Thursday, June 28, 2012

Communication and Cyberspace Chapters 15, 16, 17

Chapter 15 is titled "Getting Over the Edge." The author talks about the fact that every time a new medium appears, much speculation comes about over whether or not previous media will die out. He also talks at length about hypertext, which he describes as, "...a characteristic product of the late age of print, which is to say, it is deeply ambiguous. Although still dependent on alphabetic literacy, algorithmic programming, linearity, hierarchy, and other trappings of Gutenberg culture, hypertext implicitly challenges the episteme from which it sprang." In other words, hypertext is associated with literacy and challenges it at the same time.

Chapter 16 is titled "Dispatches from the New Frontier: Writing for the Internet." The author, Camille Paglia, discusses her career as a writer for both print and online media. One of the effects of college students' increased use of the Internet is that literature departments saw a decrease in majors. She writes that for her, the most important part of writing for the Internet is visual as opposed to verbal. The Internet, she states, is full of colorful, lively graphics that more closely represent a TV screen than a book.

Chapter 17 is titled "Pedagogy and Hypertext." Author Stephanie Gibson defines hypertext as, "Any program that allows readers to navigate nonlinearly through a body of text, sometimes a single text, but frequently a database of related materials with hundreds of nodes of text linked together forming a network of relevant material." She writes that when hypertext is used in the classroom, teachers lose control over who reads what texts and how they read them. Additionally, she believes that classrooms will at some point use hypertext instead of traditional print textbooks.

No comments:

Post a Comment