I was watching a documentary on the technological revolution on PBS; the issue of hypertext was widely discussed in the program. In this modern age of technology and multitasking, one of the concerns raised was in line with the lack of continuity in thought, reading and attention among the digital natives. The concept of non-linearity is often criticised along with multi tasking, a reason for attention deficiency. The students interviewed in Stanford admitted to writing in ‘paragraphs’ rather than an ‘essays’.
Aarseth (1994) explains text as “ a fixed sequence of constituents...” (p.763). The author also points out the two perspectives of text namely, a technical or historical, social perspective and individual perspective. Looking from such a perspective of text the relevance of hypertext will be more significant in a culture of ‘cloudsourcing’.
Non-linearity as not being a mathematical or logical consequence can bring in logical interpretation with the application of hypertext. As Aarseth (p.766) points out, nonlinear text can bring in turbulence and unpredictability, as often pointed by critics as ‘scary’ jump into the unknown. It seems sometimes that the nonlinear texts are snippets of energy outbursts.
Q1. How have new media technologies resulted in a more participatory media culture? Give examples of
audience participation and contrast with other theories of the role of the audience. You may refer with examples from your experience at work and at home as you respond to this question.
Q2. How does the shortened character usage (140) of Twitter affect narrative?
Q3. Can Facebook status updates be considered a new form of narrative? Why? Examples?
Q4. What would you say is the greatest impact of web 2.0 technologies on publishing?
Q5. Web 2.0 denotes a shift from “passive use” to “active participation.” If web 2.0 does away with roles of the producer, consumer and end user, where is the text? What is the product? Who is the author?
What is narrative and how is it affected by new media developments. The focus will be on time-based narratives with a close reading of Cruising by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar.
Basing our discussion on the week’s readings we’ll critique these main ideas:
feminism
nonlinearity
temporality
transiency
rhizomatic
time-based narrative
multimodality
Discussion Questions:
Q1. How can we define nonsequentiality/multi-linearity, interactivity, narrative?
Q2. To what extent are these aspects determined by the text, the reader, the digital format?
Q3. What kinds of narratives are especially suited for a multi-linear/interactive format? Are there stories that can only be told in an online format?
Q4. Read Cruising. Analyse the structure of the narrative (is it non-linear, multi-linear?). How does it engage the reader? What are the textual mechanisms by which the text achieves engagement?
This post is not in relation to this weeks reading but I found the below article interesting. Andy Vuong writes that the "Super Bowl will serve as the launching pad for a new age of advertising". Previously marketing campaigns consisted of businesses choosing between print, radio or television mediums. The "new age of advertising" uses the conventional marketing tools but incorporates social networking sites. Super Bowl advertisers are using the social networking sites to "tease" the consumer without showing the commercials. Advertisers are convinced that people will be hooked-up to the internet during the game. I agree that viewers will be hooked-up to the internet during the game. Viewers will continue to Facebook or Tweet while watching the game. The advertisers are offering some high valued prizes so this will also ensure that viewers are on-line and that their campaigns are of interest. I have not done enough research to know if this is a new concept. At work, I currently incorporate social media into the marketing campaigns I coordinate. What are other people's thoughts?
I found that my approach to “Cruising” changed through repeated viewings. At first, I simply listened to the spoken words and ignored the images and music. I did this to establish some narrative coherence in my brain. The words themselves are quite linear, as they describe a fairly common scene in some detail that eventually leads to a broader conclusion about the significance of the event. (i.e. a fairly standard use of inductive reasoning.) Once I determined the purpose and message of the narrative, I started to play with the images. With some practice, I was able to align the text on the screen with the spoken words. Although this created a satisfying sense of accomplishment, I can’t say that any greater understanding was achieved. However, once I played the scrolling text faster or slower than the spoken word, the experience was more interesting. As well, I played the scrolling text backwards at different speeds, which created a very strange effect. Watching the backward text, particularly at a faster speed, made me focus on certain words: lipstick, love, pickup, skinny. Although I would consciously try to find different words, the same ones would always “grab” my eye.
I found that after a slow pass with the pictures, I tended to ignore their specific details. Although the individual images were certainly appropriate to the piece, their effect on the viewer seemed related more to the speed of their passage. It was fun to play with the combination of the size and speed of the images, as the closer one looked, the faster the images passed. This has an obvious metaphorical meaning to the piece. (i.e. the deeper one looks for meaning, the harder it is to find). There are obviously other implied meanings related to the passage of time and how young people view the progression of their lives and the future.
