The title of this post is a comment that I received a number of times during my hours spent at ITS working on my final project. It came a couple of times while I was sprawled outside ITS, poring over my printouts of floor plan maps and hundreds of thumbnail images. And then several more times, while I was sitting in front of Dreamweaver’s split coding/design screen, the same brightly colored printouts spread out all around me.

I’ve been frustrated writing critical papers before. I’ve been frustrated writing fiction. I’ve had writer’s block. I have never, in my entire life as a student, been as frustrated as I was at many points during my work on this final project. A solid twenty-four hours of hair-pulling and tears spent trying and failing to recover the crashed (coughcoughpirated) copy of Dreamweaver and the pages I’d already built from off my computer (the ITS staff tells me Dreamweaver software will never run on my computer again); hours wasted figuring out how to convert full-size images into thumbnails; and don’t even get me started on how long it took me to figure out silly, little things like that in order to lay out text/images in horizontal columns I had to use the “Insert Table” function.

Magoo's post "Which Patterns are Good to Eat?" raised some new dimensions of Hayles' work for me, so of course I'm going to devote more words to pattern versus absence. The example of a the bunny and carrot is an interesting one, particularly because it depends on the primacy of an external reality. It is provocative that the bunny does not percieve the carrot as a carrot until smell compliments vision, at which point the "noise" becomes a tasty "pattern." The interesting thing here is that presence seems to separate from pattern as the bunny momentarily fails to represent the carrot.

Night Owl's recent piece on Hayles and pattern raises some interesting points. Hayles' dichotomy between pattern and noise seems fundamental to our neurology. I recall reading in some piece of pop science about an experiment with rabbits.

(Maybe someone with some neurological or cogsci background could extend this or improve it)

The experimenter would draw a carrot before the bunny's nose. When the bunny didn't inhale, the pattern in said bunny's olfactory lobe was stochaic. (For stochaic, think something like snow on a TV set or "white noise" on the radio; it's not technically random, but that's the way we generally take it). When the bunny inhaled, the increased input stimulated a set of waves that crossed back and forth through the olfactory lobe. A different stimulus produced a different pattern.

Hypertext authors understand that they problematize readers' sequence, of course, but

In story, first

Nonfiction works in linked text because it's explicit. Just like a human sentence has

Media gets replaced or supplanted when folks find better ways. But media don't deliver message equally, so replacement is incomplete.

Sometimes replacement is almost total

Zoey raises a key concept in the entry about Ariana Huffington. Certain people and ideas gain or lose influence because of media form.

This has to happen extensively. Extreme cases will probably be obvious: for years deaf people couldn't use phones; dyslexia is considered a handicap primarily in alphabetic cultures. Likewise, not all messages travel equally in all media. Most people consider a poem or song more appropriate for a confession of love than, say, a table of data, a pie chart, or a formal essay with MLA style works-cited page attached.

It seems inevitable to extend to perhaps less obvious and more critical circumstances. Noam Chomsky and others have pointed out that 30-second TV or radio soundbytes tend to squelch dissent. One can quickly express an opinion that shares the audience's assumptions because one needn't repeat the groundwork, but if one must reform those assumptions, one needs time.

I really enjoyed the juxtaposition of essays and commentary in Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan's First Person. I thought the format of putting responses and commentary directly below their respective essays on the same page gave us a nice contrast of opinions and points. It also reminded me of our class blog, and I thought it was cool that the book was able to achieve this blogging/commenting feature in print.

I don't know how everyone else felt, but the physical experience of reading First Person was also a little strange and bewildering to me at first. Usually when I'm reading for a class, especially if it's a really long book, I really like the feeling of finishing a chapter and moving on.

I was interested by silversprung's question about whether materiality is that much of a big deal for authors not aware of their own materiality. Clearly, there are authors like Mark Danielewski who take great pride in proclaiming and commenting on their materiality, but it does seem that this is a given for the vast majority of authors.

Reading "Lexia to Perplexia," I (here I was about to say enjoyed, but that isn't quite the right coloration) was provoked by the issue of the "face" that we impose onto a computer monitor. Among other things, it brought to mind the biases that we bring to reading a text, in this case a mapping from our human experience of face-to-face conversation.