Monday, December 14, 2015
The Function of the Mediums
Through our exploration of the print culture and how the development of relevant technology has influenced the social anatomy of the time, I have understood much deeper that the medium might change but the function is the same. Print culture might be digitizing, but its function is overwhelmingly similar. In the earlier readings this semester, i.e. The Book, we learned the transition of how conversations of current events transitioned. This is most clearly seen through the transition of newspaper clippings to sharing articles on Facebook. During the early American development of print culture, we learned that people would write comments in the margins of articles and mail them to friends and family. This sheet of paper would then travel and collect more opinions and comments, which is mirrored exactly on the Facebook article sharing culture that has become popular. Members on Facebook will share articles with their Facebook friends, who will then be able to comment on it and continue to share it. This new medium has made that exceedingly more streamline and widely accessible, but has not changed the sharing process nor the function of this aspect of social culture.
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I think you make a very interesting comparison and point. Sharing articles on Facebook is kind of like the new sharing of article clippings through the mail. It's definitely more convenient to share a news article with just a click of a button on Facebook as opposed to actually seeking out articles, writing notes in the margins, and then mailing it off to friends and family. But like you said, both methods serve the same purpose: to share information.In that sense, I think that's really the main reason why the printed word won't necessarily ever die because people are always going to try to find ways to share news and communicate with others; it just might take a new form in a different medium.
ReplyDeleteIt’s crazy to think that a college social network has transformed to include people of all ages. Our social brains have transformed a secluded site into one of the most public sites in the world (except for in China and North Korea). Even when we had newspapers instead of news articles that we could link, we were thinking of creating a community and sharing knowledge with those close to us. Even though the knowledge might not have been as relevant when someone received it, they would still participate in the sharing and spreading on knowledge. To me, it’s crazy to think that our social brains haven’t evolved and changed quite like we like to think they have.
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