Allo my little Interwebs,

I’m the worst student in the world, because I have about 3 blogs to write and about an hour to write them. Joy. Time to start smashing them out like candy I guess. (But shhh, don’t tell my teachers!!). During week 6 our readings talked about the restraints of print literacy and how we interact with stories and/or books.

One main point that stood out to me was “interactive literacy” and that books were “primitive” because they “restricted” us. It got me thinking about how much literature has changed over the past few years just because on the internet and technology developments. Apple came out with iBooks and along with that some interactive textbooks for students to use. A couple of years back I came across a story about a young girl who was raised to be a sacrifice in a Pagan-cult town, purely printed online and free (It was a strange story, I’m not sure if you could find it again). Even these days at uni I prefer to type my notes and read my readings online rather than printing them out, however if you were to place my laptop in front of my parents the first they would request would be a pen, paper and a print out copy of my notes. But then, to us, that’s restrictive, if we write in pen, we’ve made a possibly permanent error on our page and cleaning it up would just be a bigger hassle.

Another thing it made me think about was video games, yep, those small cartridges that hold so many hours upon themselves. I am personally a HUGE fan of video games, especially those with a good storyline. So after reading the two chapters it got me thinking: are some video games a form of storytelling? There are even games where you’re forced to make decisions and then your ending will be based upon those choices you make, which can be fun… unless you’re indecisive. I mean for goodness sakes there’s even dating sims!! In Japan there are literally games where you make choices and attempt to gain the attention of a partner within the game, which, if it wasn’t for the fact that some creepy guy married his DS is actually a rather good testament for how far we’ve come from day to day books.