Chapter 13
Chapter 13 discusses how corporate development relies on technology and how they use cool to influence their image. Business depends on making a profit and technology has become a crucial way to market their products and become apart of popular culture. Rice uses H.P.’s vision for the future, demonstrating a technical Utopia called Cooltown. Cooltown capitalizes on computer inventions that include a domino effect of products they invent through Hewlett-Packard. These inventions are to increase our standard of living making improvement that are difficult to live without. This model has two basic tenets that relate to writing: Mobiity and interlinking activities. Media therorist Marshall McLuhan concept of cool relates to our particiapation in the media. He descibes “Hot Media” as media with high definition which requires little participation to make sense of their message. He contrast hot media with “Cool Media”. Referencing cool media, the viewers are required to have a lot of participation, the ability to understand their meaning, and the interlinks that convey the intentions of the inventor.
Rice expands on commercialism and technology, and how consumers are bombarded with tie-ins and product placement. Businesses are tricky in concealing their true intentions and work together to form a beneficial relationship with their intended buyers. We have seen this with previous chapters and provided examples with our Cool Projects. The video Merchants of Cool showed how marketing works and that companies spend a huge amount of money to acomplish this projection of cool to get the most economic benefit possible. Their sole purpose is to increase the purchasing power of the consumer. We see a lot of adwares, when we got to various sites that flash across the screen as banners to grab potential clients. Large coorporations are merging together to create big dollars for our business. Major corporations are using their influence with these tie-ins, and Rice hopes that his readers will think critically about what they view.
Chapter 14
Cyberculture is interlinking everything to the World Wide Web so that the information is shared quickly and can be widely viewed around the world. Rice states that Cyberculture is fundamentally cool. It is the icon for “Cool Media”, because it is so interactive, and requires a lot of participation from the user.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of W.W.W. had a vision of interlinking scientists to prevent duplication of work and the sharing of knowledge. He revolutionized the world with his vision and inspired many other computer programmers after him.This later went to businesses and eventually to every home in America.
Rice gives us several web sites to draw connections with. He gives a few exercises so that readers can go between links and see how companies are intentionally connected by technology. He offers his readers an opportunity to view common patterns that parent companies have put togther with tie-ins. Clicking on various hyperlinks, we connect writing and ideas so quickly. When we see collages we are engaged in active participation. As viewers we have to decipher the meaning of the juxtaposition and imagery means. Finally, we see how hypertext is used. It provides information, hopefully to appeal to an audience that gets some sort of emotion, which Rice tells us is called pathos. Hopefully, the reader is pleased or informed by your hypertext. If not the discourse is allusive and lacks purpose, and clarity. Rice suggest that if text is allusive, question the writer for clarity, intentions, and who is the intended audience is. He states allusiveness is a rhetorical strategy that also requires the reader to think critically and explore outside learning opportunities. As in chapter 13, he wants his readers to become active learners and to think critically, with an open mind.
