S15 Awakening the Digital Imagination
New Media Seminar for Virginia Tech faculty, staff and graduate students
Reading: Time Frames by Scott McCloud, New Media Reader. This reading was a great finale to Virginia Tech’s New Media Seminar. McCloud’s dissection of time and space in comics is fantastic! Take a look at the image below – is it one point in time, or are there a sequence of points? Are you aware […]
Reading: Chapter 7 (“Learning Webs”) of Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, 1971. This week we were challenged with the task of considering a “deschooled society.” Illich writes, We must conceive of new relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to [educational] resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his […]
Reading: Two Selections by Brenda Laurel, available from the New Media Reader. “The Six Elements and the Causal Relations Among Them.” Computers as Theater, 49-65. 2nd ed., 1993. “Star Raiders: Dramatic Interaction in a Small World,” Ph.D. Thesis, Ohio State University, pp. 81-86, 1986. I am going to tackle the task of identifying a form of […]
Reading: “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” by Bill Viola. Video 80(5):36-41. 1982. The notion of “data space” has changed drastically with the advancement of technology. I enjoyed Viola’s examples of data space in history as elaborate memory systems, “mnemo-technics.” My example of data space highlights the brain’s amazing ability to adapt to new information. In […]
This series of short interviews with technological leaders in 2008 is illuminating. Their predictions for the development of technology over the next 10 years echo many of the “far-fetched” predictions by the authors we have read in the New Media Seminar. Big data: The next Google : Nature News.
Reading: “Personal Dynamic Media” by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg. Computer 10(3):31-41. March 1977. Available as a sample chapter from the New Media Reader. Here, Kay and Goldberg describe the potential of their Dynabook to influence the lives of any person as a creative and educational outlet. I am impressed that they have users from […]
The Turing Test! Getting closer…take the quiz from the New York Times. Did a Human or a Computer Write This? – NYTimes.com.
Many of the people we are reading in the New Media Seminar encourage the ubiquitous nature of technology, envisioning a world where people use technology seamlessly in their everyday lives. In many ways, we have realized this dream. But there may be some costs that even Bush, Englebart, and Nelson couldn’t foresee. Wired recently posted […]
This WIRED article resonated with the New Media Seminar I’m taking at Virginia Tech. Big Data: One Thing to Think About When Buying Your Apple Watch | WIRED. I hadn’t heard of the term ephemeralization coined by Buckminster Fuller before, which is the promise of technology to do “more and more with less and less until eventually […]
Reading: “Computer Lib / Dream Machines” by Theodor H. Nelson. Self-published, 1974. 2nd ed., Redmond, Washington: Tempus Books/Microsoft Press, 1987. Excerpt from the New Media Reader (available here). Nelson’s passionate and witty perspective of society’s adoption of technology kept hitting me in the face with bold (and sometimes biting) comments about the current directions of technology. Add to […]
