Explore The New World

I already submitted my major project, also the final one. I finished this subject finally. Honestly, I like it. Before studying this subject, I do not know how to design a website. Like the kid exploring the new world, I gradually find out more and more interesting things. We have studied not only the theory about communication history but also how to use it into website design.

When I began a glossary, it is just small exercise but I did not know how to do it firstly. But then when I started it, everything became clearer. Then about a major project. Exactly, I did not understand it. I remembered the day when my lecturer asked everyone to bring one photo and one artefact to class for next week tutorial, I talked to my classmate about it.

After that, when I was clearer about this assigment, I had to choose a topic for my project. Firstly, I thought about the eyes. I planed to do something about my childhood and my family through the eyes of my nephew. I am the youngest girl in my family. I just have an older sister. My sister has a girl and a boy. I am very close friend of my niece. I have followed her when she just was born. When I came to Australia, she was 11 years old. While, my nephew was just 1 year old. My parents and my sister often tell me about him and send his
photos to me.

However, I changed my mind during researching. When I remembered my childhood and my life, I thought about the love. I asked myself many times what color of my love is. And that is the topic of my major project “The colors of love”. This reminded me something in major project instruction handout: “You are heading off in a direction but you don’t know the destination and you may change directions many times. But going off course is encouraged!”. Wow, it took me for a long time to finish it. I was thinking about it even when I had the showers. Thinking about ideas, building plan and carrying out it step by step. When I submitted my project, I feel happy and maybe a little bit proud of myself. I have not known about my result yet but I think I have learned many things from this subject and find out about I have made much progress in my studies. This is my first semester and there have been many things to discover and achieve ahead.

A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs.

There are many different types of blogs, which depend not only on the type of content, but also on the way that content is delivered or written such as personal blogs, corporate blogs (used to enhance the communication and culture or for marketing and public relations purposes or by media type, by device, by genre etc.

I remember the first time I knew what a blog was. I already heard about this word before that but I was not interested in it. At that time I still was in Vietnam and worked for Hochiminh City Television (HTV) as an editor. My colleague (and also one of my best friends) sent me the invitation to her Yahoo blog. Because I would come to Australia soon and stopped working at HTV, she wanted me to keep contact with everyone at HTV by her blog. I was excited about this. So I also created my own personal blog. Honestly, I can keep contact with my friends and colleague up to now thanks to this blog. Although I am living far away from everyone now but I feel I am still beside them. Everytime when I have good news or achieve any successes, my happinesses grow up because of the comments from my friends. Aslo, when I feel upset, I can share with them by my blog. We have connected to each other by the blogs.

I can not imagine how many blogs that were created everyday over the world.

I read something interesting about the literacy and electracy on a website while I did research. Maybe it is easier to understand for me and it reflects the hot topic in the modern life now: reading and young people.

“Books aren’t dead. They’re just gathering dust in the nooks and crannies of our libraries.

We know from our history, old genres never die; they just morph into new genres. The epic poem becomes the novel, the play the movie, the novel the interactive, multimedia website. Long into the future, books will be published and read. Librarians will continue to carefully catalog and archive books, preserving our civilization’s memory, culture, and thoughts. MFA programs will continue to flourish as generations of new writers will enter our writing programs, seeking the enduring permance of the literary novel or glory of the mass market paperback. Seeing green, Google and others are digitalizing our books.

In the summary of over 40 independent studies conducted by the US Department of Education and various universities, the National Endowment for the Arts concluded:

- Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubles over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.
- On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.
- Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.
- 2005 reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

As you can imagine, given ways past generations have responded to other writing technologies—from the papus, paper, pencil, pen, printing press, typewriter—we know hyperbole sells newspapers, albeit online newspapers in today’s forums, or interactive blogs. Even while he was hard at work engineering the better pencil, Henry David Thoreau argued the telegraph was a worthless technology: “x”.

Instead, Americans spend more time online reading web pages, playing interactive games, and watching videos, or authoring mixed genre mashups of web pages, video, and podcasts.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, many of our nation’s leading universities have moved some books out of the libraries to create large work spaces for students, places where teams can work collaboratively via dual monitors and comfortable work spaces or where students can sit in their cubicles, all lined up facing computers rather than each other, enabling them to sip their coffee and talk online, check their FaceBooks, and create mulitmodal compositions. Likewise, the curriculum of traditional first year composition courses at leading universities, such as Stanford, UNC Chappel Hil, are being revised to include some instruction in multimedia authoring.

