Baudrillard, McLuhan, and Bolter ... oh my!

My fascinating reading for this morning comes from: Diane, Suzanne, Sarah, and Jennifer. 

The physical remediation so prevalent in our society and laid out with incredible visual power in Diane's post really had me thinking about the struggles of women to meet the unrealistic expectations of beauty in our society ... and who knew I was channeling Baudrillard as I thought about this! Suzanne and Sarah explain well Baudrillard's concept of simulcra, and I was struck most by his point that society has gotten to where the real and the simulated can no longer be distinguished.  At its most basic level, this is speaking to the women's magazines Diane writes of and the video on plastic surgery she shares.  When a reader of Cosmo feels she needs to look like the models, she is seeking to make a simulcrum into a reality ... and the damage that comes with such an effort is enormous. Sarah and Jennifer then offer the final link in today's cycle of thoughts -- McLuhan's thoughts on how media affect messages.

CSS Exploration #3

As I am in the midst of understanding CSS vocabulary and not yet done, I need to stop and let these foundational terms sink in before I go further. Here is my key terms list for today (all taken from the Mozilla CSS tutorial site):

CSS Exploration #2

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Today I took the advice I read last week that nothing is better than just jumping into playing with coding. This CSS tutorial recommended by Wil Laveist is a great start for beginners like me. After working through the first four modules, I succeeded in getting coding into my browser and adjusting the style. This is the me who did not know before tonight how to get coding into a browser let alone how to code. Thank you, Mozilla Developer Network for your excellent beginner's guide -- you have me feeling like a real Stage 2 Programmer!

CSS Exploration #1

Explorer Nobles reporting in from week one. Not lost. Repeat not lost. In fact, feeling rather smug that this first foray into the unknown terrain of coding went so well. Must remember though that tougher terrain lays ahead ...

It's Not Disney World, but CSS ... Here I Come!

For my individual tutorial I am going to explore CSS, which means I am also going to explore HTML. After hearing about all of the languages last night, I have decided that, as a newbie to this whole world, CSS/HTML, since it is so widely used, is a good entry point that will lead me in the right direction for my future work. I am attending the 2012 DMAC, during which I will explore video and audio editing a great deal. I hope to take that experience and apply it to the basic of website building that I will learn through my explorations this semester with the ultimate goal of creating my digital portfolio for my PhD language requirement.

Exploring Blogs

Responses to first part of Lingua Fracta:
- Cheri Lemieux Spiegel's post
- Diane Cooke's post

Responses to finishing Lingua Fracta:
- Eric Sentell's post
- Mat Reynold's post





My partner in the canonical book assignment (McLuhan's Understanding Media):
- Jennifer Buckner's post
- (Reading Eric's post above and seeing that he was also reading McLuhan led me to read his McLuhan post ... so I have two on three topics versus three on two topics. Hope that is okay ...) Eric Sentell's post

Reading, Thinking, and Reflecting #6

 My Book ... Too Full of Ideas to Contain! 

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, chapters 12-22 and chapters 22-33:One of McLuhan's running themes is the difference between tribal and literate societies. I have been tracking this thread ...

- "Literacy creates very much simpler kinds of people than those that develop in the complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies. For the fragmented man creates the homogenized Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated, not by their specialist skills or visible marks, but by their unique emotional mixes. The oral man's inner world is a tangle of complex emotions and feelings that the Western practical man has long ago eroded or suppressed within himself in the interest of efficiency and practicality" (75).

Reading, Thinking, and Reflecting #5

Understanding Media: The Extensions of ManChapters 1-11:
Marshall McLuhan ... "McLuhan wrote with no knowledge of galvanic skin response technology, terminal node controllers, or the Apple Newton. He might not have been able even to imagine what a biomouse is. But he pointed the way to understanding all of these, not in themselves, but in their relation to each other, to older technologies, and above all in relation to ourselves our bodies, our physical senses, our psychic balance. When he published Understanding Media in 1964, he was disturbed about mankind’s shuffling toward the twenty-first century in the shackles of nineteenth century perceptions. He might be no less disturbed today. And he would continue to issue the challenge that confronts the reader at every page of his writings to cast off those shackles" (Gordon).