Blog 1 - Some Defining Qualities of the Internet

There are a handful of qualities that make CMC what it is.  People live off of the speed that comes with packet-switching and synchronicity, and social media really depends on interactivity (would Twitter and Facebook be possible without it?)  But multimedia and hypertextuality are my personal favorite things about the internet.

Multimedia describes the different modes or ways that we can communicate using the internet.  This may include different platforms, like SnapChat and Instagram/Vine, but it may also describe the different possible formats of CMC.  Email and text are traditional examples, but we also communicate through pictures, memes, and video clips.  Reading an article without any multimedia is obviously very different from one that, for example, includes a gallery.

Which would you want to read?

There's even a term for the reaction that people often have to extensive blocks of plain text in articles: TL;DR, which stands for "Too Long; Didn't Read."  Some users put this acronym at the end of a lengthy piece to get their message across concisely at the cost of much written detail.

One of the drawbacks to multimedia can come about when there's too much going on within a page.  This article talks about the first Roman emperor, but it would probably take a few minutes for you to figure that out since there are so many ads that look like they might be part of the content.  On top of that, pages with so much content also take longer to load, which is counterproductive.

Hypertextuality is my other favorite when it comes to CMC.  It's described by our text as "non-linear communication." (75)  In class, we also learned that it's the interlinking of information, and the prime example of it was a hyperlink.  I like to think of it as a separate or different train of thought, like when you're having a conversation with someone and they go on an extended tangent; it's all related, but maybe not directly.

The reason why I'm such a big fan of this particular aspect of CMC is because it makes learning so much easier.  I've always been an avid reader, but when I can highlight a word I don't know in an e-book to find out what it means instead of first locating a dictionary and then finding some variation of that word, it makes a big difference in how I can experience the material.

Likewise, I love all of the links that you can find in a Wikipedia page.  That's because while an expert might not need to know some information, a lay person is going to need some more background or context.  If you're really new material you might just be like me and open ten new tabs, just to make sure you can get back to where you started.In this way, hypertextuality prevents redundancy and overly long articles by providing access to that information, but only if you really need it.

Our textbook is actually a great attempt at hypertextuality outside of CMC.  It uses text boxes and side notes indicated by a helix symbol to refer us to other material, including web addresses.


This isn't part of my blog post, but in light of the release of the most recent iteration of the iPhone and our discussions on obsolete technology:

The Cost of the Difference