Chapter 13: The Web
In chapter 13, Rice addresses how cool and corporate development merge on the web to create a result that predicts a futuristic, web-based writing process. Rice talks about HP’s “Cooltown,” a utopian future in which all movement is controlled by computer technology created for the internet. It is based on mobility and associating of different activities. McLuhan breaks media down into two groups; hot and cool. Hot media requires little interaction to understand its content. Cool media requires more interaction from the viewer in order to understand it. In McLuhan’s definition, cool media is marked by low definition, requiring high participation, and interlinking with other media forms. Rice turns back to Cooltown and shows that it is based around HP’s products and that it is a promotional concept. Cooltown uses tie-ins. Tie-ins is using one product of the company to promote or draw attention to another one of their products.
Chapter 14: Cyberculture
The image of cyberculture is marked by: futuristic, built on old forms, interconnected, and being strange, even unsettling, when first introduced. Rice shows that when surfing the internet we are actually moving through information arranged in various places and in various patterns. Cyberculture is considered cool because of its highly participatory atmosphere in which we move through this information. Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet as a way for scientists in the company he worked for to compare projects and share findings. He based his early system on a web like file sharing system. In the same way that the scientist shared different types of information, we view information on the internet in different ways. Different pages use different writing formats and writing styles. One site that Rice has us view uses nodes to link words in on page to a different page about that word, or related to it. While conventional writing discourages writers from working together, everything2.com encourages writers to work together and build off of each other. As an audience in cyberculture we should not be too quick to dismiss these new styles and approaches of writing. At the same time as writers, we must be aware of our audience and write accordingly.
Note: Due to the recent time change, this is being posted at 10:18 am and not the 11:18 that the timestamp shows.
