Blog 5- Who wrote that...?

In today’s society you can get online, search in Google, find numerous articles on what you’re looking for, and use the information at hand. There are certain questions a smart searcher should ask:  Where is this information coming from? Is it credible? Is the author being bias? The digital world has changed the way we view piracy, credibility and originality. It blows mind to even think about how much information and articles are recycled and used in different ways. Good articles will have authors, citations, sources and background. What does this all mean though? How do you know that the sources they used are even credible?  The subject at hand here is very hard to determine.

According to, the book of Nature and the Nature of the Book, piracy is something of concern even for non digitalized work. The manufacture has a big part in how a book will be processed, how many copies will be made, and how it will be distributed. There are manufactures out there that a fakes. Companies will produce unauthorized reprints of existing books and claim they are written by bestselling authors. (Johns) It may seem ridiculous that you could buy a “fake” book, but if you don’t know it’s out there they can get you. These companies can change what the author has written which interns changes the idea/perception of the book.

In the digital world you have to be careful what you read and how much you take away from it. It takes time for people to research what they are reading over the web. Nobody wants to click on every source the author has used and go through those sources in depth. This is why we have to know what websites are credible. It also helps if we know who the person is that is writing the article. People tend to follow authors that are well known, or seem to fit the reader’s personality. This aspect is also talked about in Manuscripts. Writers had to find patron (I would define patron as an entrepreneur in our times) who would distribute it. The more famous this patron (or entrepreneur/celebrity type) the more popular the piece.

The internet has changed the way we think about credibility and piracy. You have to careful what you read and what you take away from it. Digitalizing the written world has made it more accessible and easier to change. The internet is a place where anyone can post anything. We have to make sure that we don’t digest everything as truthfulness.

Hypermedia and what not... Blog 4

Hypermedia has changed the way we view literature and what is involved with it. In one of my other DTC classes we have talked about Hypermedia, Hypertext, Cybertext, etc.. These articles are reference this idea of Hypermedia and the idea behind it.

Hypermedia:

• None paper based
• Visual- graphical interface is very important
• Multimedia- animation, music, pictures, etc... <- fundamental part
• Non-linear
• Open text
• Some: Users can contribute content

These articles seem to focus on the beginning of pictures and style involved with literate. It is very interesting to see how litereature has turned from hieroglyphics to an alphabet and in a way reverting back to "images". It seems more popular for people to want to see an image with little words then to read simple text. People say a picture is worth a thousand words, but without a caption you may not know the background behind this image. This caption can even change the way you view a picture. The world wide web has even evolved this further. Not only are the there images with captions, but now you can click and find more information on the subject, you can post it on your social network with your opinion, or even distort the image and make it your own.

Hypermedia revolutionized the way we see the world now. People have the ability to change things and take other peoples work and edit it more easily than ever before. If you go on Youtube you can find different variations of the same thing. Youtube has changed how media works. Normal people around the world, that would have never been famous before the internet, are now known by millions of people. This website works in a way that promotes getting distracted and lost, but one of the most important things on this website is the comment section. You are allowed to post whatever you want regarding the movie or not. This creates  a discussion that can be hilarious or serious depending on what the video was about.

Anyways.... This may seem a little off topic, but my point here is that "literature", involved with hypermedia, has evolved into a way where many people around the world are able to come together and converse on different subjects.

Blog 3-reading revolutions

The most interesting reading revolution too me would have to be the industrial revolution. This brought on a whole new idea to literature. Having the ability to print out books, newspapers and magazines in a speedy  manner changed how people read. This idea brings back the first revolution the article talked about and that was the movement from intensive reading to extensive reading. Meaning, people would re-read certain literature (i.e. The Bible) or many different texts just once. I think this plays into the way we read now especially. Having any kind of information at the tips of our fingers makes the way we read totally different then say even just thirty years ago. The internet has made, in my opinion, people more "lazy". What i mean by lazy is that we have shorter attention spans when it comes to literature. I understand there are people that still sit down and can read 1984 multiple times, but i think that this is becoming rarer and rarer. When we want to know something we google it. The more we google the faster we want answers and the less patient we become. People can view this as good and bad, but that can be a whole other topic. :)

Orality Blog 2

“The importance of ancient Greek civilization to all the world was beginning to show in an entirely new light: it marked the point in human history when deeply interiorized alphabetic literacy first clashed head-on with orality.”

Poetry was the theme throughout this text and the idea behind the quote above is that the writing down and “collaboration” of poetry has changed how poems are remembered and reversed. To sum up, in my opinion, what chapter two was about is that the epic poems of Homer are a combination of literature used by others. Homers work seemed to be made up of clichés, but as many people have said Homer was no beginner poet or a poor poet at all. In my opinion, Homer used the themes we all know and told them in a great way.

Where remediation comes into factor is how the orality of poems changed when written word came to play. The ability of the poet to change, reinvent, and reshape the oral poems became difficult. “In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential wisdom and effective administration.” From this quote you can also see the positive side to written language for the fact that it was permanent and can be “easily” accessed. I put easily in quotes because in the past it was more difficult to find printed work than it is in the age of internet.

Remedation Blog 1

According to Dictoinary.com remediation is “the correction of something bad or defective”, personally I don’t believe this is true. Yes, the evolution of an idea or product can help and usually does, but it doesn’t mean we should ditch the old ways for good. A great example of this is the idea of an e-book. Everything about it seems great and I am all for the idea of having a way of purchasing cheap very accessible books. The more people I talk to though, still prefer regular old fashioned books. I am trying to understand why, when it seems e-books are the future.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of both E-books and regular books. E-books portability is wonderful. Electronic text takes up virtually no room and, compared to lugging around three books or more, can be very light. Carrying around many books can be almost impossible, but an e-book device can store up to many different books which can be accessed anytime. The features of e-books depend on the company you bought it from, but being electronic the usability is endless. Being able to copy, paste, search, highlight, take notes, erase, and book mark more easily make using an e-book easy to do. Having a back ground screen also makes it able to access an e-book at anytime without some kind of light source.

Although all these great features there are always going to be cons. The most frequent complaint I have heard from people is that they don’t like staring at a computer screen. They would rather read off of paper if they are going to sit down and read for long periods of time. Some e-books can also be very expensive and having the responsibility of having all of your books on one device that can get stolen or broken can turn people away.

According to the reading “remediation is used by educators as a euphemism for the task of bringing lagging students up to an expected level of performance…” I believe this idea of remediation doesn’t describe what is happening in this situation. Once they figure out a way of making the back light better on e-reading devices and that all books are actually e-books, then we can get close to bring “lagging” ideas to new. What I think e-books do are fill and repair the fault of “regular books”. They capture the idea of having thousands of books at the disposal of a two pound device.