Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Dissemination and the Memex (Rettberg, Blogging)

Where to start where to start. This is a Topic-driven blog according to Rettberg, due to the fact that it focuses on the general topic of film audiences and the readings, screenings, and daily interactions that I encounter with material pertaining to the class, Film Audiences. Blogs as ways to disseminate information and the way that it can be a useful form of the modern day Memex is a very interesting way to view blogs as a medium. I found it eerie how Plato says that writing will cause people to lose memory, which I think is true in one aspect to not only blogging but our new technologies and attention spans. A different way to use Plato's statement and transform it is the Memex that Bush mentions. We have a blogging as a form of memory and retaining the information that once would be remembered through auditory and oral recollection. A personal blogger would be better at reciting a speech that he wrote down than someone that tried to memorize it on the first try.

Reading these first two chapters immediately transformed the way I viewed this blog and the all of the potentials that blogging offers. I previous post was inspired by reading about blogging and personal use while connecting it to the topics that are discussed in the blog. The historical nature of language and text are continually changing and the way that we engage with it are constantly shifting and molding to our different demands. I wonder just as texts are now becoming shorter in 'microblogging' such as twitter, what will happen to the novel? Print books are being challenged by the digital book and digital books may be in fact be threatened by the journalistic properties of the topic driven blogs, that focus on a topic and use less of the personal anecdotes. As our culture becomes used to short form writing are we entering a new era of changing our language? Will the distinction between scholarly writing and personal writing grow or will the two merge as the communication networks start to merge? The reading shows that through the ages as people and technology change the ways which we communicate are changed and in turn change the way in which we communicate and interact, such as increasing the dialogue or decreasing dialogue, or affecting the way that we present our blogs and online persona which thus dictate who and what we are and will be talking about.

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