Personal Musings on an Interactive Writing Career

Interactive writing is a whole other world from typical professional and technical writing. There are so many other things to take into account and such a wide variety of mediums to use. I have really come to respect good writers for interactive media. I don't think I am interested in pursuing a career in interactive writing, but I am planning to use some of these skills in other capacities. In fact, I have already used my newfound knowledge about creating websites to create a proposal for a different opportunity. By utilizing the skills I learned about various kinds of writing, my proposal will be more than just a typical PowerPoint presentation and it will really be able to engage the audience.

The main reason I don't want to pursue a career in this field is the amount of work and logic that goes into it for so little reward. Running the risk of creating a website or a video that no one will use does not intrigue me.

I do appreciate the skills and base knowledge I gained from this class, but I do not think that I will pursue a career.

Scholarly Article #5

As I was reading the article "What Do Technical Communicators Need to Know about New Media," the characteristics of New Media really stuck out to me including how it results from digitization, depends on digital networks, entails using code, enables interactivity, and how it is becoming ubiquitous. I think that the most important characteristic of new media is how it enables and promotes interactivity, because that truly lends to the learning of a concept. It also promotes technological advancements.

For educational purposes, interacting with the content is more likely to engage students rather than just reading it from a textbook.

For entertainment purposes, the interactivity is crucial because at this point in our lives, we have seen a lot of entertainment concepts, but being able to influence the game and have it program differently depending on our choices is very interesting and crucial to retaining individiuals

Scholarly Article #4

I have always thought that narratives are closely tied to the fundamentals of culture, whether that be a nation's culture, religious culture, or technology culture. But not only are specific cultures influential on the narratives being written, but narratives also inspire and cultivate the culture itself. I feel like Selfe said it best in her post: "we've seen increasing numbers of teachers and scholars... turn to personal narratives as an effective way of exploring the social, cultural, political, ideological, and historical formations that have shaped the literacy practices and values of peoples and groups" She is describing the impact that cultures have on literary components and literature itself.

Another component to this relationship is the people that bridge the culture and the literature together. We all come from different backgrounds and that affects not only what stories we write, but the transformation and identity we have formed in to get to this point. Everything that we have experienced and become, like Kraus says within Selfe's article, is "socially embedded, and readable" in our writing.

Like I have previously stated, not only does culture affect literature and vice versa, but the narrative affects the narrator, and vice versa. Putting into words our emotions and personal stories emphasizes and affirms certain characteristics about ourselves.

I found this article very interesting and it really just articulated how I feel about the mutually-defining relationships between culture, literature, narratives, and narrators.

Scholarly Article #3

My favorite line from this article is where it states that "we cannot continue with existing theories of meaning given the facts of the changes in the social, economic, and cultural domain." This is where design comes in because you can have the same content designed different in a variety of multimodal domains, but the demands vary and the design needs to meet the requirements. If you are trying to reach a very professional and wide variety of people with a lot of information, a video is not the best way to go. So understanding design and the correct dissemination of information is important, especially when you take into account the audience, the resources, and the social and cultural environment.

Aesthetics is just as important in the relaying of information as the info itself. And like the quote I referenced before, we can't keep doing the same things because we live in a very different world with different needs and resources.

Scholarly Article #2

I think that Ullmen was trying to say that the internet, and marketing as well, are individualizing people and making people think that they are the only ones who are important. The commercialization, according to Ullman, has “isolated the individual within a sea of economic activity” and that “the world really does revolve around you.” While seeing this isolation and individualization could be seen as a negative and selfish idea, I like to think otherwise.

                Technology has made us feel like we have complete control and that we are important. With all of the self-harm and body image issues that goes on in people’s minds today – typically a result of the “idealization” marketing – I think that the knowledge that you actually could change the world and that you do have a power over your own life. Just like what she Ullman says about technology being an “enabling technology” – a technical breakthrough that takes a difficult task and makes it suddenly doable, easy – this is a positive thing that she thinks is negative.  

Digital Literacy Autobiography

Only I could save the Zoombinis from the evil Bloats who had conquered Zoombini Isle and guide the misplaced citizens to their new home. This is my first experience with a computer. This interactive game had me accomplishing challenges and leading the poor Zoombinis to their new home. I didn't know how to do much else except open the Paint program and create an abstract or cubist masterpiece.

I don't remember having to "learn" how to use a computer, I was just brought into a digital world in 1996 and adapted to it as I was raised. By having 5 older siblings, I was surrounded with cellphones, Windows 95, and the sound of dial-up.

From Zoombinis to Oregon Trail, I typically used the internet to resolve my need for interactive entertainment. But, little did I know how surfing the internet was actually increasing my knowledge and lexicon. I unintentionally learned things as I found my way exploring the internet and I think that's what I have come to appreciate the most from the internet. The only difficulty is that there is so much information on there now, that it's hard to know what is just somebody's point of view and opinion and what is fact?

In my mind, the perks of the internet definitely outweighs the disadvantages and problems. There will always be people who try to use it for the wrong reason, but the good, such as the Oregon Trail, will often overcome the negativity.

Scholarly Article #1

As Pinker says, "consciousness evolves in connection with technology, shaping one another" (21). Looking back to the 18th or 19th century, our language and culture was very different from today and that has a lot to do with the evolution in technology. The advances in technology affected our writing and the change in writing furthered and changed technology. It isn't an either/or situation, but rather a both/and situation.

Because our culture has a larger amount of data, our minds have to understand and accomplish complex and abstract tasks. This makes, as Pinker explains, the thought that our human thought is purely and exclusively internal misleading. Instead, our thoughts are also shown in the external processes; e.g., body language, communication, and writing. We have to think of it as a "continuous materiality."

With the influx of information and symbols, we are required to create a new set of tools to coincide with the explosion of information.

The hardest part about trying to explain human interaction and thought scientifically is that it isn't inherently quantifiable. Rhetoric is such an abstract discussion, but it is based on the scientific knowledge of cognitive thought processes. So I appreciate in this article when it states that this book is "an attempt to introduce a theory of materiality of writing/media and cognition that is consonant with our theories about idology and discourse" (25).

The externalization of cognition and thought is a radical change. But when we think about the language, speech, and gestures we use as external reactions and reiterations of symbols, it is much easier to relate to the cavemen in their dwellings and the symbols they carved into the walls. The only difference is that we have increased the amount of symbols and separated our cognitive thoughts into speech, gestures, and actions from our bodies.

I found this article very interesting because it attempted to explain the evolution and fundamental change in the human races consciousness as writing and technology has advanced simultaneously. It was definitely fascinating and I felt more related to the cavemen than ever before.