Posts filed under ‘Assignment’
Metaforas:Libraries and Museums
Art=Museums Books= Library
All the contents of library and museums are chosen to be displayed and decided when to be displayed by either one person or a small group. Everyone has to travel to look at art or borrow a book. But thanks to digital technology, this is no longer so. With the internet we can look at almost any book and view almost any piece of artwork from anywhere in the world. We don’t have to travel outside our homes and we don’t have to be limited by the pickings of a museum or library curator. Even better, we can digitally form our own collection of books and art. We can make our own library and museum.
Collecting is a part of the human species. We collect because it brings people together socially and defines who we are as a culture and the history of people and culture. People culturalize themselves through collections. Once collections like books and art were limited to the rich, those who could afford it. Then as history progressed, they became more available to everyone. Now people can access those collectibles from everywhere, just not in a physical form. While the distribution and access to such valuables has expanded, we may be somewhat devaluing these valuables by placing them on the internet for all to see. Do you think we are causing valuable objects of culture such as art and books to be less valuable due to mass producing them digitally through the internet?
Add comment September 16, 2008
Metaforas: World Brain
I had a slow start in reading this article. I wasn’t quite sure what it is HG Wells is talking about. But I think when he’s talking about the world brain, he means a world wide center for giving and getting information. At first the internet was nothing more than a network with the ability to send out large amounts of information produced by the media. But instead, the world is adding its own content. Instead of being a monitored form on media by a higher company, we make and edit our own productions. We are primarily in conttrol of what we want to watch, read, or listen to. And if we don’t like it, we can make our own.
What we make and what information we chose to collect is what becomes our world brain. ” We are training the Web”. We learn from it, and it learns from what we put in it. So in essence the world brain in a digital collection of thoughts, ideas, products, information, and productions that anyone can tap into or add to. What do you think could be some downfalls to this world brain that anyone can get any time of information from?
Add comment September 16, 2008
Metaforas: Circuit
- Realm-interlocking network of human exchange
- Network-linkage of nodes (components) into a system; facilitates the distribution, exchange, and assemblage of information and goods, and allows human beings to move between communities
- Node-anything that is connected-person, internet, town
The article talks about how a network has changed through out history. It used to be the place people came to gather to exchange goods and information. In a way it still is, but now it is digital. With networks of the internet we not only have more goods and information to exchange, but we can now do it with almost anyone, anywhere, at anytime.
The article then goes on to talk about how the human brain played an interesting role in the improvement of reliabilty of a digital network. Because the network of a brain is so redundant in its actions and wide spread in its neurons, even when it becomes damaged it is still able to function on some level. With the internet, they created the same thing-spreading the nodes out rather than having one center of control. Then scientists started modeling computers after the brain network. The computer will perform a task over and over again until it becomes redundant and the computer starts to “learn” through the connection of action to reaction.
Technology has changed the way networks work making it so that we can log on to any number of sites and participate in social activities. “The circuit is home to people and hardware, and networks have value as they reinforce existing social networks, at the same time as they create new networks.” Digital networks are changing the way we live and socialize as a whole. What do you think will be the next improvement in technolgy that will again revolutionize the way we connect to others?
Add comment September 16, 2008