I’m not sure this piece could be described as non-linear. Aarseth describes a non-linear text as one where the words or sequence of words differ from reading to reading. In this case, although one could vary the speed, size, and direction of the printed text, there was always the recurring voice-over that kept the narrative moving forward. Manipulation of the printed text and images certainly suggested new associations that may not have been obvious from the initial reading (I am still wondering why my brain repeatedly fixed itself on certain words in the backwards viewing) and these associations could clearly create poetic meaning beyond the literal, but I found my interpretations always seeking their way back to the linear narrative.
Multi-linear might be a better way to describe this piece. I visualize this type of narrative as a single stream moving forward that then has various branches of meaning splaying and straying outward. These branches could split into further branches, could loop back on themselves, could intersect with other branches, but they always find their way back to the main stream.
This article should be of interest especially in light of Assignment #2.
VISUALIZING CO-EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE
Authors: Joachim Kimmerlea; Johannes Moskaliuka; Andreas Harrerb; Ulrike Cressc [ show biographies ]
Abstract
This paper describes how processes of knowledge building with wikis may be visualized, citing the user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia as an example. The underlying theoretical basis is a framework for collaborative knowledge building with wikis that describes knowledge building as a co-evolution of individual and collective knowledge. These co-evolutionary processes may be visualized graphically, applying methods from social network analysis, especially those methods that take dynamic changes into account. For this purpose, we have undertaken to analyse, on the one hand, the temporal development of a Wikipedia article and related articles that are linked to this core article. On the other hand, we analysed the temporal development of those users who worked on these articles. The resulting graphics show an analogous process, both with regard to the articles that refer to the core article and to the users involved. These results provide empirical support for the co-evolution model.
Citation in APA Style:
Kimmerle, J., Moskaliuk, J., Harrer, A. & Cress, U. (2010). VISUALIZING CO-EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE. Information, Communication & Society, 13(8), 1099-1121. doi:10.1080/13691180903521547
It is necessary to divide out the cultural linguistic understanding of what text based language is with textual narrative. Text is a created and aggreed upon visual representation of human language. Like any other form of language, it is constantly evolving. Evolving in the Darwinian sense, not the social evolutionary sense. This evolution does not make textual language better over time, it only changes it. Textual narrative is the process of using this language to create and structure social meaning. 'Books,' be they papyrus scrolls or e-readers are used to store this textual narrative.
It is interesting to note that historically any new technology for transmitting this narrative is predominantly first used to plagiarize works and disseminate pornography. Yes, technology changes, but basic human behaviors and motivations do not. It is said our society now is creating more knowledge in minutes than entire previous civilization's created. We will need to find convenient and appropriate ways to store and transmit this information. We're doing the same things humanity has always done- creating narrative, transmitting culture; we're just doing them in different ways now. Each narrative, book, scroll, and so on has it's own meaning in situ. It is not so much that the item or language is changing and updating, our beliefs surrounding it are as well. Books used to be similar in value to serious hard currency, one could tell how wealthy one was by the number of books in their collection. This monetary value of books is not currently viable because culture has changed and therefore our value of our artifacts has also transformed.
Linguistic mediums do not generally die, they just adapt along with the new mediums introduced. Photography didn't kill painting, radio didn't end writen documents, television didn't kill radio, and the internet has not killed television. Our usage patterns changed, but the fundamental linguistic technology remained sticky.
I apologize for taking so long on this, it's been a rough couple of weeks for the technology in my life. I used the movie maker because my current netbook's mic is not working, so this is all text based. I'm trying to think of it positively as a learning experience and coping strategies test. Hopefully this works.:
Neil Baldwin. Image from the Creative Research Centre.
Thanks so much to Neil Baldwin (Director of the Creative Research Center at Montclair State University) for sharing his thoughts and expertise with us here in the form of an open letter.
Students - please remember to respond in the comments.
January 23, 2011
Dear Jess: I congratulate you on the magnificence of your New Media Narratives course – all of it! -- the Syllabus, the probing and provocative questions, the required readings, the entire “culture” of the work you are doing, and the thoroughness and depth of scholarship.
I am honored to be asked to share my thoughts on transdisciplinarity and on publishing and thereby to make a simulus/contribution to the building-up and looking-forward phase of the course.
I hope you don’t mind that I am communicating as if I were writing a letter.
It’s a way for me to pretend that I am speaking to you and your students since I cannot be there in person, which would be wonderful.
I won’t go into the mission and originating impetus behind the CRC, because all of that is well-spelled-out in our Mission Statement and other rhetoric pervading the site.
