Hello Interweb,

Since I didn’t attend the week 5 Symposium and I’ve just caught up on the reading (whoopsie daisy) I’m just going to smash both out in one go instead.

So for the week 5 readings we’re talking about Hypertext, now like I said in previous posts, I SUCK at doing my readings and digesting the information within my mind. And so this reading was fun (considered the poor quality of the scanner) in terms of the amount of times I had to re-read certain sentences. Anyways, back to the point, my first question when reading this is what the potential of hypertext is for the future? More specifically: my future? It is theorised that all “future individual texts” will be linked together. Does that mean I could read a book and they can link it to the movie trailer on youtube? Which I do say would be pretty cool.

Think about it this way: you go to a library looking for a book to use for your research. You find the book, however whilst flipping through its pages you discover that it refers to another book or article or researcher that you want to discover more information about, so then you go searching for that book, once you’ve found it, you also discover a word that you don’t understand and need a dictionary for and so the process continues. Now image the same scenario except with a library you have all your texts encoded into ebooks, that is the beauty of hypertext and the hopes for our future. That rather then just having to carry actual books or going to the library we use hyperlinks to link multiple text together and this can be all done is these texts were translated into hypertext.

Of course this is just an example. While there are many who do use a complicated hypertext system it’s probably going to be a while before we can link together the 4,000,000,000,000 posts online and on the World Wide Web.

Now to the symposium, since I didn’t attend I’m just going to attempt to answer some of the questions asked myself (despite the fact that it was my class that thought of them.)

1. How is hypertext relevant to us as media practitioners?
2. What predictions about network literacy should we be aware of?
3. What are the consequences of being network illiterate?

One: the relevance of hypertext to us? Well… To be fair media these days is often digital, and the ability to link to more than one text within a single page in itself is probably rather useful. For those who want to go into producing digital media hypertext will probably change the way we create and write, rather then presenting text and information in a linear format we can start thinking about it as a sharing platter where everyone is connected with everyone else.

Two: I kinda have no idea, the main one I can probably think of is that network literacy will become primarily digital, it’s faster, more efficient and easier to distribute to those around us. Like I mentioned in a previous post, as soon as some form of news breaks the first thing we do is head to our laptops, ipads or phones.

Three: Depends on what we define as “illiterate” But I’d say that despite my parents not understanding the difference between Facebook and Skype, it is important to understand the way the internet works. Especially security and safety, it’s okay not to understand why it works the way it works but not know the dangers of being online can have large ramifications.