Ummm… WHAT

This entire reading made zero sense to me. So much mumbo-jumbo. Plus I can’t say the style of the page helps any. Ugh. Why don’t they have Sparknotes for our readings?

Would you want to stare at this all day?

This is concept that has already been discussed in my comms class in the reading “Communications, Technologies and Social Institutions” by Raymond Williams. What struck me about this new reading however, was Brian Eno’s suggestion that culture can be defined as “everything we do not have to do”:

“We have to eat, but we do not have “cuisines”…”We have to cover ourselves against the weather, but we do not have to be so concerned as we are about whether we put on Levi’s or Yves Saint-Laurent””

Where a book is a technology, the technique would be reading, but what would the culture be? Weather we read the newspaper, or a comic book, or Jane Austen?

Where “technology” refers to the study of craft, it suggests that technology does not strictly refer to anything electronic, as it is understood to be in society. It would refer to the anything made by man. A “craft”, so something that is designed, or made, right?

In the first reading for week 4, it is stated that writing is a technology for collective memory. The reading suggests that writing is a technology for preserving, presenting and communicating human experience as a record, so those in the present and the far future can learn from a secondary source. This ensures that information is communicated widely, and is more easily accessible. The reading addresses the histories of writing forms, and suggests that writing is not strictly writing in it’s literal sense, but the writing of information, whether that be in words, pictures, art forms, sculptures, vocally, or other technologies. While it is stated that a writer “always needs a surface upon which to make his or her marks and a tool with which to make them”, it is also noted that spoken language is a written technology, as “literacy is the realisation that language can have a visual as well as an aural dimension, that one’s words can be recorded and shown to others who are not present, perhaps not even alive, at the time of recording”.

Another point that caught my attention was the proposal that “all writing demands method, the intention of the writer to arrange ideas systematically in a space for later examination”. Similarly to what has already been discussed, this point, to me, translates to mean that any single thought that is recorded in the real world, and taken out of the dimensions of our mind becomes a writing technology- it is recorded or noted in order to communicate our human experience, whether it be to our peers, bosses, or to ourselves in the future. The act of writing is a technology used to preserve the information we concoct in our minds and present it as something tangible, or legible, which we can refer to in the future, in order to communicate our human experiences of learning, of growth, or of general thought.

I’ll be the first to say it; this concept confused the shit out of me.

“The deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.”

HUH?! 

so… using narrative styles on purpose to make change believable as reality… STILL, HUH?! Like, it makes sense… but it doesn’t!
After reading and re-reading everything over and over again. I think I have somehwat grasped the idea… While of course the actual definition and the videos helped from reading 1, it was the quick 14 point summaries from the 2nd reading that made the concepts and their applications a little easier to comprehend.

Looks like I’ll have to do my research on the bus to uni tomorrow in order to get my head completely untangled!