I heard you like technology, So I put a technology in a technology to show off my technology…

News organizations are not remediating the technology of the web because it adds anything more to their goal of broadcasting news stories, but because, as is the case with remediated technologies, the technology of the web has quickly become comfortable and familiar. So now rather than simply recounting the events of a news story, a newscaster engages in a type of faux web browsing, with pointing and moving of texts and images, opening windows, clicking links, etc. I just find this interesting because it seems to be old technology remediating itself, rather than a new technology being remediated (if that makes sense). This demonstrates the level to which digital technologies have affected our society and culture. I mean computers as we know and experience them now have only been around for maybe 15-20 years at the most and have already caused our traditional forms of media to begin remediating themselves simply to survive.

The TV thinks it is Internets

While reading Blakesley’s review of Remediation I was glad to see him point out the remediation of an already remediated technology. His example of news organizations who attempt to reproduce the popular digital technologies of the world wide web is great because it offers a new perspective into the world of remediation. What I mean is that the news broadcast exists and has existed for quite some time, however, the trend of adopting and remediating the technology of the web is not an attempt to define, but rather an attempt to survive.

Is the web really free?

Now the driving force behind the web is ad revenue for the most part and these social networking and social media sites are increasingly being absorbed into large corporations. Reddit.com for instance is owned by Conde Nast Publications (a company founded in 1907), a world-wide publishing company, MySapce.com was bought by Fox, and those are just two of probably many social spaces on the web that have been co-opted by big business. Now what I think is interesting is how the ad money gets reduced and split depending on the source of the content on the web. Using Google search you make choices as to where you want to go, cutting out wasted advertisements (Google gets a percentage of dollars at the expense of say cnn.com). In the same way, social media sites such as Reddit.com receive much more ad revenue than the actual hosting site because it is user driven, pin-pointed content.

Where do you get your news?

As I was reading Bolter’s introduction to Remediation, I couldn’t help but to think about some of the changes in the new media that he discusses since this text was written. Bolter claims that the “[o]lder electronic and print media are seeking to reaffirm their status within our culture as digital media challenge that status” (5). What is interesting regarding this statement is how ten years later that fight continues with a kind of symbiotic, if not parasitic, relationship. For instance, most news stories and articles that I encounter come from a third party social networking site such as Digg, Reddit, Fark, or any of a number of blogs. Now all of these sites earn revenue through advertisements. What is interesting to me, though, is how these sites essentially hijack content sometimes with no link to the original source. Sometimes an entire article is simple screen captured and posted on an image posting site such as imgur.com.

Pants-XtraNormal

Hanging in the Alley-XtraNormal

Functional Literacy

From my phone. Hope the formatting is fine. ?

Mini Visual Essay

Technological Power Moves

I wanted to touch on the two reactions that Selber calls “power moves” that users have when dealing with technology.  The two stages that he suggests in terms of technology are adjustment and reconstitution, the first I think is the most common in terms of how students actually react to the technology most often.  It almost seems to me to be a misunderstanding, or misperception on the part of students regarding what they see as affecting change.  What I mean by this is that by simply making surface level, or visible and easily recognized adjustments to technology they are essentially acting out a temporary solution to a larger issue.  If the technology does not allow for certain acts or function to a user’s needs then there are definitely larger issues of control, power, and access that should be addressed to gain any long term solution.

Why is knowing just enough ok?

Is this really necessary?

Think about the reading levels of most local newspapers (not the big major ones) and then think about how that is supposed to represent the most literate nation in the world. There seems to be a similar phenomenon with regards to the technology of the print newspaper and the technology of the internet and computer technology in general. Is being able to read an average newspaper an adequate measure of literacy? And if so, what are the consequences of accepting such low standard in our society? If we adopt a similar standard in terms of our newer digital technologies (which are increasingly intertwined with traditional notions of literacy), then we run the risk of not being able to obtain and master a functioning and critical literacy. Our interaction with the digital technologies in our day to day lives is becoming increasingly formulaic and idiot proofed (online templates, obvious code with cut and paste directions, software that accomplishes the simplest of connectivity tasks, etc.). It seems the more we use technology and the more it does for us, the less we actually understand about how that technology functions at a basic level.