Starting with a list:
I am thinking about Porter’s article and whether the substantive view/dystopian view is accurate and I think it would be a good debate for my classroom:
How do Machines threaten our freedom and identity?
How do they damage our writing process?
How do the damage our thinking process?
How do they harm our memory?
How does the true art of writing exist apart from the machine?
How does it help or hinder writing?
How is it/or isn’t it essential to the art?
How is the computer assisting mental processes?
How should we design technology?
How should we use technology?
How should we engage technology?
What is a good new term for computer?
What is a great encompassing name for Computer writing and inquiry?
I think I wrote last week, that my first desktop cost $500, a used Dell in 1995 and I remember such archaic devices as dial up and pagers (and Pong). I like Porters idea of a ' community of practice' and wish we had more time in this class to practice and get help on the computer. But I also like that term for what I am trying to do in the classroom, create a community of practice for all the students to improve their digital literacy and experience. Porter says the revolution is not the computer but the networked computer and the social/rhetorical contexts that it creates.
"My machine and I have become partners in composing." Nice.
Porter asks why we are excited about the computer as revolutionary literacy. We may have not been excited about the pen or pencil but those inventions certainly created a sort of revolution in their own time. His favorite quote for me was the fact that we struggle and hurry to learn the latest advancement only to be rewarded with being "immediately obsolete"; that is sad and frustrating. No wonder we rush and hurry and stress to keep up, in every aspect of life, especially in media and technology! The revolution lies in use, which guides and drives innovation. I think Manovich would agree with Porter, that "technology is not a static set of devices but a system unfolding over time."
Reading "Writing for Web Audience", I was reminded of my journalism courses and learning to write with the inverted pyramid. I also returned to many web pages to see how the text, graphics and captions affected how I read the page, scanned or searched the information.
Monovich 2
Did anyone see Inception? This reminds me of digital architects creating multiple realties they we can escape to, travel to in our dreams and revisit the past and create new realities. I had the idea of hooking up patients in nursing homes or severe physical disabilities and letting them go experience a new reality every day. For the older folks, yes it would be an escape but also a chance to experience life again, (plus who wants to stay in that reality 24/7?) and for patients with disabilities, it may help them stay motivated to do recovery therapy.
Manovich says that media has been liberated from its traditional space and designers now can mix pages of free floating, and I found it interesting that he connected ancient reading of scrolls to scrolling on the computer screen. He also made the connection to the screen and the original15th century art painting size and the screen still being referred to as “portrait’ and ‘landscape’.
Reviewing my experience from typewriters to Pong to early home computers, I can understand Manovich's statement that "interfacing with the computers has become interfacing with a culture encoded in digital form." His analogy to painters from 15th to 16th centuries, each using only a small amount of the information that would be possible, has a direct connection to our digital world today. We are working with only a fraction of what will be available in the future and it is incredible to think of what we will be working with in the future.
He also explained how these technologies have developed in unique ways and in how it is presented to us. I try to wrap my brain around the concept of space and time being connected but in reading his information I am getting a better appreciation for how all of this has and continues to affect the human experience.
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