Welcome to the blog for the class Introduction to Digital Literacies at Ball State University. This Fall we will be exploring the ways our reading, writing, and engaging with texts of all kinds have migrated to a digital, networked, and world-wide environment. We’ll be looking both at focused issues of page and screen design in common composing tools, as well as taking a larger view of how our human interactions in all fields are changing, with great implications for us as individuals and groups, and for our culture as a whole.
One of the early thinkers who articulated the impact of electric/electronic media was Marshall McLuhan. He wrote in The Medium is the Massage that young people in the 1960’s were finished with rules and craved roles to play in the unfolding drama of cultural change. It may also be that the old rules of our communication practices have changed, and that we need to discover what roles rhetoric can and should play today. Follow us as we consider these issues from many points of view.
Blogs from prior semesters' Digital Literacies' classes can be found below
Spring 2011
Fall 2010
I feel there are numerous implications that can be extracted from how our human interactions are changing, and then these implications can be reduced to stakes (for better or worse) for the future.
ReplyDeleteMy personal opinion is that our human interactions are changing, and drastically. In one of our recent readings, Moorville's ambivalent findability, he writes about how we have this perception that we are exposing ourselves to the outsided world with the web, technology, and such. However, he acknowledges the fact that all of those channels to the outside world are open and leave the user just as exposed. He calls this exposure or ability to be easily accessed ambivalent findability
I believe that as a society (as a whole society and as an academic society) it is very critical to analyze this concept of ambivalent findabilty and the implications it has for us all. I personally see both the positives and negatives, and am struggling to weigh them fairly.
I see the positives in this concept such as, ambivalent findabilty creates a world where our children can be tracked easier and thus are safer from the dangers our our world. Yet I see the negative side where we are slowly losing our privacy. So I say this is definately a difficult issue.
Finally, I think that no matter what my or someone else's political coloring may be, it is important to examine how ambivalent findabilty is going to affect our society.