Media Technologies

I enjoyed our history of digital media technologies. It was very interesting to me to see how the timeline played out. The two earlier pieces seemed to almost be selling their ideas and trying to convince the audiences of the worth and practicality of pushing forward with this technology, the third recorded a story of someone trying to document how people’s minds would interact with the technology, and the fourth—well, the fourth was interesting all on its own. Bolter’s quick run through media and visual communication technology served to show us how we are presently using the new technology in old ways. We are still working at finding new ways to make the most of technology today. That is what W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) and web 2.0 are all about: finding better ways to really integrate the text, graphics, and interactive components of digital communications in order to revolutionize the way we will use—and interact with— information. What’s remarkable about Bolter’s assertions is that he wrote them in 1991, while web 2.0 began around 2005.

Speaking of Mr. O’Reilly, check out this entry in his blog to see one of the craziest… I can’t even name it. There is apparently an organization that is searching blogs for the phrase “I feel” or “I’m feeling” and using it to compile data statistics on how people are feeling, sorting the data by various methods (demographics, etc.). It’s actually quite fascinating and possibly very pertinent to our examination of blogs (and privacy!).