SLepe’s World

In 2001 David Bolter furthered his argument for hypermedia into the book Writing Space. In his blog, David Mueller comments on Bolter’s views of hypertext and remediation, saying that Space belongs in the upper echelon of writing in the growing world of computers along with the works of Hayles and Johnson, which from the titles of their work(Writing Machines and Interface Culture respectively) sounds important.

Bolter foregrounds much of the discussion of the force of hypertext on writing activity (activity leaning into academic projects and literary pieces) with the idea of remediation: the existence of the old in the new.

Mueller goes on to say that as hypertext continues to grow, it will challenge all perceptions of the written word. Libraries have to incorporate much more than printed works and the need and demand for printed materials diminishes to a point that the author questions weather there will be a need for printed media whatsoever at all in the future.

As we have all come to realize, there is “the future” and there is THE FUTURE. Though it may be hard to accept for most, our future may never become the latter which brings flying cars in the early 21st century like the Jetsons have, and I think the same goes for wholly computerized works of writing. There will always be people that want to be able to hold in their hands that which gives them information. This is why newspapers will still be around for quite sometime. There seems to be some sort of validity and integrity to something in print, so much so that our own UTD faculty will most often reject citing the internet as a primary source of information, God forbid Wikipedia. At the same time however, our library, just like most other libraries, has an increasing pool of online resources and e-books and articles from trusted media that have since their inception converted to electronic format.

I think that just as remediation calls for a sort of backwards compatibility where aspects of the old media are found in new media, so, too, will the aging media do its best to emulate what the new media can do that it cannot. This is evident with books and magazines that ship with cds and dvds full of content that you can only access by getting the printed material that comes with it. The acceptance of new media has led to things such as sing-along books or even books as simple as the ones this generation had as children that would every so often substitute a word with a picture and the reader presses the button bearing that picture on the soundboard along the right side of the book and it would make the appropriate sound to go along with the picture.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go find out what the cow says…

I had never heard of the upcoming movie project “The Love Guru” slated for a 2008 release, but last week MTV Movies Blog reported the following:

Brining sexy back to comedy: Justin Timberlake set to join Mike Myers and Jessica Alba in “The Love Guru.”

In a time marred by the huge gap in quality of movies in general and, sadly, even more in the comedy genre, it seems that studios want to tack on as much star power to a comedy with the slightest bit of promise to maximize their earnings. Yet as many recent releases have shown, this formula of big names + comedy has seldom added up to big bucks. “The Love Guru” looks to be following in the footsteps of recent bombs full of big name actors License to Wed ($43 million, Robin Williams, John Krasinski, Mandy Moore), My Super Ex-Girlfriend ($22.5 million, Luke Wilson, Uma Thurman, Rain Wilson), The Ex ($3 million! Zach Braff, Jason Bateman, Amanda Peet), and even Evan Almighty(Steve Carell, Morgan Freeman, Wanda Sykes) which was a flop at what would be a modest $98 million for any other movie, except it cost nearly double that to make.

Joining Myers, Alba, and Timberlake in Guru will be Hollywood’s favorite midget Verne Troyer fresh off a stellar(…not) performance in a car insurance commercial that made me throw the remote at the tv, and Romany Malco who holds his ground in the Showtime series Weeds and did well in a minor role in “The 40 Year Old Virgin”. Myers will be dabbling into his first new character since he came up with Austin Powers in 1997. I think since then his work has been on the decline with the only exception being Goldmember being a lot better than The Spy Who Shagged Me.

Dying is easy, comedy is hard. I don’t think megastars Alba and Timberlake have what it takes to punch out a good live action comedic performance, though Timberlake did a great job on one particular Saturday Night Live sketch. Jessica Alba has not attempted comedy since her small role in the not-too-stellar “Idle Hands,” and while she is plenty nice to look at, her standard acting timing leaves something to be desired, and with comedic timing being even harder to master, I don’t see her doing too well here. Even with Myers being one of the best comedic minds to pass through Hollywood in the last thirty years, I think fame has led him to think he can do no wrong which shows in the lack of originality in his latest work with sequel after sequel, after Dr. Seuss flop. He need only look to Robin Williams’ latest works to see that even the best can go wrong, and Robin Williams had a much funnier #2 in “License to Wed” (The Office’s John Krasinski) than Myer’s #s 2,3,4, and 5.

