For my final project I’d like to explore how far the “Long Tail” goes. Does it reach an end? Or, in other words, is it possible for someone to put something online and have no-one look at it?

I had never realized the developments of immediacy and hypermediation before I read this assignment, and I found it fascinating that these trends had been going on for thousands of years. In the trend of immediacy we try to forget that the medium is there in the first place. Yet simultaneously in the development of hypermediacy we are almost trying to elaborate on the medium as much as possible.

I did my midterm project (http://wikipedia-structure.pbwiki.com/) on the structure of Wikipedia. I did not want to include this essay in my project, but I want to post it anyway for my blog post; it captures a lot of my thinking on the subject. Wikipedia was the first website named on Time Magizene’s article on the Web 2.0, I think Wikipedia embodies a lot of what is new and changing about media, such popularity, accessibility, and creation by users.

I've been taking this class for five weeks now, but I think I've only really now begun to understand what "new media" really is. Initially I though new media was the internet and technology. New media was Facebook, the itunes store, youtube, and basically any other technology that allowed us to interact with machines and each other, or conveyed information. I though that in the class we would be covering only this topic. In retrospect that would have been a fairly limited subject.

Let me just say that I really enjoyed Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths;” it is one of the best stories I have read for awhile. What is most fascinating to me is the idea of the story contained within a story, continuing to an almost infinite degree. The short story itself begins with the statement “an attack against the Serre-Montauban line by thirteen British divisions… had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th.” That story, seemingly tediously boring, when investigated yields the thrilling story of Dr. Yu Tsun, English Professor and German spy.

For my midterm project, I'd like to analyze the structure of wikipedia. Both Nelson and Bush had ideas about software with a structure like that of Wikipedia, and I would examine how Wikipedia both approaches their respective visions, yet is also different from each. Furthermore, I would examine why Wikipedia might be separate from the supposably optimal models that these scientists foresaw. Could Wikipedia be improved along the lines they suggest? Or, is the structure of Wikipedia actually more practical than what they wrote about?

With all of the computer software we have today, in addition to the internet, Nelson probably wonders why we don’t currently use his model of hypertext. Although the internet may seem similar to his hypertext on the surface, he writes that hypertext would be “a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not be presented on paper.” Most informative websites on the internet seem to me to be a way of linking separate pages; they more like the table of contents in a book than a way of representing information in a radically new way.

To me the most interesting part of Vannevar Bush’s piece is the optimism about the progress of technology and society that practically seeps through the pages. He writes not just about the great need for easy access for information, but also about how it would benefit society. We would learn from our mistakes and be better people because of it. Now we have access to an almost unlimited amount of information, in a form that Bush could only have imagined, but it seems to me that human society hasn’t changed.

An issue that used to be important to my friends and I, although it doesn’t affect me much anymore, is the regulation and prohibition of online networking sites like MySpace. As we all know, many parents prohibit their teens from using these sites, or try to control how they use them. Boyd writes at length about this these regulations, and they become a significant dispute for many families. At the risk of sounding like a teenager who wants to complain about his or her family rules (they’re like the most unfair ever!), I want to champion a more relaxed method of oversight.