Tag Archives: books

The Social Executive – Dionne Kasian Lew

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A couple of weeks ago I had this book suggested to me by a friend of mine. Published this year, this modern and futuristically focused novel is all about the importance and vitality of network media in the establishment and sustainability of businesses today. Throughout this novel we are ironically presented with the modern concepts we are discussing in both our classes and symposiums that revolve around understanding various media platforms and utilising an online presence as a key to connect with others within your industry through the traditional and now seemingly constrictive  form of a written book.  However, although I doubt many of us have arrived at the point of owning a business, ‘The Social Executive’ is definitely worth a flip through if anyone is wishing to ferment their understanding of the type of work place we will all soon be finding ourselves in.

Writing and Reading with New Technology

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Again following on with the concepts revolving around hypertext, this weeks reading focuses on possibilities available for narratives and the potential role of the reader.  Despite the length and breadth of the reading however, it was one of the opening quotes that sparked my interest the most.

What if you had a book that changed every time you read it? —Michael Joyce (1991)

Straight away this reigited my childhood memories of the classic novel series, ‘Give Yourself Goosebumps’ by R.L Stine that through a choice of options at the end of various chapters, enabled you to jump between pages and chose the narrative  outcome. As a child, I, as I’m sure many others, absolutely loved these books. This structuring of the text allowed the reader to feel as though they were becoming involved in the narrative and enabled the reader to read the book multiple times and through trial of each options, progress through a different story on each occasion. However in the format of a written book, bound by a front and back cover, there was a limit to these variations. Discussed and questioned throughout the reading is the potential of hypertext to produce novels that are continuously changing, that through visual interaction enable the reader to constantly produce different outcomes. Yet isn’t this simply the production of completely different narratives? How is this any different to picking up three different novels from a library about teenage love or zombies?

The reading then continues on to discuss the kaleidoscope book. A book that really could interact with your choices, moods and fantasies, that allowed you to decided when the book ended and how. Is this what hypertext could lead to? Do we want to control the narratives that we read for enjoyment and relaxation?

Technology has provided the human race with so many improvements and opportunities but how far do we take this technology in erasing all the history and fundamentals it has arisen out of?
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Validity, Credibility, Ability and a Little on Elliot’s Hair

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Today we started off the lecture talking about Elliot’s trip to the hairdresser…a seemingly mundane, personal hygiene and appearance maintenance task, but no! He managed to very relevantly bring it back to the issue of how can you trust the validity of the internet? The answer simply is, that most of the time you can’t. Unless you know how to navigate through the copious amounts of pages and posts to find which ones have academic or a reputable authority, a number of links to other sources and, how many people have actually referred to this issue. That is, like what Jason mentioned, until you see how many people have written or posted about it and on what platform. For me, this issue was very relevant as only this morning had I seen the articles on Robin William’s death, and just like Jason, I too initially regarded it as a hoax. Too retrieve the truth on the matter however, I waited for about half an hour before making a post to two of my personal social media sites – Facebook and this blog. And in that time, I searched 3-4 websites and skimmed through my Instagram page and Facebook newsfeed to validate his death.

Before finishing this week’s discussion, we touched on the differences between print and network literacy, and in the eyes of some, our current inability to comprehend the technicalities that are imbedded within network literacy despite our generational reputation. We compared and contrasted the understandings that people hold of print literacy yet does not exist within the form of network literacy. Do we need to understand how toner in a printer works to fully understand print literacy? Is this the same as understanding how a website is developed in order to become network literate?

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