I hope Hollywood realizes that big names do not equal good movies, ESPECIALLY comedies, and they start funding more comedies that rely on the good writing like some of the best movies of this and last summer: Little Miss Sunshine (who’s biggest star Steve Carell has gone on to take a step back in his success thanks to Evan Almighty) and Knocked Up (who’s biggest star was an old Ghostbuster) did, and stop feeding us unfunny garbage with ensemble casts that do go well together.

While the biggest loser with Guru figures to be us, the consumers, I feel really bad for Malco, who comes in at a close second, because he has a very promising career and could probably not turn down an opportunity to work with such big names, but will likely come out the worse for it.

Digital Photography School is a blog that provides tips and techniques for digital photographers as well as news that its readers find important.  The blog gives each entry a designated amount of space for the preview view and each entry has a “Read the rest of this entry” link at the bottom of it.  This is useful because photography tips usually are not the type of things that take up a few sentences, they require examples and the author includes them and at the end of each entry links to related and similar posts are included, which I think is a nice touch.  This blog also has a nice navigation at the top of the page to find posts relating to whatever kind of help you might be seeking as a photographer.  The writing works in that it does everything you can ask for instructional writing to do, which is convey its point without coming across as condescending to its readers.  I found this blog as a result of this assignment, but have now subscribed to it and plan to make as much use of it as I can because I think it will come into use for my photography portfolio class this semester.

Hashmarks by Matt Mosley of Dallas area sports-writing lore (well, maybe not lore, but he is a familiar voice on local sports talk radio and a former DMN writer) is a football blog on ESPN.com, as a result his blog is just another piece of content wedged into the standard ESPN.com visual structure.  I have been reading Mosley’s blog on a fairly regular basis since he started it back in May and it is interesting to see how he’s adapted his writing to the fast, short and sweet style of blogs.  His writing is fairly casual as is the writing of most opinion-based sports writers and most bloggers in general.  Pictures are sporadically used, most likely on the assumption that his readers have already had their share of visual on the topic he might be covering elsewhere on the ESPN website.  He tends to pepper his posts with links as needed and does it neither to excess or too sporadically.  He tends to update just about every time something of matter happens in the NFL, which at this time of year is quite often.  This blog is an easy read and, for me, a fun read because I have a great interest in the NFL and I will likely read it for as long as it stays online.

Over the last six years or so I have had many run-ins with blogging. Starting in high school many of the people I knew started posting web journals on sites such as LiveJournal, Xanga, and even the now defunct Ujournal. From there a few friends of mine built their own sites, none of which still stand today. I myself jumped into the fray by building a couple of journal-centric sites, of which only one has been kept alive by a free host that doesn’t seem to monitor site activity, that mostly served as a platform to showcase some of my writing and photography in a very informal manner.

Since those days blogs have grown at a blistering pace changing what they are along the way. Most blogs today try to be informative, or at the very least entertaining. Blogs today allow writers, both professional and amateur, to give people instant updates of what is on their mind. This instant gratification form of writing is the most essential shift blogging has brought to writing over the last decade. Even big media outlets have realized the magnitude of this change and sites such as ESPN.com and CNN.com (towards the middle of the page) have either hired a slew of new writers or have assigned their existing writers to the blogsphere.

It is inevitable, however, that no matter what platform people choose to write in, what they say will not be something for everyone to agree upon, nor will the authors mean for it to be. Opinions will resonate in writing for as long as mankind chooses to write. Blogging merely amplifies this concept by giving everyone a voice, including those who would not have otherwise been able to express themselves to such a large audience.

From this point forward who knows where blogging will go. It may continue to separate into smaller and smaller pieces that eventually become something new and different altogether, or it could become a group that is increasingly closer knit and unified as blogging for the sake of blogging. 2010s here we come.