User:Petra Milicki/Essay outline draft
Essay outline proposal
In this essay I would like to introduce myself and my visual communication practice to a (in this context) new medium. Since most of my work has been involving text (design of its content and form in print), I would like to examine how changing the medium could affect and improve my work.
I will be examining how different media (print and digital) and their translation fromone to another can change comprehension, reactions and the motivation of the readers and writers of two different types of text, journalistic and/or literary. Also, I would like to see how the new media have influenced the conventional roles of text critics, editors, publishers, printers, writers and readers.
In this manner, I will write about how a certain content translates from a conventional medium of print, into a new - digital medium and in the end the newest - networked medium. This kind comparison, could give a slight overview of the opportunities that the new media environment can offer to production and consumption of journalistic and/or literary text.
Walter Benjamin argues that the new medium of mechanical reproduction enabled the new way of progressive reaction towards art. "The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion." By following this statement, I would like to investigate how/if this theory relates to print text, being the conventional medium, and the digital being the 'truly new'. Also, how/if the "simultaneous collective experience" perceived by Benjamin in the film art medium, can be applied to networked media type of digital text.
By this analysis I would like to make a (modest) theoretical platform for some experiments with the text, switching it and translating back and forth the old and new media. Having all this in mind I would like to prepare a solid theoretical base for the further research of the collaborative content producing and its tools and methods.
Bibliography
- Benjamin, W. (1936) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
- Hayles, K., N. (2001) My Mother was a Computer (Translating Media)
- McLuhan, M. (1967) Understanding Media
- Coover, R. (1992) The End of Books
- Manovich, L. (1992) New Media from Borges to HTML
- Gunder, A. (2001) Forming the Text, Performing the Work