Hello Everyone!
I am answering question number seven.
Digital literature is a huge deal these days. There are blogs, online publications, video blogs (vlogs), twitter, online newspapers, and things like Facebook posts. Its interesting to see all of these stories, ideas, and thoughts being automatically transferred to the world wide web for widespread readership lacking formal editing and publication. Its a strange thought. I grew up in a house full of books, often rooms had so many books the bookcases overflowed and we had to make mazes in between the piles of books on the floor in order to access the rooms. I feel strange thinking about stories and literature being accessed through a tablet versus a chunk of paper and glue and ink. Social media tools like WordPress and YouTube and things like Facebook and Twitter are all ways of bypassing the paper and ink of old days. While reading Chamberlin’s book I felt confronted with the idea that perhaps this use of social media to share words, thoughts, and stories was almost like a reversal to an oral culture of stories. They go directly from one person to the next, without being edited or changed, without changing language in some cases and through an easily accessible database. Due to distance and travel its not always possible for a thought or idea from North America to reach South East Asia, for example, but a blog post can reach quit easily and encompass so much distance in a single click. Social media, for me, seems like the reemergence of an oral culture. Chamberlin also talks about stories, and the differences within them, help us understand other people even with the differences. While reading further into the novel I was confronted with the idea that all of this, strangely, reminded me of a scene from the 2013 film Star Trek: Into Darkness and specifically the opening scene where the characters accidentally change the future of a civilization. This idea, of changing the original trajectory of a society, is evocative of the idea of how imperialism changed the original trajectory of evolution of societies all over the world. I find it, interesting, that a series set so far in the future is attempting to teach, instill, and force humans to realize that interfering in another culture/people/society/planets original trajectory of evolution is a bad idea.
A link you may find interesting is this comic about Bartolome de las Casas.
Another aspect of online media is hyperlinks. It is a backstory almost. I was reading an article online the other day, about how Facebook is the Star Trek villain the ‘Borg’, and part of the article was an extension of a hyperlink. In order to understand the disclaimer at the end one had to click the hyperlink and think about article almost within the original article. The idea of the hyperlink is like giving an individual a story, telling them a story, and then saying hold on, wait here for a second, and bringing in a second person to give another mini-story to explain one sentence. After the mini story the original storyteller steps back in, pushes the other away, and restarts the original story. Hyperlinks are all about stories within stories within stories, it is like one of those Russian dolls, opening one only leads to another doll and another doll and another doll until one finally ends up with a single fact or idea. Everything leads back to a single thought, it is like branches of a tree and the final hyperlink’s destination are the roots, and they have their own meaning.
Interesting thoughts! Your description of how hyperlinks works reminds me a bit of computer programming. Most of programming is built on the idea of functions running other functions. Sometimes the second function might run a third function, and the third a fourth, etc., before each one finally returns its answers to the one above it and the program can wrap up. This can go hundreds of layers deep.
One difficulty with humans doing this, though, is that our brains tend not to be quite as good at handling all of the additional choices involved in reading hyperlinked text. Deciding what to click, and returning the original text only later, can affect reading comprehension. (Link: http://hightalk.net/2010/06/16/do-hyperlinks-endanger-reading/)
I’m not convinced that this means hyperlinking shouldn’t be used, but it’s something to be conscious of when presenting hypertext. Maybe there’s an art to arranging hyperlinks as well?
Cheers!
~Mattias
🙂
Hi, Saarah!
I enjoyed your insights a lot, especially since we’re at the very heart of your answer regarding the power of the internet in terms of a new form of communication. (We are taking an online course, afterall.)
I just want to ask about one of your points. You seemed to have contradicted yourself in your post, “I felt confronted with the idea that perhaps this use of social media to share words, thoughts, and stories was almost like a reversal to an oral culture of stories.” and “Social media, for me, seems like the reemergence of an oral culture.” – I want to clarify on where you stand, do you find that the internet has reversed the role of oral culture or that it has enhanced it?
Regarding your second point that social media has become the reemergence of an oral culture, I’m not sure I quite agree. Or at least, based on our readings of MacNeil’s article (https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/_). She points out that the cyberspace, with the distribution of both recordings (oral) and texting or blogging (written) have become too intertwined and I agree. There are spoken words in interviews or recordings that will later be printed in the same profile, for example. Oral and written words blurring together and diminishing the view that there is this heirarchy that places either the written or the oral on top or below each other. According to McLuhan, “notion of the “reversal” [12] that comes with new technology returns to a dualism that is too limited in scope: the computer does not initiate the dominance of one media form over another, but rather encourages their fusion within the pluralistic realm of the “global village.”” This argument also ties in with your claim that perhaps the use of the internet is now the reversal form of oral culture. McLuhan claims that it is, in fact, now emboldens the importance of interlacing both the oral and written as an equivalent of the other. Or at least erases the need to view the oral or written as lesser or superior than the other. Same with your views on hyperlinks, it is perhaps a story within a story, but isn’t that what the internet does anyway? The links we click on Google are stories within stories of the original content. If we click on a link from the search page, it’s the first Russian doll, and then the article itself that is derived from an interview told or talking about another article is the second Russian doll, and so forth. It seems confusing, but I think that that’s what oral culture does. Listening to a story told by others and then passing on that same story in the next generation, a story within another story, from one Russian doll to the next. The internet, oral culture, written culture, and other types of communication, cyber or otherwise, are all interconnecting with one another, in what I perceive as in a beneficial way.
All the best!
Angela Olivares
🙂