To my surprise, the lecture today debunked the theory that most of my high school teachers instilled in me, that Wikipedia being an unreliable source. Previously, I have often sidestepped the Wikipedia link when ‘googling’ something, thinking it was untrustworthy. Little did I know about the statistic that claims its validity over Encyclopedia Britannica, a source that although I hadn’t used, I had deemed highly reliable. Adrian also said something useful in relation to Wikipedia, along the lines of, and I use these quotations marks loosely; ‘while there are a lot of people posting untruths, there are also a lot of people online debunking these untruths’. And therefore, you really just need to be an active surfer of the web, questioning things and using your common sense. Which, alas, is probably common sense.

On other things in the lecture – literacy can actually stand as an extremely broad term and is defined as ‘the competence or knowledge in a specified area’.
Some examples in everyday life: how to cross the road, how to understanding the sizing system of clothes, how to brush your teeth, how to listen to music. These are all literacies that we learn and develop over a time and network literacy is no different. In fact, it has been implemented as part of the curriculum for many schools and is slowly starting to gain prevalence in early education. Part of me wishes I were a part of this movement as I slowly scramble to update my network literacy. Is anyone else freaking out about the HTML test coming up?

As I scurried into the lecture (late again, cursed 56!) I caught the end of Adrian’s reference to materiality and immediately flashed back to my overwhelmed self a week prior… Philosophy again? Really?

Regardless of my initial dismay, much of what he had to say was in fact extremely thought-provoking. His overarching idea: materiality matters. My lightbulb moment occurred as he asked us to take away all discursive meaning of a book and attempt to explain it to someone that has never seen nor heard of one before. It was near impossible and I kept being roadblocked by yet another question ‘but what are pages?’, ‘what are letters?’. It made me realise that everything I understand about a book is in its materiality and the preconditions I’ve developed about it.
He then moved on to question our expectation that a narrative would have a beginning, middle and end. And well, since Aristotle times, this is precisely true. A story without such a narrative structure leaves my mind reeling and makes me feel more than a little uncomfortable. Yet have I unconsciously been experiencing this bizarre approach to narrative online everyday? In a network that is entirely limitless and you have complete control over where you begin and finish to read, does a beginning middle and end exist? I think that yes, each singular entry online has some kind of structure and this is integral to our understanding of it. I can’t tell if this is my OCD personality talking however, so it will be interesting to see how my perceptions change (if at all) over the semester.