The Web in its conceptual form

This week's readings were a lot to process. Breaking it down is the easiest approach to me in a chronological order.

Vannevar Bush's article explained that scientists and scholars, more generally, had become stagnant because they had no way of quickly and efficiently sharing their research with others. This resulted in a lack of progress in expanding knowledge and the human mind. At that point in the 1940s, we had been able to create advanced technology that was essentially an extension of what we could to do physically. However, what is most important to carry on is intellectual growth because advances in other areas would not be possible.

His idea of compressing information so it can be shared quickly and inexpensively with many people on a small machine, or the memex, provided the concept for personal computers and the Internet as we know them today. Who would have thought we knew all about this stuff more than 60 years ago?

McLuhan expands this idea of information sharing with his idea of the medium being the message. He categorizes mediums into hot or cold, with hot media having less interaction, while cold media did the opposite and engaged the audience. McLuhan would probably consider the web to be icy if anything, especially once Web 2.0 hit. People are creating content, socializing online, and connecting themselves and information into one big network. This introduces his concept of the global village where cold media connects us all and there is no nationalistic tie to the information or connection. The Internet is doing this and so far it appears to be following the McLuhan concepts of old or hot media moving into newer media, but eventually new content is created from it and the cycle repeats itself. The Web Theory book describes this better as the content of a new medium being filled with the content of the old and in time, the new medium will develop its own reorganization of content.

That's a lot of information and redevolpment of information.

Finally, the reading on on elements of diffusion describes to some extent what how and why new technology can be difficult to grasp. The process is broken down into four parts: innovation, communication, time, and social system. Currently, the Internet is as the stage where many across the world have adopted it as a tool, but many more continue to be left out because of money, techonology, distance and so forth. This is related to the social system.

So as I take this all in, it seems the Internet has come to a turning point in its purpose, which is why we are studying new media. It is going to take time for everyone who is connected to understand what it all is. Just like I'm attempting right now.

I think my brain hurts now.