Reading about the gadgets in the Diamond Age is like experiencing any of the other new mediums through which we've read/experienced literary forms in this class. I always have to understand the gadget by likening it to a form I already know and then branching off from there, in the same way that we can't seem to read new media without thinking of our experiences with the novel. The Primer is of course the most advanced hypertext novel that could exist. Don't know the definition of the word you're reading?

I plan on doing the creative option for my term project. As you can probably tell from class, I am resisting the change from novel to hypertext. I like the linearity, the completeness, and the closure that a novel can give me. We’ve talked in class about hypertexts that have been printed into books and many of us have tried to print certain Internet texts (like the Hayle’s essay), which really should stay on the Internet. I would like to go in the opposite direction by changing a printed text into a hypertext.

In the Hayle's reading "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" she writes (on page 78) that, "the interpaly between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction." I assume that when she uses the word system she implies both the human body and technological systems as she has implied earlier in this essay. Doesn't a computer run completely on algorithms?

After reading Hayles essay I thought a lot about my history with footnotes. My experience with literature mostly included footnotes that were citings to other texts. What I learned from this is that you don't need to read a footnote. But then I met some useful footnotes (alas, more reading). Publishers of Shakespeare texts often have an entire page of footnotes for every page of story, all translating the definitions of the words that Shakespeare uses that are no longer recognizable to us.

Since we've been talking a lot in this course about the ways that new media use pre-existing content, I thought that might be a nice place to start for our Wiki.

We could make a narrative out of content that already exists and mix different forms of media, like websites, books, videos and songs.

The other thing I thought of was that we could somehow give a different meaning to something that already exists. This is an example (and it's enjoyable so definitely watch it):

I picked up my Newsweek today and read an article about the "One Laptop Per Child" project. If you haven't heard about this you should check out
the OLPC news . The basic premise is that this non profit organization, which began with professor Negroponte from MIT, is in the process of producing extremely cheap laptops (they were supposed to be $100, but are actually $188) to sell to third world countries to help their education systems. You can also watch this demonstration of the laptop:

As I read "As We May Think" I found myself writing a ton in the margins. Everything he predicted or described brought up in me some sort of modern technology. When he wrote about the department store and the ability to combine the information from the object, the seller, and the consumer into one I thought immediately of bar codes and credit cards. The personal library he thought of is our modern day laptop (or even a desktop computer). If you have a laptop and an internet connection you have in your posession much of the printed literature from the last half of the 20th century and on.

When we were talking about Manovich's idea that one of the principles of new media is that it involves selection, meaning that one can choose from images, text, and pieces that have already been made to make something new. The first thing I thought of was this YouTube video called Amateur , in which the author videotapes himself making sounds on a drumset and a piano and then edits them together to make a song.

I was looking through Henry Jenkins blog when I noticed an article called " Are games art?