Tapscott- Part 1

Individuals that are included in the "new generation" are growing up with technology that will shape how they see the world forever. "New Geners" don't know a life without the technology that connects us all to one another. Even trying to comprehend a life without the type of technology that we always have available at the end of our fingers. The use of typewriters, cassette tapes, and landlines are becoming more and more of a foreign concept. 

The book brought up a very good point that individuals of this generations have not only been shaped by the technology that they are growing up with, but they also learn all versions of technology much faster than older generations. People of this generation are able to use technology easily and efficiently, so it is not hard for them to learn new technology. This also contributes to the fact that the individuals that create the latest and greatest technology know that no matter what technology they create there will be a large demographic of the population that will be able to learn the technology quickly. Also, if the group is able to learn the technology quickly, then there is a higher chance that the technology will be welcomed more. Overall, the population isn't a big fan of change. However, if the change is more familiar and an easier transition then we are much more welcoming of changes.

"New Geners" also help shape the technology that shape them. They help open the horizons of creativity and bring forth different perspectives that will help mold technological advancements. Older generations don't have the kind of understanding of technology that "new geners" have. They don't realize the kind of potential that technology has. "New geners" have the understanding that there is so much room for growth when it comes to technology and that there is a world of possibilities. 

Blogs are Boggling

Blogs are an outlet for any individual to be able to express themselves through the written word for the world to see. Blogs give anyone with the access to the internet to be an author without having to persuade someone to publish them. Even though the doors of expression and authorship have been opened even further, the lines between fact and fiction are quickly being blurred. With the vast amount of blogs available, you never know what you are reading is fact or fiction.

Blogs' credibility are always being questioned. With a lack of restrictions on what is being published anything and everything can be said or shown no matter how true it is. Due to this, there is a lot of room for people being fed wrong information and believing it. "Credible" and well-known blogs have the potential to be a breeding ground for potentially harmful and repetitional crushing rumors. Even though blogs are technically being "published" and could potentially be very harmful to someone's image, they are free from any potential libelous charges. In the Doe vs. Cahill 2005 case, Judge Steel ruled stated that "blogs and chat rooms tend to be vehicles for the expression of opinions; by their very nature, they are not a source of facts or data which a reasonable person would rely" (173). This ruling could tend to lead to a lot of trouble because of the fact that some people believe almost anything they read on the internet.

Reading the chapter on blogs raised a few questions. Even though Judge Steel stated that people don't read blogs as fact, aren't there a good portion of individuals who believe everything that they read on the internet? And if so, do blogs have the potential to make some people even more ignorant? I have a feeling that at some point blogs will have to become a medium that isn't free from libel laws. While there is are multitude of online outlets that anyone can publish on, there will have to become a time were libel law laws are redefined and apply to certain online mediums such as blogs.

Progression of Writing

Writing is just like technology, for it has progressed, evolved, and transformed how we live our lives. People have criticized and condemned it, but it has become a vital piece of our everyday life. Just like almost anything, people are scared of change and that is exactly what happened when writing came to be. Socrates wrote that writing would be ambiguous and deceitful. While this was one of the first records of a statement that says writing is untrustworthy, this mentality is still around today. 

Writing has gone through a roller coaster ride when it comes to it's credibility. Socrates stated that writing is very one sided and non-conversational. Socrates compared writing to a painting because they are basically both illustrations of what the author believes to be true. However, you can keep asking with an actual conversation to find the real truth. Due to this, Socrates believed that writing is a false medium and cannot be trusted. Eventually down the road, the ethos behind writing began to shift. Writing became more and more credible because of the fact that the individuals that could read and write were the most educated and typically the most wealthy. 

Nowadays, writing, whether it is hand-done or digital, is becoming more and more skeptical. In order to get trustworthy information you have to make sure that it comes from a credible source. Magazine and the internet are known for creating rumors and providing false information on a variety of topics. For example, anything on a blog or on yelp could be true, but there is a very good chance that it could also be false. You never know who is on the other side of the computer screen writing a review and whether or not they have honest intentions. People are always questioning whether something are credible or not, but there are always somethings that you have to have in official legal writing to know something is legitimate. For example, legal documents, contracts, diplomas, ect. anything that is worthy of recognition. 