I would, however, like to direct you and your students to the Web-Bibliography and the Links pages of the CRC.
These have grown exponentially in the past six months, and are the two dimensions of the site of which I am proudest, even moreso than the blogs.
Let me explain why – by way of actually and yes, metaphorically addressing two of the core issues of your course.
The thoughts that follow herewith are actually the first time I have shared publicly a selection of segments of a long essay/book in progress that began gestating at the end of last year, when I finally came to terms with how much time I was spending on the Web.
For most anyone between the ages of 12-35, this is the norm.
For someone of my generation (born 1947), a “Baby Boomer,” this is a breakthrough.
That admitted, I spotlight the Web-Bibliography and the Links pages for many reasons, the primary one being pedagogical.
To me -- a lifelong teacher and learner (those two are inextricably linked), starting in the analog world and now deeply immersed in the digital -- links represent the cultivation of the ideal sensibility and habits of Mind that should be applied to the use of text on the Web.
There is a remarkable degree of attention and sensory discrimination required to correctly, appropriately, & constructively embed a network of links into a born-digital text.
The CRC as intentionally link-laden/link-heavy.
This intention is an inherent aspect of our causal aesthetic.
If the medium is the message, then the efficacy of the medium will be judged by the degree to which the message is exploited.
I want to open up born-digital,Web-based writings and make them more permeable, reflective, and directive out into the world.
Linking breaks down the walls of the Web text that I am “on,” [as it were] – making the text into a permeable membrane.
Powerful decisions and choices are made with each linkput into place: to whom, and for what reasons, are links chosen to be set into, and then to lead out of, a Key Word or term.
Linkspossess compositional importance.
They are not just mere elaborations, to “force” the piece wider. If the writer does that, the piece will come across as self-conscious and artificial.
Linking makes a structural statement about the way one curates and conceptualizes information and presents it - framed in a certain manner - to others.
Links open up the singular text being composed to a multiplicity of other influences and associations which make the work being written and posted become transdisciplinary on the most fundamental linguistic level.
Flashback: Twelve years ago, at which time I was the founding Executive Director of The National Book Foundation, sponsor of the National Book Awards, I was invited by Microsoft Corporation to pay a visit to their Seattle headquarters.
I signed a non-disclosure agreement, however, nothing I am about to tell you and your students will violate that.
One of the reasons the Microsoft executives wanted me to talk with them was so they could show me the first prototype model of an e-book reader.
Remember, this was a dozen years ago.
The e-book was a glimmer in the eyes of the technology world.
The most vivid impression I retain from that visit was a mural I saw on the wall of a conference room. It was a kind of “evolutionary” chart with the Gutenberg press at one end, books as we knew them toward the middle, and electronic books at the right edge.
Someone waggled their index finger at me by way of a warning: “Books are dead. We have the wave of the future.”
They handed me a hand-made e-reader, cobbled together with screws. “This is where we are going,” they said. “The train has left the station.”
I have singled out the power of links because they are the most fundamental building-blocks of transdisciplinarity. Links are the most viable currency of digital communication because they permit texts to connect without disrupting original words. It was an extension of link-thinking that inspired me to make the CRC; because, in a higher education setting, where disciplines are hard-wired and immutable on an analog level, I believed the CRC would break new ground without threatening existing academic “units,” as we call them here in the USA. And now we are seeing the efflorescence of a hypertext boom in publishing allowing us to carry around thousands of books unencumbered.
I remember saying to myself a few short months ago that I enjoyed expressing my thoughts and observations on the exponential growth and expansion of media technology; but I also harbor no illusions that my opinions – well-considered and interesting though they may be – are going to in any way effect the pace of change.
It’s not just about the printing press! The history of the book presents us with a complete, observable communications revolution. The historical record allows us to examine the whole of a vast socio-cultural, political, and economic change over a period of some three to five hundred years (depending on whose perspective you prefer). By following the developments in manuscript and print book production, tied to the changes in the technologies used to produce those texts, we can also chart the various changes in social organization, politics and economics.
“Can books only exist in the paper-printed media? Can the text be separated from paper to be reused as a book through digital media? Is such a discussion relevant to the subject of books?”
Some key ideas to consider:
the history of the book
the end of books (!?)
the net_reading/writing_condition
What are some current views about the emergence and diffusion of media?
Was There a Reading Revolution in the New American Republic?
Professor Robert Gross explores the history and historiography of book history and reading in pre Civil War America. This lecture was originally given at the University of Toronto in the fall of 2008.
