compost for 11/14
Posted by amicnyanza on November 14, 2008
I will be using Birkerts to refute the effectiveness of Patchwork Girl.
-pg 214 of GE:
“I see instead a steady displacement of old by new, a generational pressure that escalates, its momentum gathers as the members of te old dispensation age and die off.”
“The rate of change, social and technological, has surpassed exponentially the gradually escalating rates of previous periods.”
-pg 219 of GE:
“By degrees — it is happening year by year, appliance by appliance — we are wiring ourselves into a gigantic hive.”
Society is constantly changing as a result of technology, but is it changing too fast???
I’m not going to go into depth about the actual story of Patchwork Girl; I’m going to focus more on the StorySpace program and how things are set up. People are not satisfied with Patchwork Girl as a technological text. It was only published 15 years ago, but we’ve come so far in so few years that it seems archaic to us. We need more! PG is very limiting and only allows you to link to different parts of the text; we are used to being able to link to anywhere on the internet. The internet is a vast network of information that we surf and browse around every day. We are not used to having limits on where we can travel to and what information we can learn about. Our society constantly craves more; we want things faster and better than they were yesterday.
Is it really such a bad thing that we’re putting ourselves into this electronic “hive”?
What are some possible negatives about electronic dependency?
-human interaction has changed: it’s becoming less personal (less face-to-face interaction) but also much more convenient and easy to communicate with others (telephones, cellphones, AIM, video chat, etc)
-people are less productive
-increased dependence on technology (calculators are a good example for this)
Possible positives include:
-more convenient communication
-quick and effective ways of getting information
For example, I just searched the internet to find articles which state the positives and negatives of technology. It doesn’t get much easier than typing a few words in a search engine… =]
I’m thinking about looking more into the Domino Effect. Wikipedia’s definition- “The domino effect is a chain reaction that occurs when a small change causes a similar change nearby, which then will cause another similar change, and so on in linear sequence.”
doctorshelley said
comments in response to the draft (couldn’t post to paper 4 posting). you mention at the end of the draft that Jackson uses the software to provide a different reading experience. focus in on the difference. in your sense of how the technology is now actually old, are you suggesting that PG may actually provide a reader more depth and ‘deep time’ to use SB’s idea, or does it limit that?