Yet what is lost when the book is replaced by an interactive, multimodal web age on the Internet? What is gained when students write multimodal compositions, mashups of YouTube videos, PowerPoint slides, wiki pages, and interactive collaborative tools as opposed to using the pen/pencil and paper?

In contrast to these negative interpretations of new writing technolgoes and new writing genres, I believe Americans are not getting dumber; they are getting smarter in new ways. Fewer people are reading books not because literacy is in decline but because there are new genres, new literacies, that are more engaging, that offer writers new opportunities for originality. In short, literacy is evolving and attempts by such groups as NEA to preserve existing traditions, to put a finger in the dyke of change by offering a national reading day, are misguided and self-destructive. Rather than complaining about new standards or threats to traditions, academics and education critics need to embrace new literacy genres and ensure our educational institutions are preparing our students for contemporary literacies”.

Hypertext refers to text on a computer that will lead the user to other, related information on demand. Hypertext makes possible a dynamic organization of information through links and connections (called hyperlinks).

“By now the word ‘hypertext’ has become generally accepted for branching and responding text, but the corresponding word ‘hypermedia’, meaning complexes of branching and responding graphics, movies and sound – as well as text – is much less used. Instead they use the strange term ‘interactive multimedia’ – four syllables longer, and not expressing the idea that it extends hypertext”. (Nelson, “Literary Machines”, 1992)

The word “hypertext” was first coined by Nelson in 1963, and is first found in print in an article about a lecture named “Computers, Creativity, and the Nature of the Written Word” in January, 1965. Nelson later popularized the hypertext concept in his book “Literary Machines” and has continued to develop his theory with Project Xanadu. This is a high-performance hypertext system that assures the identity of references to objects, and solves the problems of configuration management and copyright control.

To produce many copies of a document in a short time, a machine to print is necessary. Printing has a long history. Chinese printers were the first to structure printing in a way that hinted at mass-production in the 8th century. They used wooden blocks with characters carved into them, which were then inked and stamped on paper. Extending the Chinese monopoly on printing, in the 11th century Pi Sheng created a primitive form of moveable type (made of wood), which allowed for the letters to be rearranged. In a neighboring country Korea, moveable metal type was tried in the early 15th century but it was not very successful due to the large number of characters in Korean script. In Europe printing developed a bit later. Till the beginning of the 15th century, they followed the method introduced by Chinese — block printing.

The invention of a machine to print became possible. An innovator in Germany, Johann Gutenberg spent over ten-years developing the western-style moveable type. He then developed a method using lead and tin alloys to mold moving type for individual letters of the Roman script. He also invented a machine, the printing press that was based on the design of presses used by farmers to make olive oil. The first printing press used a heavy screw to force a printing block against the paper below and the ink used was a mixture of turpentine, lampblack and linseed oil.

James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel “Ulysses”. “Ulysses” used the structure of the Homeric Odyssey as a contrast to the lives of the Dublin working class.

Joyce’s technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue. He used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions.

If “The Odyssey” of Homer was in the purely oral universe, “Ulysses” was in the heavily textual environment. The text of “Ulysses” is not organized in memory and unfolded in time, but both organized and unforlded in what we may call technological space: on printed pages for which it was designed form the beginning. Joyce is acutely aware that the mordern Homer must deal with neither an oral culture nor a manuscript one, but with a printing culture.

Authorship is a cultural convention so familiar that it is almost invisible. Readers habitually interpret texts using their knowledge about who wrote them. However, as recent literary theory and cultural criticism has shown, our usual assumptions about authorship mask some complex questions about knowledge and identity. Authorship is conventional rather than natural.

According to Grusin, “to understand what is new and different about electronic authorship, we need to look at the way in which the network of inscriptions that constitue electronic wring circulates within a heterogeneous social space of cultural, linguistic, and technoscientific practices”.

While for Bolter, “electronic writing empahsizes the impermanence and changeabitity of text, and it tens to recuce the distance between author and reader by turning the reader into an author”.