to remember that the author has also been trained to present the information in such a way; beginning, middle, end, requiring us to read it as such.