Chapter 13 was very insightful as it reverted back to the World Wide Web that we explored in Chapter 2. It explored personal web-sites and how they related to cool. It also examined how cool and corporate development merge on the Web so that they end result predicts a futuristic, web-based writing process.
Cooltown was the first example Rice used to expand on. Hewlett Packard’s hypothetical futuristic world where technology connects everyone, everywhere, in the smallest and most convenient ways. Rice says, “the idea behind Cooltown is that expansions of technology in our daily lives will prove beneficial to our overall standard of living and life enjoyment” (136).
In comparing this idea to our writing, Rice picks out two points of the Packard Project that are relevant. Mobility and interlinking activities have “long traditions in cool.” He also uses American Graffiti and Marshall McLuhan’s concept of cool to explain Cool town’s relevance.
McLuhan’s book, Understanding Media, separates media into hot and cool concerning the degree of participation involved. Cool media was pointed out to be “low in definition, requiring high participation and linked with other media forms” (137). The reasons for this use of cool media was then explored in again, Hewlett Packard. It’s vision of Cooltown was proposed to be for attracting a “young customer base by appropriating a word from popular culture and to conceptualize an interlinking society that is cool because of the detailed ways it forms connections between distinct lifestyles” (138).
Commercialism and Technology was the next big focus of the chapter. Hewlett Packard was once again the example to show how “technology allows corporations to use cool as an electronic writing for economic means” (139). Investigating the company for these elements though, brought significance to the element of “tie-ins.” Defined as product placements; used to attract attention to other products a company sells. Interlinking items such as cd’s and books with a film was an example for this type of cool media taking place. I was intrigued with the example of Absolut.com. The site created for playing games and watching videos is the companies attempt to encourage its users to purchase more of their products.
Finally, Rice uses this cool media demonstration to expand on cool writing. He points out that we can “use cool tie-ins in our writing to forge complex connections that will persuade out readers to agree with points we want to make” (141).
Chapter 14 used the question of tie-ins discussed in the previous chapter, to extend into and explore the topic of Cyberculture. Rice points out that many things make up cyberculture and the only thing they have uncommon is their “propensity to merge technology with other forms of expression or with cultural items that can exist independently of new technology” (144). By showing what Mark Dery believes comprises cyberculture, Rice reveals how cyberculture is fundamentally cool. Just as in chapter 13, it has to do with its highly participatory atmosphere.
Collage was a new element introduced in chapter 14. Just like artistic cutting and pasting, Rice makes the connection that cyberspace as collage forces us to actively participate in its “creation.” He then uses this and McLuhans’s books to show how our writing must be “collagist” and cool.
Rice uses Tim Berner’s-Lee’s project, similar to McLuhan’s, to elaborate on cyberspace as hypertext. Their work “interlinked unrelated information in order to demonstrate how information connects in subtle ways.” Sportsline.com and Everthing2.com were both explored concerning the cool media test and found it demonstrated in two separate ways. Sportsline being cool for its connections between various independent writers by linking to one main page, and Everything2 .com for it’s encouraged participation by building on one another’s work. Rice’s investigation reveal that a site can be cool both when it forces participation to figure out its meaning as well as, when it writes clearly about a specific point.
