You many not be bilingual, but you can be biliterate

Sitting on the train this morning, reading this week’s content I realised that I was quite literally surrounded by everything that Adrian Miles was talking about in his piece about ‘Network Literacy’. Looking up from my laptop, almost everyone that was on the train was holding some sort of electronic device capable of enabling the user to read, write or listen to anything that interested them on the web.

Yet whilst reading up on the differences between print and network literacy, it made me think, for the amount of people that pour their time into the online world, how many of them actually understand it? How many people are simply ‘computer literate’ yet are naively ‘network illiterate’? With the world now being so technologically dependent, print literacy is fast becoming next week’s topic in your weekly highschool history class rather than something that is being taught and practiced on an every day basis.

Being biliterate, therefore understanding and practicing both print and network literacy is now something that is a necessity rather than a unique, personal characteristic. Unlike the real world, in the online world of websites, RSS, HTML, blogs, links, search engines, tags, subscribers and live feeds, writing is not about who wrote it, but about what is written. Throughout network literacy, you are what you write.

Merge the lines of reality, blur the lines of photography

Just a recently a friend of mine has got me onto this website called 9Gag. I’d heard of it before and had seen links to it throughout my Facebook newsfeed every now and then but I never really took much notice of it. That was until I started this blog, which through the need for interesting weekly posts, has really helped motivate me to take notice of all the quirky websites that are out there yet I have previously ignored on a daily basis! Full of interesting facts, comedic political cartoons, memes and a load of unique photography from around the world, this website has a little bit of something for everyone.

For me however, it’s the amazing photography that intrigues me the most. With photography being a big passion of mine and hobby that I unfortunately rarely have the time to enjoy, I absorb as much as I can from cool photos that I find flicking through 9Gag along with other students blogs, and tumblr pages.

The link below is of the work of a photographer who has completely taken advantage of, whilst perhaps also subtly mocking the convenience of the iPhone camera. Throughout these images, this photographer has taken a very unique and quirky approach to ‘iPhone photography’ by perfectly blending the images of TV and film characters with images in real life. Is what I really admire about these photos is that despite being quite a simple idea, the product is extremely effective by being both humorous yet artistic and has very possibly been able to do so on a very affordable budget!

With the newest iPhones now containing an 8MP camera, equipped with flash, true tone capture, image stabilisation and many more tools and modes that were once only available on regular digital cameras, the images they capture aren’t too far behind your average DSLR. And of course with one of these snazzy iPhones in hand, every man and his dog claim to be a photographer. Maybe its just me, but the steady hand, the perfect symmetry and the widely loved tv characters, this photographer is also having a crack at everyone out there who has an iPhone and is apparently the next Terry Richardson, Ansel Adams or Dorothea Lange.

http://9gag.com/gag/a9d3wXj

 

What constitutes a story? Is it format, material or it’s ability to provide closure?

Leaving Tuesdays ‘unlecturing lecture’, I admit I was a bit lost. Unlike other lectures, the assignments weren’t mentioned, nor was the course guide. Our laptops were even asked to be shut. What? A lecture theatre without the pathetically indiscreet blue and white gleam of Facebook newsfeeds. I know, crazy! However, throughout this seminar, Adrian presented some very unique ideas about the fundamentals of stories and books. Engaging with us through questions like ‘what makes a story?’ ‘Why do they always have an ending?’ and ‘is every piece of writing a story?, I found myself being questioned on something so seemingly simplistic that I had never thought how contextual it could be. So upon leaving the lecture theatre I began to think, maybe books do a have an ending – a physical end to what is written on the page in front of you, but that doesn’t mean your thought processing or your ideas just come to a holt. perhaps your thoughts that simply an unwritten continuation of the story?

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