Net202 - 2 part 1

Week 2 of trying to use this as a reflective tool. *ugh*

So HTML and hypertext.. i'm such a pc snob i'm not going to do the 'hello world' html activity... i've used html extensively (even though it was before i started full time work..) and it really is a bit of a yawn fest for me. What a snob eh? I'm so behind in all this stuff! so moving on...

How WWW and hypertext started was interesting though, being so young back then we never got that introduction to computers, it was all about how to use them for what we needed to do. It was never who, what where or why of the creation of the net. Nowadays more of that stuff is coming out, but i still think there isn't enough of it out there to make kids understand that this wasn't always the reality... that there was life before computers and it wasn't in Grandads era either. All people even older workers probably don't know (and in most cases don't care) the who, whats and whys of all this stuff either but i think it wouldn't hurt for them too, to understand how this all really works... it might even make some of them more enthusiastic about certain changes occuring in the WWW. maybe...

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Next bit involves reading something from George Landow's 1992 book, Hypertext. Which i have to sadly say i found interesting. Very netforce explorers VR/RL kind of theory.

"hypertext as multisequentially read text" (http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/jhup/htanalogue.html) is interesting as no one now would align hypertext with a book. But in truth what he says is true hypertext is present in journals and articles all the time, we often leave the main text and follow the train of thought to an image or footnote or citation. But to think of it as hypertext.. in this day and age is almost painful.
Following on from that it is interesting to think that when you transfer the initial idea into electronic form the sum of the related articles, links, texts, images etc do often make up and are more important than the main text. We do relate better to a text via other items, contexts and experiences... but doing it via the internet... the www... makes a much more full on sensory experience. Netforce explorers eat your heart out... wow.

Readerly text vs writerly text, Roland Barthes makes an incredibly insightful point regarding the value of writerly text... compared to readerly text the limitations are almost stifling. How could one satifactorily go back to the non-involvement of the printed text when you can become so intimately involved with the text. I think that is where social networking sites have found their forte. People want to be involved, we don't like just reading and processing... we want hands on experiences with theories and ideas. Reading a textbook vs using an e-book version with links, videos, a forum... there is almost no doubt which a learner would prefer. But at the same time from a library/supplier/$$$ point of view, we're not there yet. Not in terms of the freedom of information we should really have. e-books currently are almost painful to read, they mostly are just scanned books... there is no interactivity. And in the cases where there is you have to pay for it, even then its not worth it most times. The virtual cosmos of ideas and wondrous freedom of information that comes to mind when i think of what should be makes what we do now pale in comparison. I find it so hard to believe that we can't use those possibilities.. the technology exists, but... its not commercially viable yet. Which is depressing to say the least.

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