Parallel universes

Queen eats what is in front of her nose.

"Do you write a letter every week?"  Neil looked off to the pasture where Queen ambled up to the water trough.  How could I make this 60 plus year old farmer understand that the photos I'd taken moments ago with my Android were already on my son's tablet in the UK?  


"We usually Skype."  


Neil closed his left eye and scrunched his lips over to the right.  Face-to-face, communication had failed.


"Um, it's like telephoning over the internet, although we could have video, or just type messages back and forth.  Typing's rather nice as we can chat off and on over an entire day as something occurs to us, more like being together than a short international call.  I talk with Ben almost every day."


He breathed out slowly.  "Ah, chatting is nice.  I'd miss our kids if they didn't live down the road, but we only see them about once a week.  Cheryl's got the hang of these computers, but I've never needed them."


Did my eyes widen when Neil came up with the term chat?  


While we talked on, another part of me pondered (bodily hypertexted?) who will read the work my students create online and how will the department grade their efforts.

Anticipating Users

Newborn Lily meeting 97 year old Ruth.

What determines who will use particular media?  


It is not age.  


Already today, I read a blog from my 26 year old niece, exchanged facebook statuses with my 80 year old mother-in-law, and responded to an email from a 4th grader, a phone call from a college senior, and a text from the mother of high school students.

It is not profession. 


My father, an elementary school principal with no background anywhere in the sciences, programmed educational games for his school in the 1970s. 


My son, LU '06, controlled the robot he designed over the internet as it trundled out in the world to get a scone. Geekitude.

Meanwhile, my brother-in-law, who is responsible for voice over the internet having "designed and implemented protocols and software for some of the earliest experiments with packet voice ... [and who] was the primary organizer for the establishment of the worldwide Internet Multicast Backbone (MBONE)" has an empty facebook profile on which his wife lurks to read  family updates.  He was Geek of the Week in July, 1994. 


We can only reach him by phone or stamped mail.


Discussion  of digital natives and digital immigrants followed on the 1999 publication of Tapscott's Growing Up Digital.  Assorted cheerleaders and doomsayers  continue to explore this idea.  

It may not have been that speech or print was linear, but that they had been isolated dialogues.  Online, we are now involved in conversations, conferences, symposia.

Academic adjustments

Punctuation standards, derived from programming protocols, varied from formal written language and percolated through expected usages.  The addition of image, audio, video, links, the hypertextual constructs of varying pathways through the material have changed what is published on line and how.   


Work online is not like an essay or term paper.  


Faculty demand that students use appropriate citation styles for online websites vs. online journals. We can also learn to adjust to online conventions for content.  

• The informality of language.  
• White space.  
• Sentence length.  
• A sense of visual literacy.  
• The conversational attitude used to create connections, community, and meaningful content.

Neil's thoughts converged to the very term we use online.  I need to find the online style standards that correlate Diane Hacker's A Pocket Style Manual.

INTRODUCTORY MUSING

Sitting in on Intermedia, I still need to introduce myself.  Hello, I am Cindy; I work with biology majors on their senior experience.  I am here to learn more about the possibilities and techniques to disseminate their work to audiences beyond the readers of research papers or honors theses.   My posts will reflect the works we read in class through a non-fiction lens. 

afternoon, a story seems as especially appropriate choice for me as it was first presented as a demonstration piece for Storyspace at a computing conference on hypertext in 1987. In the days before the World Wide Web, we accessed the net to look at files we already knew of from colleagues’ emails or print journal articles.  The files were fully text.  To find related material required either a direct link or a fairly sophisticated rummaging about in a file.  Security was light, but users were almost all professional programmers.  This was fine; we were accustomed to letters or phone calls or article in print journals.  Information came in a linear fashion.  We debated whether to put footnotes on the same page as the reference or at the end of a piece.  Email exchanges, begun in 1982, had already established traditions of maintaining the same subject line and adding new material at the top of an exchange like piling up in a continuous stretch just as our fan-folded paper emerged from printers.

Causality and time were not the only relationships in storytelling, non-linear narratives    Character viewpoint  as described by “[t]he Rashomon effect…[from Kurosawa’s 1950 film where] the subjectivity of perception on recollection, by which observers of an event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it”   has a strong tradition in storytelling, as does the alternative eventualities accessed through a character’s thoughts in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence atOwl Creek Bridge” of 1890.   The methodology used in the literary criticism of afternoon by Jill Walkerin “Piecing together and tearing apart: finding the story in Michael Joyce’s afternoon”  draws on an even earlier tradition that goes back millennia, but which became concrete with the advent of printing.

Jewish Oral Law traditions were written down as the Mishnah about 1800 years ago and the inevitable discussion, commentary, and arguments combined with those laws to form the Talmud.  Relationships amidst the passages were made with pinpricks in the days when the text was inscribed on parchment scrolls.  Paging among bound leaves of paper made study far easier than the unrolling of a continuous roll.  By 1520, the Bomberg Talmud established the pagination used to this day.  This Bomberg Talmud also arranged the commentary and argument of the commentary as in a wrap around display much like the growth rings of a tree, with succeeding discussion ever farther removed from the central text.   Current scholars like Rabbi Debora Gordon alludes to this on her own blog:
        [I] “haven’t sat down and created a beautiful on-line syllabus yet with links to all the 
        resources I want the students to see. Well, instead I’m creating a Talmud-style 
        resource — which is to say, it’s not organized in a linear fashion. Neither is the Web. 
        Neither is my mind. But the blog, being Web-based, is searchable — and so is my mind”. 


The move to a webpage adds more layers, more linkages, more ways to embrace a holy duty.  It was inevitable. 


Will this hold true in all non-fiction realms?


Mathematically, a line, a linear representation is described as one-dimensional.   Adding information to either side defines a plane, a 2-dimensional construct as in Abbot’s Flatland. (See the External links .) Do the additional links to an ever-widening scope of information carry us to further dimensions as in Dionys Burger’s Sphereland?  Or do they merely fill in the details on the plane?  Do hyperlinks and Intermedia techniques give us hyperspace and increased understanding, or do they obfuscate the plane of knowledge?   

For fun using some simple special effects in a short movie.