Technology: The Death of Comic Strips?

Ever since I was a little girl, I've read the comic strips (or "the funnies" as my grandma called them) in the daily newspaper. My grandma used to read them to my brother and me, and even today I read the comics when I have access to a newspaper. In the last 22+ years, I've essentially grown up with the characters in the comics. Some have been retired and replaced by new comics, others have stood the test of time and are still being printed, such as Garfield, and Peanuts. But what happens when newspapers are gradually being replaced with technology? Specifically, the Internet.

As more and more people are turning to the Internet for news, printed newspapers are being put out of business because, frankly, nobody wants to buy them. This has had many negative consequences, and comic strips and their writers have been greatly affected. A new documentary called Stripped is exploring this situation, and the implications it is having on comic strip writers and artists.

There are many comic strips that are solely on the Internet, such as The Oatmeal. Some of these writers love that they can essentially do whatever they want by publishing on the Internet, but what will the older generation of writers and artists do when newspapers become extinct? Will they have to adapt to the new technology, or will they have to go extinct as well? Will they have to face the truth that their livelihood and the beautiful medium of hand-drawn comics is obsolete, or will there always be a place for printed comics, even if it isn't in newspapers? Perhaps this documentary will shed some light on the situation, even if we don't have an answer just yet.

The last "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip ended on a bittersweet note.

HTML Practice with a Table

Today I will practice integrating a table into my blog using HTML codes. This post is utter nonsense (aside from how serious I am about chocolate. I never kid about chocolate). This will be a new and exciting experience for me since I will write this post entirely in HTML code. Pretty nifty, eh?

Chocolate Rankings

Type	Ranking	Flavor	Reasons
Milk Chocolate	#1	Delicious; sweet; melty awesomeness	You can't go wrong with milk chocolate. Put in milk, on fruit, on your hand, or just eat a bar of it. Either way, you're winning.
Dark Chocolate	#2	Sweet; bitter; tall, dark & handsome.	It's healthier than milk chocolate, adds depth of flavor and a little bitterness to your day. Loses some points for not being as addictive as milk chocolate, and he's bitter about that. Nobody likes a sore loser.
White Chocolate	#3	Confused; too sweet; not chocolatey; ewww.	What ARE you? Can we even call this chocolate? More like milk chocolate's awkward albino cousin who went to the prom with milk chocolate because her mom bribed her. Boooo!!

Twitch Plays Pokemon...With 80,000 Other People

 A new level of chaos was introduced to me by my roommate last night. We've all played a video game intended for just one player. Perhaps you've even gotten creative and tried to play with two people at the controls (my brother and I once played on the same Guitar Hero guitar for a song. Awkward, yes. But definitely do-able). However, can you fathom thousands of people controlling the same player? As it turns out, this is happening as we speak.

About a week ago the game was started, and using crowd sourcing a single game of Pokemon Red is currently being controlled by thousands of people by entering commands into a chat window. (Don't ask me how any of this works; I know nothing about crowd sourcing or anything that makes this possible. It's all magic to me). It was started as a social experiment, I'm told, with users voting to implement anarchy or democracy. That means that either everyone will enter commands as they want (anarchy, which is currently happening) or democracy will be put into place and a select few will enter commands.

 Surprisingly, these 80,000 or so players have actually gotten about halfway through the game in a week. If you watch the game being played for a few seconds you'll quickly understand why that's so amazing. After watching Red bonk into walls for a while, try to use random items at the wrong time, and get through battle after tedious battle I was astounded that any progress had been made. I was also astounded that I was even watching the madness, especially after my roommate told me that a religion had formed because of this.

Yes, a religion. With a Pidgeot-Jesus, a holy Helix Fossil, and an evil "false prophet" Flareon being kept in the PC by a gatekeeper Drowsee.

I don't understand it. I don't want to understand it. But I am certainly amazed at what technology has managed to do with the game, and the attention of thousands of viewers and players who are so heavily invested in the success of the game that they genuinely feel upset when things go badly. Like when Hitmonlee was released. I imagine it was quite sad....

Digital Literacy and Cynthia Selfe: Good & Bad Technology

Recently I've been reading Cynthia Selfe's book Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention, a book that's almost too old to be completely relevant to us (it was published in 1999), and yet there are many aspects of this book that are spot-on...and many that are not.

Selfe says that "technological literacy refers to a complex set of socially and culturally situated values, practices, and skills involved in operating linguistically within the context of electronic environments, including reading, writing, and communicating." Even in 1999, when computers were not as prevalent as they are today, Selfe recognized the importance of being able to not only use computers, but to be able to effectively communicate with them. Today, computers are all around us and we are constantly in the presence of technology, whether we realize it or not.

