Month / September 2015

by isabela

Week 3 Reading Response

Question: Is it better for information to be free or expensive?

I feel like this is a question that I have been conflicted about for a while now, and it’s a theme that I touched upon in one of the other readings that was assigned for this class. There was one passage within From Zero to One that really embodies this theme — “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient.”

 

Before I started college, I had never experienced having to pay for a text book. I’m against the concept of paying for textbooks because I know for a fact that i’m only going to read them once, but at the same time I feel as though They’re one of the few texts that will actually make me learn something, and therefore the most important. It bothers me though that they are more expensive than other types of texts, but at the same time it makes sense, with the idea of classism and that a person must have a certain background and social awareness to be able to afford and comprehend a textbook. However, I don’t like this idea, because I feel that informative texts should be accessible to everyone, so that everyone learns, and therefore everyone has the academic background to be able to comprehend that information.

by Fernanda

Reading Response Week 3

As Derrida points out in the reading “From One to Zero”, is it correct to say that books are tools for us to forget?

In thinking more about the subject, I might say that Derrida’s opinion is understandable, due to the fact that, at that time, with the help of books to remember us of several stories that were before, stored in our minds, we allow ourselves to forget, because the book will remind us after all. All it takes is reading it. On the other hand, this could be true back then, however, with the amount of information that is out there nowadays, it may be impossible for us to remember everything without the help of a tool. And so, in this case, the book is a tool used to remember. If you think about it, now, not even books are being enough anymore to store the amount of information that we have. It got to a point that they took too much space, and the invention of the computer and later of e-books, that is, information compressed in one single device was a wonderful idea, some might say.

Moreover, as the reading “From Zero to One” said, these online libraries also made information to be spread much more easily and accessible to more people, once there wasn’t a limited amount of copies and it could be “accessed through an infinite number of web browsers”. Although, it is interesting to notice, in the end of the reading, that more and more each new version of the Kindle wants to look more book-like, that is, people still want the same feeling as when they are reading an actual book. However, they don’t want the constrains that come with a book.

by Breeana

Reading Response 3 Cont.

Because computers have a built in obsolescence, does that stop society from going completely digital with books?

 

It’s obvious that the most popular resource for information is the Internet and technology. The transition from book to web is rapid and all encompassing, but there is a slight hesitation to give up completely on books.

Computers are reliable and quick, but when they fail and or break down, the fragility of information and reliance on technology is often frightening to those who depend on it. When the Internet fails and I can’t get to a file or web page I needed or when my computer dies out from old age, it’s unsettling how helpless I become with the resource cut off. With that being said, books have become the archaic necessity in our times. Also, some prefer holding a book with a binding and reading from paper then reading an Ebook or Kindle. Some personal preferences won’t change, even though a majority of books are vanishing into the web.

by Breeana

Reading Response 3

Is it true that the library and the Internet both are meant to spread information to the public?

 

The purpose of a library is to provide books, information and resources to the general public by borrowing. The Internet is a more complex platform, but essentially it serves the same purpose. There’s a lot of argument about what the Internet is doing to public libraries, or even written word in general. This article reminds everyone that even though there is a distinction between the two, one platform being digital and one platform being more old-fashioned, it also addresses the similarities.

This distinction of the ‘real’ world and the ‘digital’ world is forgetting that the information being provided is all the same- just different ways of accessing it. People will argue that a Kindle Fire isn’t a book, but in fact it holds the same knowledge and information as the book you would be holding in your hands. The only difference is that with a button you click the page instead of turning it yourself.

by Luna

Reading Response Class 2

How has the development of hyperlinks and technology impacted the way we tell stories today? 

While the article mentions that the non-linear information sharing site, “Buzz”, failed, I can identify some ways that the idea of pulling together fractured sections of stories is used today to create a broader constellation of archives.  When thinking of the way in which media and specifically journalism sites work today, the individual users’ ability to access and contribute to online sites also changes the information we receive.  Through social media sites like Twitter and Facebook as well as through blogs and online news sites that use citizen journalism, people who have historically not had a voice are able to share their perspective when it comes to news, technology and cultural events.  While before news was written by an elite few who had access to education and a certain rhetoric, the somewhat neutralizing landscape of the internet makes it so that anyone with access to internet can contribute.
Because we have more individuals from different ethnic, gender, location and class backgrounds contributing knowledge, we collectively have more holistic stories. I think the most fundamental idea this challenges is that of objective history and knowledge; what we previously think of as “fact” we now can see is heavily dependent on the individual viewpoint and experience. Therefore the line between fact and opinion are blurred to create a non-linear and inclusive story.  While there is not one singular site that can create a a “hyperlink story” in which all different aspects are shown, the idea lives on through the internet as a platform that allow individuals to search and explore one topic or event through different websites that are specific to different communities and individuals.
by Maria

Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story – Maria Jessica

Screen Shot 2015-09-16 at 5.03.53 PM

my visual response is based on the hypertext definition which is a software system that links topics on the screen to related information and graphics, which are typically accessed by a point-and-click method. (source: dictionary). Similarly with what Steven said, “first work of true hypertext fiction: a branching path of overlapping narratives and detours that the reader navigated through the novel convention of clicking on textual links.”

As an illustration and my response, I was trying to understand why web developer, author started to use hypertext, how it works, and how it affects my knowledge, point of view because hypertext can be a hunch words linked to other link with different authors, publishing on different sites. So I started with the big on the right site, linked to obama, link to his history, works, people who worked with him, iran, nuclear, which before I read clicked to this article i already knew that its true that all of them are linked together but they have different contents. Surprisingly,obama himself become the a central mode of communication like what steven said about hypertext. He said,”it turned out to be a brilliant medium for bundling a collection of linear stories or arguments written by different people” Of course hypertext become a branching path to expand networks and readers exploring ideas, as network culture, but it can be the death of the authors. Hypertext created nonlinear writing, storytelling wheres there is no beginning and end. Which is sometimes can be ambiguous .

Given these points, I agree with Steven that nonlinear writing, story telling would not make hypertext less attractive. For example, as a student hypertext really help me to explore more information from different point of view, sites (different country), data, comparison, or similarities. Probably the only thing that I experienced with hypertext was unrelated links, false statement, or blog which is more like their own opinion without any further research. Indeed, “hypertext turned out to be a brilliant medium for bundling a collection liner stories or arguments written by different people” (steven johnson )

by isabela

Response to ‘Why No one Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story’

Is non linear writing more innovative or confusing?

 

 

Before reading ‘Why no one clicked on the great hypertext story’, I had never even heard of nonlinear writing. The idea sounded alluring enough in theory: no concrete beginning or end, a seemingly unlimited amount of stories within one story. And I wondered, why is it that i’ve never heard or seen this? Well, in reality it is incredibly confusing.

 

When I first opened the article and saw numbered paragraphs, I didn’t know what it meant, so i attempted to read from the top to the bottom like a normal person would; I couldn’t get passed the second paragraph. There was no alternate story, just a bunch of sentences that had absolutely no relation to the previous ones. Eventually I understood what the numbers and the arrows were for, and that they were supposed to relate to the material in the text, and I was able to decipher the true story out of the discombobulation. Nonlinear reading sounds like a really cool idea theoretically, but from my experience, it seemed like there was too much going on. For me personally, structure and order in a story is vital to it being a cohesive piece which I would be able to comprehend and enjoy.

by Carsen

Response to Steven Johnson’s “Why No One Clicked On The Great Hypertext Story”

What role do “poets and philosophers” and other creative types have in the physical creation of the Internet?

I grew up reading the Choose Your Own Adventure Books (and inevitably always died with my first three choices, no matter what I did) and the world of hypertext storytelling Johnson talks about immediately evoked these books. However, as Johnson also goes on to point out, there are millions of Internet pages all connected by hyperlinks. The books I read were physical objects in the world (not just a bunch of tubes) limited to a finite number of words and pages. I like Johnson’s point however that while the type of story telling they envisioned did not pan out, mostly out of the mere impossibility of the logistics, he has optimism that of that conceit something better was created, and it relied on the tenacity of the “poets and philosophers.” And I have to agree that the way the hypertext exists now, as a connection between information, a way to build one’s wealth of knowledge in the shape of a constellation (to borrow Johnson’s word).

I also have to agree with his idea that creative people are just as needed as coders to build the infrastructure of the Internet. To make things like clicking a hyperlink possible, Internet needs the poets, the storytellers, the investigators, philosophers, artists, and creative. Because what good is a hyperlink that goes nowhere? What good is the Internet without the information and entertainment it provides? Is that not why it was created — to be able to be a network, like a spiders web, of interconnecting and cross-sectioning ideas? While Choose Your Own Adventure books are fun, they are limited and we ultimately can’t learn anything else from them. The internet does not have this problem; a symbiotic home to both the logical and illogical; infinite.