Before there was ever a written culture or a digital culture human beings communicated through much less technological means. Generally when people has thoughts, feelings, stories, histories and even poems, they were forced to rely upon their own memories and word of mouth to sustain the authenticity of their content.This content was passed down from generation to generation through face to face contact, creating what we would today call an oral culture.
While in present times we tend to think of writing as a very low-tech process, constrained by the compulsory need for pen and paper it is my belief along with other technologists that this is in a process of great change. Being raised in the 1990’s m school systems integration with computers was just beginning as i reached middle school. During class we only used computers for heavily structure projects that involved creating websites and learning excel spreadsheet commands. However in my middle school computer class we never really thought about computers or technology as being a tool for writing, or at least the idea was never really introduced.It wasn’t until the end of high school and the beginning of college that i began to see the world around me become so fixated on the idea of user created writing, covering an unprecedented amount of topics.
As sites like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and personalized blogs like Xanga became more popular I realized that writing could be done anywhere and by anyone with the aid of technology. It was for this reason that i was excited about venturing to a local area and documenting what i was there in my Podcast Hypertext.
For my Podcast Hypertext i decided to venture out past the SCU campus and record what it was like on a different college campus, so i chose to observe SJSU ( San Jose State University). At first i as a little confused about what types of observations the assignment was looking for but once i got there i was overwhelmed by the amount of readily available observations i could make. SJSU’s campus was bustling with students talking with friends, heading to class, and people walking their dogs much like on SCU’s campus. There were so many observations that i could have made that it felt as though when i was editing the podcast i was losing a lot of valuable information. However once i finished editing the podcast i felt that the observations i did make were very easy to write about and that all in all i had done a good job on learning to write in the field.
My project:http://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/Mreed/podcasthyperhome.html
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