Both the Gee and Kittler pieces are in our printed packet and also available on the blog “Links to Readings” page.
Here’s the link for the Aborigines with mobile phones that Amy was talking about.
“All this technology is making us antisocial.”
I thought people in class might be interested in Lev Manovich’s The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kiev. “Using computational and data visualization techniques, [Manovich] explore[s] 13,208 Instagram images shared by 6,165 people in the central area of Kiev during 2014 Ukrainian revolution (February 17 – February 22, 2014).”
Elizabeth Losh wrote a guest essay for the project as well. “Hashtag #Euromaidan: What Counts as Political Speech on Instagram?“
Chapters 2 and 3 of Katherine Hayles How we think : digital media and contemporary technogenesis (available via “CLICKS” at 2 CUNY Libraries. You can have the book delivered to the GC library if you don’t want to go to libraries directly)
Kittler “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter“
Here is another interesting article about reading and comprehension and comparing ebooks to printed paper books.
“Science Has Great News for People Who Read Actual Books”
Here is a short excerpt “Our brains were not designed for reading, but have adapted and created new circuits to understand letters and texts. The brain reads by constructing a mental representation of the text based on the placement of the page in the book and the word on the page.” I know, for myself personally, when I read and I’m trying to recall something I read, I get a mental picture of what side of the page the quote or sentence I was thinking about was on.
What do other people think? How do you read and remember? What do you think about all these new studies coming out talking about either how multitasking and reading online is training our brains to learn in new ways or how reading a printed item allows for more comprehension and understanding? Can they both be true?
Here’s that picture of the cave art.
PRI has this great story/article on the way we navigate different modes of media when we read digitally vs. when we read on paper. My favorite quote from the article (which includes the link to the whole thing): “If you don’t use the deep reading part of your brain. You lose the deep reading part of your brain.”
Excerpt:
” “The problem is that many of us have adapted to reading online just too well. And if you don’t use the deep reading part of your brain, you lose the deep reading part of your brain.”
So what’s deep reading? It’s the concentrated kind we do when we want to “immerse ourselves in a novel or read a mortgage document,” Zoromodi says. And that uses the kind of long-established linear reading you don’t typically do on a computer. “Dense text that we really want to understand requires deep reading, and on the internet we don’t do that.”
Linear reading and digital distractions have caught the attention of academics like Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University.
“I don’t worry that we’ll become dumb because of the Internet,” Wolf says, “but I worry we will not use our most preciously acquired deep reading processes because we’re just given too much stimulation. That’s, I think, the nub of the problem.””
I added a link to the Ong book in the page Links to Readings. Enjoy
This article, “Is Google Making Students Stupid?: Outsourcing menial tasks to machines can seem liberating, but it may be robbing a whole generation of certain basic mental abilities.” by Nick Romeo appeared September 30, 2014 in The Atlantic. I thought it was interesting and fit well with our readings this week by Paul Duguid “Material Matters: Aspect of the Past and the Futurology of the Book and Carla Hesse “Books in Time“
