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. 

Images as text: Driving.

The readings/subject this week was a little harder for me to grasp.. probably one of the reasons why I'm writing it on sunday night (totally regretting it now). 
The example I have come up with is street signs. They are everywhere, and without them driving would be a lot more dangerous. Yea, there are a lot of signs that do have words on them.. like these:

But there are also not so obvious looking street signs that only show images to get the point across. The interesting part is, a lot of times these signs that only show images are a little bit different in every country. 

these ones below were actually done by artists, and were placed all over Europe. How long they were able to stay there is unknown but the point is, the artists decided to design a collection of "street signs" to put out certain messages. 

The one directly above, I don't really understand but the tunnel one is clever in my opinion. Anyway, to show some signs we are more familiar with here in the U.S.. 

A lot of these signs I have seen before but a lot of them I haven't at all. But just looking at them you can figure them out. Putting them in the right location makes them speak for themselves with no words needed. "These systems of graphic presentation are operational, not merely passive schematic structures. They are active agents for creating meaning, instructions for reading, viewing, comprehending information." (Drucker & Mcgann) 

With street signs they are obviously there to convey information in a way that is super easy to comprehend. We don't want people driving and suddenly having to turn their heads and take their eyes off the road to try and figure out what that sign said. Therefore they have to be cleverly designed to be easily processed by the average human being. Basically, street signs are supposed to be incredibly obvious. However if you're in another country and you see a street sign like those artists have made, you will definitely start to think about what the heck that means. They are pictographs to convey information, that we see every day and don't always think too much about. 

Writing Brightens Consciousness

After reading this article the example that really got me thinking right away was simply the switch of language from sound to vision.

"Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong thought print helped further reorient language from sound to vision, paving the way for our screen-fixated present."

As simple as it is, language switching from people talking to each other, to people reading and writing is huge. For example, without writing people could have never learned different languages from what they were taught while growing up. Because without seeing the words, it's pretty dang hard to learn a different language just through sound. In short, texts and the "reading revolution" have everything to do with communication. Through texts people are able to learn new things from outside of where they come from. They can learn other languages so they can communicate with others outside of where they live, people are able to imagine what the text is talking about rather than focusing on listening. 

In relation to Ong and what he has written about, you can't communicate solely through sound. Your brain needs a different type of medium to bring out ideas. With speech there are so many other processes going on in the brain forcing you to think about what you are going to say, and make the sounds to say it however with writing you don't need to speak, so there are all kinds of completely different processes going on, processes that happen in the right (creative) side of the brain rather than the left (logical) side. As Ong says, speaking comes naturally to every human, but writing doesn't. Writing and reading is something that must be learned, and practiced. Therefore the switch from only communicating through sound to communicating through sound AND vision was immensely important in human consciousness, and still is. There is more room for interpretation through writing/texts, and more room for the mind to think. Also as Ong said, writing is rebellious! things written down to read are not always the best or most appropriate things to say out loud, and in turn once again have the ability to leave the reader open to interpretation. 

Orality of Literacy

The point in time I chose along Ong's 'Orality of Literacy' timeline was the point when Alexander Pope decides that all poets are expected to be original, and the readers had to react to the poem in a way where it could not be expressed any better. Even further if you were a romantic poet, you were expected to ideally be like god himself, creating phrases "out of nothing," or as it was expressed in latin, Ex nihilo. There were no cliches, no humor, no nothing. 

This is kind of interesting because it sounds like if you were a poet during this time, you were under a ton of pressure to produce great work. Today, poets have just about all the freedom in the world. They can write about whatever they want, use as many cliches as they want, be as unoriginal as they want, even put words in whatever format, or word order they want. I don't think we can say poetry was remediated from this exact point in time but there was a large evolutionary change in the way people continued to write poetry from this point on. 

No one writes their poetry as if they were god himself. No one writes their poetry in constant worry that they are saying the wrong thing. People today write poetry simply to get an idea or group of ideas out there, or on paper. Back in Pope's time people weren't so free to express their ideas on paper. As the reading explains, "In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost; fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential for wisdom and effective administration." (pg. 23) 

In other words, people had to just walk around repeating and passing off bits of information to people or else it would be lost. However in Plato's day, everything changed. The passing on of knowledge was remediated into text, and the new way to store knowledge started to be through writing, and not speech. This "freed the mind for more original or abstract thought," which was evolutionary because it started this break from everything having to be perfect and original. People didn't have to write as if they are god, they could write as if they were themselves with their own ideas, and their own feelings of how to write a romantic poem. Which basically as time went on led to what we are doing right now....writing whatever the heck we want, and putting it on the internet for the whole world to see!