The interesting thing about writing is the fact that it is now becoming two sided. With today's technology and social media, almost anything that is written you can respond to. Whether it is a tweet, article, blog, or recipe there is almost always an opportunity to make it a two-way conversation. So even though Socrates would have never of seen that coming and he definitely had a very valid argument, times are changing and is writing and how we perceive it. 

Chinua Achebe - Also a "Cool" Medium

John Walter wrote a blog post online just here recently defining hot and cool mediums. According to Walter, a hot medium can be defined as something that gives you a lot of information, but not much to do with it. A hot medium simply just makes you absorb all of the information that is thrown at you. A cool medium is something that give you just enough information to fill in the missing pieces. According to Walter's blog post, print is a medium that is a hot medium and all you have to do is take in all of the information that you are reading. However, I believe that there are instances as to where a print can actually be a cool medium as well.

Any book can be made into a cool medium by the reader when they do more than simply just read the book. For example, if someone were to just read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe they most likely would not understand or realize the underlying themes of the book. The reader has to make a conscious effort to think about the themes of masculinity and how language expresses culture, Achebe doesn't spell those things out for us in the book. I believe that mediums are what you put into them. An author puts a lot of information into the reader's brain to make the plot interesting but the reader has to work with the information that they are given to find what message the author was going for.

Not only that, Things Fall Apart have sparked some really interesting conversations in class. If we were simply to just absorb the information in the book, we wouldn't have had these additional, collegiate conversations. Since we are doing extra work with the information that we are given, our class is transforming what Walter classifies as a hot medium into a cool medium.

It totally makes sense as to where Walter was coming from, but I believe that with books like Things Fall Apart, you can't classify whether a medium is hot or cool until after the audience has done something with it. Walter's generalizations are a good platform to start with when someone is classifying mediums, but there are a lot of factors that can alter the final classification.

Things Falling Apart

The title of this book, Things Fall Apart, perfectly sums up the plot of this book in three simple words. Throughout the first half of the book you truly come to realize that Okonkwo's life is slowly starting to fall apart. When Okonkwo beat his wife during the peace of the sacred week, it presented Okonkwo with a slight bump in the road, but it was truly when Nwoye's three years were over, that is when things really started falling apart. While reading the book there was a lot to learn about Okonkwo's character. 

During the first half of the book it becomes apparent that Okonkwo is very concerned with being masculine and providing a super masculine image. Okonkwo's father, Unoka, was someone that was lazy, quiet, gentle, and slightly a faint-hearted individual. Okonkwo strives to be the exact opposite of his father and to become a masculine figure that his family can look up to and rely on. This motivation to not be like his father and to be extremely masculine is the catalyst for his life beginning to fall apart. When walking Nwoye back to his home village, some of the men from Umuofia begin attacking the boy with machetes. Nwoye runs to Okonkwo for help. However, since Okonkwo doesn't want to look weak and feeble in front of his fellow tribesman he ends up helping the other tribesman take down Nwoye. After returning home, Okonkwo sinks into a depression where he stops eating and sleeping. His concern with being a strong, masculine tribesman ended up back firing on him and putting him into a gloomy period. I firmly believe that Okonkwo's goal of maintaining a masculine image will bring him into more trouble. 

Maintaining a masculine image can also be seen in all over the media today. Recently, Ray Rice, a player for the Baltimore Ravens, has been accused of domestic violence towards his fiancee. Several months ago Rice and his fiancee got into a quarrel in an elevator in Atlantic City. Rice punched her in the face, forcing her to the ground, and then drug her out of the elevator, face down. This act of domestic violence has been taking over the media. This act shows Rice's mentality of proving that he is "manly" and is the one in charge. Okonkwo and Rice both share the same mentality and due to that, it has both landed them in a world of hurt. Rice has been kicked off of the Baltimore Ravens and the NFL has suspended him indefinitely. 

The theme of maintaining a masculine image is widely prevalent in today's society and in today's popular literature.

