Texts Without Context

1. Digital and social media have had a great impact on our culture. One example that Michiko Kakutani, the author of the article, discusses is the impact of books entering the digital realm. He says how before digital books, book reading allowed the reader to enter a whole other world and escape reality. By books being read digitally, they become more like a magazine or newspaper; you read little parts of it whenever you get a chance. Another impact of social and digital media, according to Kakutani, is the more and more these media's become popular, the less attention span the public has. He says how people have become less interested in "an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech." Instead people would rather just hear the conclusion or summary and get on with their day. People are no longer interested in the context of certain things that they were once interested in. In the article, Mr. Lanier says that internet has encouraged people to "...be a child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood." This is because of the fact that internet has no qualities of a physical world, but instead has "playfulness and optimism."

2. According to Cass Sunstein, cyberbalkanization is personalizing your favorite websites, so that you only get the type of news that you are interested in. They do this so that they do not have to read things that do not interest them. It is said in the article that doing this grows consensus and common ground even smaller. I think that this is becoming a trend in our culture. In fact, I even do this myself. On my Google Mail home page, I have set it to have only information I am interested in. I think that people do this because everyone is having less and less patience for everything and come to want everything in a matter of seconds, because of the digital and social media.

3. I think that these trends are bad news for authors, composers, filmmakers and others who compose their own works. I agree with John Updike's idea in the article, when they point out that these trends would eventually lead to the "end of authorship." He also says that these writers and composers would not have the ability to earn a living from their works. Another major issue is that their own recognition from their own creations would be non-existant.

4. Appropriation art is defined in the article as the recycling or re-do's of older works. It also is the remaking of television shows into films, or video games into movies. The rise in appropriation art means a decrease in originality in media. Although I understand the point that the author has, I do not 100% think this is legitimate. This is because, if you know that an old television show or video game was successful and made a lot of money, then you would want to do something similar to that idea. I do not think it is done out of laziness, like they say in the article. I just think that it is done this way because people want to create things they know will succeed.

5. I do not agree with the idea that audience is archaic. I think that no matter what happens with media, it will always have an audience. I do not really understand how William Gibson could say that audience has become archaically passive.