You Might Find Yourself
Bobulate
i can read
Sexpigeon
ill iterate
Eunoia
I Love Charts
All That Is Interesting
These blogs are particularly interesting to me because of the nature of their presentation. Seemingly endless fragments of content—images, quick thoughts, quotes, videos, audio clips—pour into reverse chronological order to create one vast stream of consciousness. This sea of content paints a rather vivid picture of who the author is, and it does so more effectively than the majority of blogs that I come across. In this way, each of these sites is very much a personal experience.
A few other common factors contribute to the relatively unique style of these websites. Most of them don’t allow comments, and while some users may not like this, I think it adds more to these sites’ experience than it takes away from it. They all distinguish themselves with minimalistic design, further emphasizing the actual content of each one. There are also few or no ads, and I think that ads would only detract from reading in this context.
One more note for web nerds and bloggers alike: All of these sites are powered by Tumblr, a service which lends itself well to these stream-of-consciousness style blogs. It’s free, so check it out if you’re looking to maintain yet another online profile.
Speaking of expecting hypertext even in traditional media:
Maria Fischer's "Traumgedanken" ... uses threads pierced through the pages and affixed to other pages to make physical hyperlinks between ideas.
[via BoingBoing]
As I make my way through the interviews in Designing Media, I find myself leaning further and further towards Chris Anderson’s opinion of the term “media”:
I think media is an expired word. I don’t know what it means. It’s a word that maybe once had meaning but that meaning has been fuzzied to the point that it means everything and as a result nothing today. I think in the twentienth century media meant something pretty crisp until Marshall McLuhan came and screwed it all up. Today I have no idea what media means.
I notice that as I read, the word “media” practically disappears—I ignore it in the same way that I ignore words like “a” and “the”. Like it has for Chris, the word to me has become stretched so thin that it no longer means anything.
Even so, one interview in particular stood out to me for the purposes of this blog assignment. In his interview, Roger McNamee discusses media in the context of musicians and promotion, particularly those of his band Moonalice. The implicit definition of media in McNamee’s interview seems to be any means of connection—connection between a band and their fans, connection among communities centered around certain passions and interests, and so on. This type of connection requires participation from all sides, and participation is highly valuable in today’s culture. He contrasts this to the old media models of forty or fifty years ago, where the aim was to get a very one-sided message out to large segments of consumers. As McNamee points out, “a behavioral change has taken place, and people are returning to the notion that it’s more fun and entertaining to create media than it is just to consume it.” The barriers for entry to the world of media creation have all but dissolved.
McNamee implies that the type of communication is not important; whether it be posters, t-shirts, DVDs, or Twitter, the medium is very much secondary to the connection that people seek by communicating across it. What’s valuable to him is what’s actually happening between the band and their fan base.
I am a reader who…
- gets distracted easily.
- loves discussing what I’ve read in a group, sometimes more than I enjoy actually reading it.
- sometimes finds it difficult to enter the frame of mind necessary to read a text for a class assignment.
- Googles unfamiliar concepts or phrases.
- rarely reads in a linear fashion, even with “linear” texts.
- loves experimental/non-traditional storytelling methods or textual styles.
- seeks connections to a story and its characters.
- sympathizes with authors and characters.
- expects a high level of linguistic fluency (spelling, grammar, syntax, etc).
- enjoys hearing about others’ reading and learning styles—they often help me better understand my own.
As I write these, I can’t help but think that I fit squarely into the “community-based literacies” camp, also described as “engaged learning” by Alexander and Fox. Even in my earliest education, my learning process has always been defined clearly by my environment—by my context as a student. As I alluded to in the above list, I absorb more from in-class discussions than I do from the actual reading process. I’m eager to hear what other people have to say about a text, and I’m also eager (perhaps too eager, at times) to share my thoughts as well and place them in the context of the class and ultimately, the overall community.
It’s also worth noting that my reading style has been heavily influenced by new technology—more specifically, the web. Hypertext has caused me to expect almost all reading to be easily cross-referenced, interactive, and my mind tends to wander when it’s not (in the case of a printed article or a book, for example). This proliferation of and transformation by technology is one of the guiding principles of the “Era of Engaged Learning” according to Alexander and Fox.
As a sidenote: It might be a bit premature, but I’d be willing to bet that the majority of this class will also claim “allegiance” to the community-based literacies camp, simply because it is the educational style that we’ve been subjected to for most of our student careers.