Oral Epics

Story telling is a part of every culture. Story telling is an expression of creativity, imagination, and vision. This is a perfect opportunity for someone to express their passions, opinions, and their views on history. For oral and written cultures story telling is something that represents that culture, yet they both have big differences.

Story telling is very different when comparing them with oral and written cultures. These two types of cultures differ in the regards that one type of story telling is more focused on the tradition of story telling and one is focused on the individual's imagination. The tradition of a singer telling stories is something that is consistent in themes and plots, but are not told in the same way each time. "He remembers these always differently, as rhapsodized or stitched together in his own way on this particular occasion for this particular audience. ‘Song is the remembrance of songs sung’" (143). A singer embeds the tradition of past singers into their performance. The formulas of each story are consistent and feature the same vigor as when it was told before. The listeners are not forced to create a picture of the plot, because the singer paints the story for them with their performance.

In written cultures the reader is forced to put more imagination into the plot. A written plot can only provide so much to the reader to fully grasp the plot. There is more room for error when it comes to the reader interpreting the plot the same way as the author intended. The tone, suspense, rise, fall, and any other adjective to describe the aspects of a story are left to the imagination of the reader. The author provides the seed of the plot but the full blown story is grown from the fertilization of the reader's imagination.

Oral vs. Written

There are several components of communication that will lead to someone being able to communicate effectively. Oral and written communication can both be extremely effective, however, both have their setbacks. Oral communication can provide a visual aspect if necessary, but written communication is something that lasts and has resilience. 

In the book by Walter Ong, he starts off the book by discussing how written speech doesn't hold the same expressive capabilities as oral language. He discusses how Ferdinand de Saussure says that writing is useful, but has its shortcomings and dangers (5). With written language it is much more difficult for someone to express their thoughts or concerns about any given topic. Oral language also can have the nonverbal communication aspect tacked on. Nonverbal communication adds tone, expression, and color to a conversation.Additionally, the communicator is able to move their voice up and down, further adding more tone and mood to the topic. Oral communication provides a blank canvas for someone to add as much flair and pop to a conversation as they would like. Saussure stated that "he thought of writing as a kind of complement to oral speech, not as a transformer of verbalization" (5). 

Written language also provides a blank canvas for creativity, but just not as effectively. An author can add as many adjectives as possible to describe, add detail, and provide tone, but in the end it all depends on what the reader takes from it. With written language there is more room for error when it comes to the author getting their point across. 

The invaluable aspect of written language is that retention and preservation is much more possible. For example, written history lasts much longer and the history will end up with fewer discrepancies down the road. Additionally, with history being told orally it is like the game telephone after a while, at the end there will always be something different or wrong. 

Digital Photography

While an image through a lens can capture any moment, at times the image isn't a true representation of the moment that was captured. The biggest difference between analog photography and digital photography is the ability to alter the image digitally when you are doing digital photography. While the retouched images can have a little extra pizzaz, reveal a little more, or essentially be a better image the retouched images begin to loose integrity.

When you "add computer graphic elements" to digital photography, the picture isn't what it once was. Nowadays, any photo has the ability to be digitally altered so you never really know what is a pure photo that is free from alteration. This touches on the most recent conflict of the use of photoshop when it comes to magazines and models. When photoshop is used for shrinking and altering someone's body, our perception of how we should look begins to transform from what a natural body looks like to what someone using a computer thinks someone's body should ideally look like. 

The photo alteration is altering our perception of what is truly reality. Analog photography does not have the ability to be digitally altered so the pictures that are taken are the most pure. Pure pictures provide the viewer with the most genuine representation of reality. You can trust that analog photography is not a misrepresentation of what you are looking at. As discussed in the article, with digital photography you have to always second guess if the image is altered and if so, what is altered?

Further, digital photography is leading to the increase in skill with a computer, but can lead to less vision or insight when it comes to true photography. Now to be a good photographer you have to be able to edit the photos on the computer efficiently. With the technology that is available today it is possible to transform almost any photograph into an outstanding photograph. However, with analog photography the photographer has to have the creative vision to create an outstanding image with just a lens. 

Digital photography is completely altering how images are being constructed and how we perceive reality. Thanks to digital communication our artistic vision and our perception of reality is being altered forever.