NMR: Chapters 41-54: The Kindle

As an avid Oprah show viewer, I am always interested in the things she dubs as her "new favorite product."  This year, Oprah excitedly introduced the Kindle, Amazon.com's "revolutionary wireless reading device," which allows you to purchase books digitally and read them on a small six inch screen.  It is said to "look and read like real paper," whatever that may mean, and is being used by authors like Toni Morrison and Anita Diamant among others.  

This seemed very relevant to the chapter in the text regarding the end of books, the death of one of the oldest forms of media:  the printed word.  To me, the Kindle does not offer a user-friendly, more efficient way to read, but a move to destroy books as we know them today.  What does it say about our culture when we have to have everything digitalized and why do so many people consider things easier, or more efficient simply because it is computerized, or smaller?

NMR: Chapters 35 - 40

A lot of these chapters had to deal with, either directly or indirectly and more abstractly, how our general sense of communication is not necessarily challenged, but arguably altered as a result of digital new media.  In Chapter 39, "Towards a New Classification of Tele-Information Services," by Jan L. Bordewijk and Ben ban Kaam, the authors look at the different social roles and how they each interact with one another in the varied world of digital new media.  Having grown up, for the most part and at least during my formative years, in a highly technology based world full of instant messaging and email, it is difficult for me to step back and observe exactly how technology has negatively or positively affected the way humans communicate with one another. One thing I found interesting was to consider how different this same article would sound if it were written now, by someone in my generation.  Would the new communication forms seem beneficial, offering new ways to communicate, or would it be seen as dumbing down the way we talk and interact with one another?

54. The World-Wide-Web, Berners-Lee, Cailliau, Luotonen, Nielsen, Secret, 1994

• "Pool of human knowledge"
• The World Wide Web (W3) was created to allow people in remote locations to share ideas on a common project in a common space
• This extends both professionally in business and also domestically, by enabling personal information to be organized and distributed
• URI - address system
• HTTP - Network protocol
• HTML - network markup language 
• URI - Universal Resource Identifiers - "strings used to as addresses of objects on the Web"

53. Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance, Critical Art Ensemble, 1994

• This school of thought sees the powerful elite as the "primary beneficiaries of network technologies"
• The elite are now "fully cyber spacial"
• How can you act out/speak out in this new space?  What are its benefits?  What doesn't work with it?
• There is a large, underlying question as to "how, or whether, to use new media technologies for taking (virtual) action, rather than organizing and reporting (physical) action
• Virtual Sit Ins, "hacktivists," and "cyberhippies"
• Cyber activism allows for large numbers of people to be part of something that they may not e able to be physically part of
• There is significant questions to whether or not it is at all affective.

52. Nonlinearity and Literary Theory, Aarseth, 1994

• Obvious characteristics of electronic literature - issue of linearity.
• "this quality of nonlinearity is neither insisted upon by the computer nor precluded by print."
• Screens, by nature, create a sort of an "allure" that forced people to automatically put computer literature in its own category
• In reality, there are few differences between new media art and non-digital work
• "today's electronic textual systems are not so new when systems like the telegraph are considered."

51. Surveillance and Capture, Agre, 1994.

• Especially in our world today, issues of surveillance are heavily discussed.  The concept of TOTAL surveillance has always seemed somewhat unrealistic and science-fiction-esque
• In the panopticon (Jeremy Bentham) prisoners are watched from a tower and aware that they are perpetually watched and act accordingly.
• Agre thinking about the questions that surveillance brings forth (issues of privacy) and theorizes the capture model, which is "drawn from an awareness of the current methods of computer systems design."
• The capture model is integrated in every part of our lives through various masked objects (the web, ID cards, tracking devices, etc).  The computer knows, but you don't
• 1997 - collection edited by Agre and Rotenberg discusses where privacy is moving toward in the Web 2.0 world

50. Time Frames, McCloud, 1993

• McCloud showed "the way for contemporary thinkers who would seek to...[look at new media]" and is considered to be the "Aristotle of comics"
• He saw how the comic format worked
• Comics, he believed, were "sequencial art"