Symposium 6: I’m so confused!

Today symposium is like a merry-go-round, it made my head spins. The context of today symposium was quite deep and it could be debated over and over depends on how deep someone knows about it.

There were 3 questions. First, Can technology progress independently of art and culture. There were a variety of answer for this one but I sort of agree with Adrian’s answer. He said that technology, human, art, and culture is inseperable. People lives based on culture and with that means technology and art comes from our perspective based on how we live on our culture and tradition so it could be said that technology is born based on people culture therefore it could and would not seperate. But there are some arguments about how technology differs from tools, I guess it does make sense too but i have to say I have no arguments for that as my understanding of this whole things is still limited.

Second, What is the untapped potential of hypertext? Will we ever be satisfied with it? Here is where my headaches starts, Betty begins with the explanation from Nelson who we could also call the father of ‘ Hypertext’. He coined the term predated the world wide web existence. He describe Hyper as an extension so what he means it that this whole information keeps on branching everywhere, never ending. However the world wide web hypertext is just doing a one way street that connects two information together but should something happen to one information, the other has no way of knowing. So Nelson understanding of hypertext is completely different with the hypertext we are seeing in the net. Real Hypertext can go one way, two way, have object attached, rules mentioned, but in WWW it is just one way.

He also had the idea of hypertext being transluscent? I do not know whether I typed it correctly. Basically it means when we are trying to link something from our blog, there is a little conversation in the background by the program to communicate with the website to borrow that certain information. It’s very confusing but Adrian said it similar to embedding.  Hypertext supposed to be completely distributed, has rules, and original owner is credited properly. The web is the diluted form of hypertext.

So you see where my headaches come from….