Darnton's silly circuit

Darnton is a smart guy, we all know this. I mean.. he went to Harvard and Oxford. His communication circuit is a very useful way to go through who's hands touch the book and when. However in Adams and Barker's opinion, Darnton does not focus on the right things. "The weakness of Darnton's scheme is that it deals with people, rather than with the book. It is concerned with the history of communication." (51) Today, the book trade isn't something that is the same every time. The process changes depending on the book, and how the author and publisher want to go about selling it, and getting it into the hands of readers. There are more steps in the circuit than Darnton displays. Take the printing to shipping step of Darnton's circuit. Today, when an author is in the process of publishing they have to think about whether or not they are going to make a website for their book, or a blog, or a facebook page, etc. They need to think about if they want to distribute it online, or if they want their book only in print. Therefore once their book goes to the printers, and the first copies are made, they need to start marketing right away, and to not use the internet.. just plain wouldn't be smart. It isn't as simple as printing to shipping. Books today are sometimes online before they are in print, and sometimes they aren't online until later on. It all depends on the publisher, and the author. As Adams and Barker point out, there is a "spectacular uncertainty of the book trade," and today with everything that is offered over the internet, the book trade will be forever changing.

ABC's and Learning

I thought the ways kids used to be educated through the alphabet and other means, was a lot different than I thought it would have been. Every letter was associated with just about the same thing every time if not changing it up a little here and there. Plus, the idea behind "A= Apple" really stuck because kids today are still learning their ABC's starting with "A is for Apple." 

Once I read the blog assignment for this week I could only think about images and how they are represented in our society. According to Isaac Watts, "An Idea is generally defined a representation of a thing in the mind; it is a representation of something that we have seen, felt, heard, &c, or been conscious of."

The image I can't stop thinking about in relation to all of this is...(and I hate to go this route) the image of the cross. Today, we see the cross all over the place, and for the most part when we see it we know that the building or place that it is on signifies christianity or Catholicism. However I can't help but think about how different things would be if the cross was something else. The fact of the matter is, the cross is a torturing device but today, for me at least, I don't think about that whenever I see one. I can't speak for everyone, maybe a lot of people do see a torturing device every time they look at the cross but for me it is a symbol of religion. What if the meaning behind this symbol was more thought about? I'm sure if it were it might get younger people thinking about whether or not christianity or catholicism is such a great thing. 

Or what if the symbol wasn't a cross, and was actually an angel's halo, or something more heavenly and happy. I know this might have the potentiality of changing the bible or changing something that shouldn't be changed but I wonder if the symbol for these religions was different whether or not more people would be religious. The thought processing today behind seeing a torture device a lot may be really subtle but I feel as though maybe if from the beginning it were something evoking happy emotions that would have changed a lot of attitudes toward christianity and catholicism. 

But just to make things clear, I don't know a lot about religion, and thats why I wonder about these things. 

MAPS!

Map #1: This map obviously looks kind of different because what we are used to seeing on the  left side of the map is actually on the right (North America, South America, Greenland) making it look like North and South America is in the east and the rest of the world is in the west. The website I got this from didn't reference this map but if I were to guess I'd say it might come from Australia since Australia is in the very center, looking a little bigger than it normally looks on world maps. Another change about this map is that everything kind of looks squished together, for example Alaska looks like its just a hop, a skip, and a jump away from Russia. 

Map #2 below is kind of hard so see but it was digitally made up to show the different dialects of America based on vowel sounds. It breaks up the U.S into different sections and uses certain symbols to show what their mouths are doing when they speak. I've studied this kind of thing in my sociolinguistics class, and the truth is you can't really make a map that shows the definite dialects of different parts of the U.S because people move constantly, people can have all sorts of accents based on where they are from regardless on where they live, and everyone has a different opinion on which areas speak a certain way. Plus, accents can change in the same state so you can't really group states together and say "these people in this part of the country make these types of sounds, and these people in this other part of the country make these other sounds." You can generalize, but still the accuracy of this map is not too believable for me. 

This map was made at the University of Pennsylvania in order to teach linguistics. 

Those poor authors...

To me, It seems as though authors today, are starting to have the same types of struggles that musicians are having. With music, you can "steal" it off the internet in just about 10 seconds, with books, more and more people are discovering access to copies, scans, or "google previews" than ever. I know some people who have even torrented their books for class. Not to mention the kindle and all these electronic books that you buy for about 140$ and download books for quite a bit less than the physical copy. According to this article....
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703369704575461542987870022.html#ixzz10oqmSafI
When an author's book gets sold in a store, they receive twice the amount of money as if their book sold online for an e-book or something of the sort. This obviously means as downloading books becomes more popular, authors are going to really be struggling. As if that isn't enough the article also says that publishers are not approving as many book deals as they used to, especially new authors that they haven't heard of before. Therefore authors that are trying to get their name out there, are struggling the most because they are having to go to smaller independent publishers who don't pay nearly as much. 
As far as the "fixity of the text" goes, authors not only struggle money-wise, but they also have to toss and turn over the fact that anyone could easily get their book off the internet and tweak it to how they want. Why people would want to discredit the book? I don't know, there's just those kinds of people out there. 
All of this obviously didn't used to be a problem, because books never used to be available to download on the internet. If you needed a book, you had to buy its physical, white pages and black ink book. Or you had to go to the library of course. For research purposes you always need to get different sides to one topic therefore to do good research you had to put the physical books in front of you. Now we have people who take important excerpts out of books and put them online, people who scan the books and make them into PDF's, (kinda like the books we read for this class) Which to me, being born when I was is pretty dang awesome. Because now I don't have to go pick up the book, I don't have to pay for it, and I don't have to read it all. However how do we really know that these excerpts and things really are the important content out of the book? 
we really don't. 
"Any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and also the starting point of another." (Johns)


Books take a lot of time, effort, and patience to get from the writer, to the reader. That is why I say, those poor authors because we are now basically trying to get rid of the whole system, so we can save a trip to the bookstore/library.