This week we had a couple readings by Katherine Hayles. I thought the reading on material metaphors was especially interesting. I’ve always thought the field of robotics was interesting and scary. It seems like such a good idea to create things that have the intelligence of us, and can do great things for us. It is also a scary idea that we could create, build, and enjoy things that would eventually lead to our demise. I never really thought about copying someone’s whole mind into a computer program as described in this reading. I found the story about the CEO creating a boardroom with screens to put his copy into an interesting idea. It made me think of the book iRobot. We try to create these contraptions to help us, but we don’t look ahead to what problems they could cause.
I also found the part about describing the book interesting. I’ve never really thought about the fact that books are comprised of pages, which are one after another. The page has two sides, and writing is organized in a linear fashion. This description made me think about the YouTube video we watched in class about the new books versus the old scroll. I guess a new invention really does make you realize what you’ve had this whole time. I wonder what new form of media we might be trying to learn when we’re in our golden years. I also wonder if our children will get as frustrated as we’ve been trying to teach it to us.
The reading also talked about different forms of the book. One in particular was the Reading Eye Dog. It is a computer that scans text and reads it to the user. The article talked about how this change in the “material artifact” would change how the user interacts with the artifact. This would then change the meaning of the words. I found this to be a strange concept. Can the way we hear words really affect their meaning. It seems that a word will always have the same meaning, no matter how it is communicated. It made me think of an exercise from film class the other day. We watched the same series of images with different music and narration over them. The effect was to show us that the sound we hear could greatly affect the way we see the images. I suppose the same is true for text. It seems the way we are introduced to words and ideas is almost as important, if not more important, than the words themselves.
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I think that your question about the affect of how we were taught words is very interesting. I think that the context in which certain words were introduced to children does affect their meanings. For example, some children may grow up in a home environment in which swear words are frequently used. The child does not know how to differentiate these words from everyday speech. They will surely run into some problems when they enroll in preschool or kindergarten and use these words. In the school setting, they will surely be grouped with children who have experienced different home settings and that view swear words as very different from other words. Anyways, I might be getting off topic, but I do think it is interesting to take a step back and see how literature and words specifically affect us.
Oh, it's so funny to witness you as a serious student, Bobby. I hope this comment is completely inappropriate for this class, causes you to fail, AND embarasses you. Love, chris.
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