Through history we have gone through many media phases. We started out as an oral culture, then with the advent of writing, we saw how writing has restructured our consciousness and changed us into a literary culture. Now we have come to the digital age and with it, many new mediums. I believe that humans are migrating away from pure text or speech cultures and are becoming a digital culture.
I will use Ong's "Writing restructures Consciousness" to show the similarities between the switch from an oral culture to a literary one, and the switch from a literary culture to a hypermediated one. Just as Plato argued that writing subjects down "enfeebles the mind the mind by relieving it of too much work", the baby boomer generation and perhaps some in Gen X believe that the internet does the same thing.
The next thing I will do use use a University of Idaho page to reference what makes a culture unique. http://www.cnrhome.uidaho.edu/default.aspx?pid=88955 . I will use the bullet points (Communication, Space, Time, Social organization, etc) as my main catagories of proving that this new digital culture is unique.
Then I will use "Language and the Internet" By David Crystal, to talk about how the internet has brought about a new language and what the new language entails. Crystal uses the term "Netspeak" to describe the language that has emerged from the internet and other digital mediums of communication and discourse.
Because there is no physical space in a digital environment, I will use the idea of internet privacy, or lack thereof, to talk about the idea of the use of space as a culture. I will use Anne SY Cheung's article titled "Rethinking Public Privacy in the Internet Era: A Study of Virtual Persecution by the Internet Crowd" as a source of the current state of privacy on the internet and how it differs from current American ideals.
There are many different subcultures on the internet. They range from more real world type societies, like myspace or facebook, where the social structures might seem relatively normal, to online communities, like digg, reddit, 4chan and the pirate bay, where anonymity allows all social norms to go out the window. Ya-Ching Lee's article titled "Internet and Anonymity" talks about how being anonymous on the internet has allowed a culture of brutally honest people to prosper.
I will then talk about how this culture is becoming more prominent and things like Twitter and Facebook are now staples in news reporting. Then and talk about possible naysayers and how it's just a subculture instead of being a fully formed culture on its own.
I'm hoping to find at least one more source per culture point for my final paper.
If your argument is that humans are becoming a digital culture, well....uh....yeah. We know that. Well, we know that for the First World. The Third World is still trying to find food to eat, so they have different concerns.
ReplyDeleteMy point is that your argument must be very focused -- something on the order of one or two examples that are deeply and richly explained as your "proof" for an argument. You have several statements in here which could, on their own, be halfway to a specific, narrow, guiding argument.
Note that while blog assignment #12 is due by Thursday, 12/02, 5:00pm, that does NOT mean you can't do it earlier. In fact, in order to get the best comments that would help you do the best work, the earlier you do this, the better (since the paper is due via e-mail by Friday, December 17th at 9pm). Assignment #12, the longer proprosal, should be the short proposal fleshed out, plus a tentative works cited list (with annotations, as described on the assignment sheet).