Daily Archives: November 13, 2013

Participatory Culture

The question to think about is what does the future look like for reading texts? With the new digital media age growing and coming on fast, reading an actual book is in the past. Everything is online.

A great example of this is a research project that I am doing. I had to find many sources and a lot of them were books. I looked them up on my college’s library website, and almost all of them were available online. Soon everything will be a ebook and libraries will go out of business except for the ancient texts of course. Another example of how digital texts are becoming a more popular is newspapers and magazines being easily read and delivered online. Many newspaper companies are going to soon go out of business because of the news and information that is posted free online.

Although I am specifically referring to texts going online, when it comes to engaged online texts I don’t believe they will be something that people really will adapt to so soon. They may adapt to them over a longer period of time, but for now it won’t be some that catches on for a while. It can be very confusing and hard to understand. It can be hard to navigate. The positive about it is how great it can be for education purposes. They are definitely what we should be looking forward to in the long time future, but for now we can easily still have access to normal books and ebooks and not have to worry about the integration of videos, photos, and text all in one, because for many of us that can be confusing. It is like the generations before us not really understanding how to text and use computers.

The world is changing as we [read]!

Political Campaigns in the Future

 

In today’s political landscape, opponents use subtle things like something someone may have written in a college newspaper or something that they may have said to a colleague twenty years earlier as grounds for an attack. Now, we have things like Facebook and Twitter where young people are able to say and do whatever they want without a thought of their implications on their future success. I can just imagine a future presidential debate where the moderator asks the candidate “On December 3rd, 2010 You tweeted: “F**kThis S**t, I’m gettin drunk.” Would you care to elaborate on that?”. Another potential thing is pulling up a tagged facebook picture from someone’s college years showing the candidate peeing in public while he was drunk. I mean, think of the vast amount of information people will have on politicians in the future that they do not currently have access to. All in all, it’s going to be hilarious to watch a candidate try to defend a tweet from twenty or thirty years ago. I know that I certainly have tweets that would offend some people and make me a rather unelectable candidate to some people. Do you?

– Murph