Reading Reflection - Week 1

As We May Think

Amazing! I went looking for the Life Magazine article to see what they depicted the Memex to look like. You can follow this link to the concept published in 1945. Memex

While maybe some of the implementation details are off, the end result of the knowledge at the fingertips has become the norm of today's society.


The Culture Logic of Media Convergence

This article is about 5 years old and I'm going to start by looking at the comments by the author about the 2004 presidential election and the statement that blogging affected it. Likewise the New York Times printed figures from the election of how Obama use YouTube for for 14.5 million hours at what would been a cost of $47 million if purchased on TV. (NYTimes Article). As pointed out, the way the internet was used during the campaign appears to have played an outcome in the election much in the way televisison was used with Kennedy. Also, now days if a TV show is missed its quite possible you might be able to watch it online.

As this article points out media is converging and nine points of what are called negotiations are pointed out. Among which is regulating media content. In some ways this has become easier on an individual level with the new converging of technologies. It is possible to easily record desired shows and to only watch those.

The article also discusses redesigning the digital economy and comments the free web will be only amateur and academics. To date, I'm not sure I agree with that has happened. What about the sites that give away information in the hopes that it will attract consumers which would then see a product about that information which might prove useful (i.e. computer virus information on sites selling anti-virus software, health information on sites selling vitamins and many others)

I do agree however with the basic premise that the convergence of the media will continue to change even as it has since this article was written.


Toward a Connective Ethnography of Online/Offline Literacy Networks

Where to begin with this article. While I know it is important to look at the methods used by these researchers, I think I'll start with one of the findings that surprised me.

I was surprised by the findings of the culture in Trinidad in 2000 and the fact their culture was shaping how they used the web and the finding the practiced their national identities online. I can't help but wonder if that trend is still in existence today and if so, to the same extent.

For me, this article is valuable in seeing the different types of ethnographic studies that have been done and this is especially true as I'm just beginning the required qualitative statistics courses for the PhD. In that the reading was timely for me.

Stay tuned for the next post for more on this article!