Category / Class 3

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 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.