Group items tagged

“You can’t just make a book anymore,”

At the same time, Mr. Haarsma very calculatedly gave gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book a clear incentive to read: one way that players advance is by answering questions with information from the novel.

Spurred by arguments that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency in print, libraries are hosting gaming tournaments, while schools are exploring how to incorporate video games in the classroom.

screen ubiquity

A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen.

We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.

What Does This Mean? Here's one example of what that could mean: Today, a web service might work very hard to scour the internet to discover all the book reviews written on various sites, by friends of mine, who live in Europe. That would be so hard that no one would probably try it. The suite of technologies Yahoo! is moving to support will make such searches trivial. Once publishers start including things like hReview, FOAF and geoRSS in their content then Yahoo!, and other sites leveraging Yahoo! search results, will be able to ask easily what it is we want to do with those book reviews. Say hello to a new level of innovation.

The basic idea behind Semantic Web technology is that by signaling what kind of content you are publishing on an item-by-item or field-by-field basis, publishers can help make the meaning of their text readable by machines. If machines are able to determine the meaning of the content on a page, then our human brains don't have to waste time determining, for example, which search results go beyond containing our keywords and actually mean what we are looking for.

Der Beitrag legt zunächst Kontinuitäten der Internetentwicklung dar, um die Annahme eines revolutionären Sprungs zu widerlegen, wie sie der Begriff des ›Web 2.0‹ impliziert. Für die kommunikationssoziologische Analyse wird anschließend ein praxistheoretischer Bezugsrahmen skizziert, der unabhängig von konkreten Anwendungen des Social Web einsetzbar ist. Schließlich werden aktuelle Veränderungen diskutiert, die einerseits das Zusammenwachsen von Rezeption, Produktion und Distribution von Wissens- und Kulturgütern, andererseits die Erweiterung von Öffentlichkeiten berühren, sowie derzeit offene gesellschaftliche Fragen daraus abgeleitet.

Today the comparative-media-studies home page (http://cms.mit.edu) hosts feeds from seven different blogs affiliated with our various research groups and faculty members. Our site regularly offers podcasts from conferences (like Futures of Entertainment and Media in Transition) and colloquia we hold at MIT. My own blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, attracts several thousand readers a day. We also recently made the decision to offer our masters' theses online so they can be read by researchers around the world. These efforts have had an impact on our relations with our current students, prospective students, alumni, faculty members, the news media, the general public, and other readers.

Ilya Vedrashko, for example, started a blog called the Future of Advertising, which quickly became a favorite among industry insiders and reporters. The blog's visibility opened up new contacts and resources, which supported his research.

Something similar has happened for subsequent student bloggers, who have gained visibility for their writing about "serious games", hip hop culture, music distribution, data visualization, and media policy. In each case, their work brought them into contact with key thinkers and professionals.