Harry Potter and the Internet Pirate

In today's society piracy is rampant. With access to the internet we also get access to movies, music, books, and just about anything else we want that can be seen or heard through a computer. Though intellectual piracy is not a new concept, it is done in different ways than it was in the past few centuries.

In the Johns article we read about the dispute between Tycho Brahe and Nicolai Reymers Baer on who first made certain astronomical observations. It came down to one accusing the other of plagiarism. This sort of thing could happen quite easily due to how slow information traveled. If one of them received a copy of the other's work, they could easily reprint it with their name on it and claim it theirs. This is very different in today's society. Authors now-a-days tend to copyright everything they can that is related to the story they wish to tell or the information they wish to convey. It is rare for there to be a dispute about who was the original author (though they do happen on occasion). The problem authors have now is not other people claiming the work as their own, but distributing it without their consent. It would take any internet literate person about 30 seconds to find a copy of just about any popular book that has came out in the last 50 years. There is also a problem with books being leaked to the public before they are meant to be. There was a big deal a few years back of someone copying down the new Harry Potter and posting it on-line before the release. This release ended up being a fake.

Before the advent of the printing press fixity was a very hard thing to maintain. After making a copy of a copy of a copy, you don't know exactly how accurate your version is from the source. Since the printing press was invented, documents could be easily copied exactly raising the level of fixity from copy to copy. Since remediation is so prevalent in our time, it is hard to believe that there is any difference in the book we read from the author's original words.

Although intellectual piracy is still around today, it has changed its shape. It no longer pens books in other authors' names, but instead distributes the books for free and it no longer is a mystery as to who the original author is. Times have changed and so has piracy.

Although it's not common in Western cultures, it seems to be popular in China to write your own bootleg books to take advantage of a popular franchise.

为什么妈和马不一样字？(blog #4)

If any part of this appears as empty squares, it means that you don't have the east asian languages enabled. If this is the case click here

In reading most languages we seem to forget to look at the form of what we're reading. Sure, we might notice a fun or annoying font that they used, but rarely does this take away from the meaning or add to it (although some font choices make you seem like a tool). There are, though, a few languages who's pictographic roots left the written language with a system in which you have to pay attention to the form and structure of each word for it to make sense.

If we take a look at written Chinese we get a great example of how the pictographic roots of the written language keep us from "being seduced from attending to graphical features and codes". A good example of this is how the Chinese language uses a something called radicals. A radical is part of the character that helps you derive the meaning of words you don't yet know. The popular examples are 马，吗，and 妈. These mean horse, a question particle, and mother respectively. They are all pronounced in very similar ways /mɔ/. Their difference in meaning comes from the radical. Horse doesn't have one, the second one has the mouth radical and mother has the female radical. In traditional Chinese there are 214 different radicals that can point to the meaning of something.

While quite a few of the radicals have changed over the years to not really resemble the original pictograph. There are still many that remain very similar to their roots. 日is the symbol for sun. 日startedout looking more like Ɵ and through the years became the character it is today. Whenever a native speaker/reader of Chinese sees the sun radical they automatically know that the character they are reading has to do with time. We can look at the characters 昨，明, and 时. Which mean yesterday, tomorrow, and time respectively. The 女 radical means it has something to do with women, 心means that it has something to do with the heart or emotions.

The translated title of this blog means "why are mother and horse different characters?" Even through they are pronounced almost the exact same (someone who doesn't speak Chinese couldn't tell the difference) they differ because of a radical system that uses symbols to help impart meaning on characters. In written Chinese people pay close attention to how each character is written. Some spend their entire life learning how to write the characters beautifully.

Also in Chinese, this can't happen. "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

The Alphabet and Our Brain

I believe the best example of "writing restructures consciousness" would be the alphabet. There were many early scripts, such as cuneiform, Arabic, Hebrew, but there wasn't a "proper" alphabet until Greek. The Greek alphabet was different because it had symbols for vowels and that the letters did not stand for words. (The example from the article was aleph meant ox while alpha had no meaning) It was at this point that writing stopped being a purely bureaucratic venture and began to record stories, poems, and other forms of literature.

The advent of the Greek alphabet was a major paradigm shift when it came to orality versus literacy in that it made it so anyone who could sound out the letters could read what had been written. We might not speak Spanish, but with a few simple pronunciation lessons we could read it just fine. On the other hand I don't think many people could gather that 女(nü)+ 子(zi) = 好(hao). I believe that the alphabet restructured our consciousness because it gave the ancient Greeks a 1:1 ratio with sight to sound. It could be easily taught and helped bring about a much higher literacy rate. Ong said that "The Greek alphabet was democratizing in the sense that it was easy for everyone to learn. This ease of access and use started changing us into a more literature based society and species. The alphabet allowed us to be a society that seems to value text over speech. The Ong article also had part about the neurophysiological aspect of the alphabet. Kerckhove (1981) found a phonetic alphabet increases left-brain activity helping increase abstract and analytical thought.

Clash of the titans! Orality vs literature

What struck me most about these readings was how much they loved Homer as an example. Homer was also the example used in Gened whenever they talked about early literature. While writing might have been around long before Homer's epic poems were first transcribed, they seem to be the first stories that had been.

While reading Ong I decided that Homer caused a great evolution in the way stories are taken down. Throughout the two chapters we read this week, they kept talking about how Homer's Iliad and Odyssey changed how poets did things. Instead of keeping everything as an oral tradition where people passed down the story, generation to generation, they now used writing to put down their poems, stories and other literature. They still used the same style as they did when they were oral stories, which is why it's a tough decision if this is remediation or evolution, but the fact that Homer's poems caused a paradigm shift.