Julia
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October 24, 2007
Who are you? Who am I? Facing these questions, maybe it’s now enough just to automatically come up with a response you have been so used to in so many years. Yes, now you have multi-identities and you need to consider which one is proper to use, among many others, to introduce you in front of that group of audience.
So when windows become a powerful metaphor for thinking about one’s identity, I am a little bit worried because the “splitting of mind” behavior scares me. What if people around us now, or one or two years later, learn to split their minds so skillfully that you can never tell if you really know a guy standing face to face talking to you. He may well be living another life somewhere else, online. I don’t like this idea…
So I really like the 23-year-old cocky youngster, Mark Zuckerberg, who initiates a social graph depicting real us and our social relationships and behaviors online. I feel more comfortable and secured socializing with someone I know, and know really well.
October 19, 2007
People in 1940s, when reading Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think, must view it as a piece of science fiction. Fifty years later, as I was reading the same article, I just couldn’t help feeling amazed at his intelligence and great insight. What he proposed to be the “Memex”, though never being turned into fact, has been inspiring so many other brilliant scientists to work on the dream depicted in Bush’s article and to create one miracle after another till today when we are eventually able to use networked computers to communicate, store, share, and further invent more wonderful news things.
In Chinese, the equivalent to the word “computer” is “电脑” (dian nao). The first character means “electricity” or anything related to the use of electricity, electrical or electronic. “脑”, the second character, means “brain”. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Yes, an electrical brain, that can store, sort, associate, and when put into a network, can share, communicate and work wonders!
I did some further reading about Vannevar Bush and was surprised to realize that he turned out to be such a significant figure of both the US history and the development of information technology. He received worldwide respect as “the Information Giant”, “the father of information science”, “the father of modern computer”, and “the grandfather of hypertext”. He was not the one who actually built up the modern computer or designed the World Wide Web. However, if without his wisdom and his insight, I can’t imagine how many year we might still have to spend on waiting for these breathtaking inventions of information technology to be created.
Bush must be happy if he was able to know that some fifty years later, in a college classroom, a group of writing majors were studying his article. From national defense system to professional writing, revolutions in informational technology have influenced every aspects of our life.
—Julia
October 12, 2007
Eighty percent of my writing experiences are related with the use of computers. Specifically, I write mostly using the Microsoft Word, and in other cases I may write directly online when composing emails and posts. The other two most favored writing spaces are cell phone text-messaging and handwriting.
There are three major factors that I would first take into consideration when I am to write something, namely, presentation, communication and validity. If what I am to write is to present my ability and achievement of study and career or other significant aspects of my life. I will definitely choose to draft and edit it on Word before I can present it to my bosses, my professors, and etc. In term of communication, text messaging is very handy and convenient. Email is formal and long-lasting. Handwritten letters and notes are personal and sweet. There is also another outstanding feature of Email that appeals to me which is its ability to help keep a social distance between you and the one that you are exchanging messages with in the sense that while it is obviously a virtue that you reply an email promptly, you can also take your time if you don’t feel like reply and need to think about it. As to the factor of validity, I believe that no one would doubt that handwriting always enjoy the most authority compared with other writing spaces.
Digital writing remediates handwriting by introducing flexibility and interactivity into the activity of reading and writing. More importantly, its being hypermediated can bring audience a terrific experience of the virtual reality. Besides, digital writing also borrows ideas from handwriting. For example, more and more fonts are developed in computer writing to help maintain the individual differences to a certain extent.
—Julia
