Blog Prompts

Blog Post #1

This post is mainly an exercise in synthesis and paraphrase (two concepts you should be plenty familiar with as English majors). Chapter one of Manovich is very important to us, for it lays out his five principles of new media: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. Write a post where you attempt to explain each of the concepts in your own words.
Devote an extended paragraph to each concept and make sure to do the following things with each one:

• A succinct (short as possible without sacrificing clarity) paraphrasing (putting into your own words) of each concept that could be easily understood by a general reader.

• An example and explanation of the principle at work in a specific digital document (do not repeat Manovich’s examples, though his examples might be useful to help you think of others). Conclude with a brief paragraph on which principle seems the most powerful in affecting and changing what Manovich calls a “culture undergoing computerization” and why you think so.


Blog Post #2

Although the internet itself goes back to at least the 1960s (with the US Defense Department’s ARPANET), the web as we know it didn’t really take form until the early 1990s with the development of the first commercially available internet browser (and even the internet of the 1990s would be almost unrecognizable today to people who weren’t around then).

Please address the following questions:

• What do you feel is the biggest positive change the prevalence and dominance of the internet has brought to culture or everyday life?

• Contrarily, what do you feel is the biggest new cultural/social problem that has come with the internet?


Blog Post #3

If, as Manovich suggests, the type of interface effects and can change how we experience, interpret, or value something, then it’s hard to ignore how many things in our culture are now engaged with through previously unavailable digital means. For this blog post, pick 2 of the bullet points below and discuss how experiencing, storing, and sharing these items through digital means changes the experience/relationship we have with them.

• Books/articles/magazines (now often read on an iPad or Kindle versus paper copies)

• Music (now often stored in iTunes, streamed through Spotify) versus buying physical copies of CDs

• Photographs (now snapped and viewable immediately then kept in a phone versus having to develop and print pics at a photomat to store only in a physical copy manner)

• Other people (now communicated with through text messages, snapchats, facebook “likes,” Skype calls, ect. versus face-to-face encounters)


Blog Posts #4-#7

The remaining four blog posts are open for you to explore whatever line of thinking you want. In general, you should be engaging the associated reading and exploring what the article made you think of, what you found interesting, what you possibly disagreed with, etc. These posts should be in the neighborhood of 700 words a piece. The only requirements are:

• You must engage the reading associated with the blog post

• You must quote from the article at least once in your blog post. The quote should not be
there to merely summarize. You should build off the quote to make a point of your own
and/or expand the discussion