Selfe frequently quotes other people in her book, and many of them are not on the side of technology. Like Plato, they not only scoffed the usefulness of new technology, but claimed that it would have terrible negative affects on society. Selfe refers to Barry Sanders's A is for Ox on page 33, who had some very harsh criticisms about technology, claiming that "the computer has helped to erase the inner core of the human being--conspiring, that is, in the obliteration...of stories and storytelling--it has hastened the destruction of the family."

It's very true that computers have negative consequences when used improperly, but Sanders goes way too far to claim that computers have "hastened the destruction of the family." Computers can be praised for helping keep family ties and friendships strong, and no better example comes to mind than my own use of Facebook to keep track of people who no longer live anywhere near me. About three years ago I was dating a solider who deployed to Afghanistan for a year. He often couldn't use a phone for a while and written letters take a long time to travel that far, but by logging onto Facebook his family, friends, and I could quickly see that he'd left a status or responded to something. Even if the communication wasn't directly aimed at someone, we all knew that he was at least alive. For the entire time he was gone I relied on technology to keep in contact with him and to know he was safe.

Computers don't have the capacity to "conspire" as Sanders claimed. Computers don't care what you use them for, and they can't do much without human input. Technology is completely neutral; it is what humans do with it that determines if it is being used for good or bad.

Technology That Helps the Blind See

 
For as long as there have been blind people, there has been technology invented for the sole purpose of helping them live easier lives. The types of technology range from collapsible canes, to voice recognition features on smartphones. I have a blind grandmother and I can still remember the day she showed me her "talking watch" for the very first time. She simply pressed a button and the watch vocalized what time it was. As a young child in the 1990s, my mind was blown.

I was recently doing research on blindness and discovered Tommy Edison, a blind film critic on YouTube. There is a lot of things this charming man can do without the aid of technology, but I was really amazed by a particular iPhone app he demonstrated that allows blind people to identify objects as easily as sighted people do. "Tap Tap See" works by identifying specific items that the user has taken a photo of, all the way down to the brand name and color. Tommy demonstrates by first taking a picture of a twenty dollar bill, and the phone correctly tells him what denomination the bill is. Being taken advantage of while purchasing things is pretty common to blind people, unfortunately. Since there is no way to identify a one dollar bill from a fifty dollar bill based on touch or smell alone, they must rely on the honesty of strangers, which isn't always very reliable.

The app correctly identifies a white Adidas sock and a can of Healthy Choice chicken noodle soup. This app is one example of technology that can help blind people live alone and not have to question what type of food they're eating, what they're wearing, which CD or DVD they've picked up, and many other things that sighted people don't even think about when they're going about daily life. This is yet another example of technology at its finest: helping people's lives be easier.

HTML Code: Challenge Accepted

Perhaps you, reader, have never looked at HTML code before. I mean really looked at it and tried to decipher the long lines of gobbledegook and symbols that appear meaningless to the untrained eye. If that is the case, then you are like me, a person who has a fairly good understanding of computers as long as the information is in fully-formed English sentences. So when I first looked at this:

my first reaction was this:

and my second reaction was to curl up in a ball and cry, realizing that I was expected to make sense of all those lines of letters and symbols.

I wiped away my tears and picked up the assigned textbook, Sams Teach Yourself HTML, CSS and JavaScript by Julie C. Meloni, and prayed that the information would be given to me in language a non-techie could understand. Within a few minutes I began to make sense of things, and after many careful types on Notepad I created my first successful HTML code. Ironically, I can't figure out how to get the code to translate onto this blog.

Perhaps I'll go cry in the corner again...

Or! I'll rise to the challenge and try to figure out the crazy world of HTML to make my blog do cool and interesting things! I've seen examples where other people have used HTML code to insert cool graphics and effects into their blogs, which may not be entirely necessary for me. I mean, I have pretty much all of the tools I need to do what I intend to do on this blog without typing it in HTML code, don't I? If all else fails, I can hopefully pass my class and add "Experience using HTML codes" to me resume. That's got to count for something, right?

Brummett and Rhetoric in Terms of Technology & Social Media

In 1979, Barry Brummett wrote an article called "Three Meanings of Epistemic Rhetoric," a dense article that basically suggested that there is a relationship between how people communicate and what they know. The way in which a message is transmitted from one person to another is crucial to the understanding of the knowledge, or the misunderstanding of that knowledge. I'm summarizing a LOT here since the article is kind of hard to understand if you aren't familiar with the terminology.

One of his meanings really stood out for me in terms of technology and media: the ontological meaning of rhetoric. Large words and "scholarly" writing don't impress me when I need to have a dictionary on hand in order to understand just what the heck the author is telling me, so I'll give a "dumbed-down" version of what Brummett was telling his audience for my sake as well as the sake of my readers. Basically, Brummett said that conversation changes what we know about the world. The example used in class makes the most sense: the debate about Pluto. Pluto, the big rock floating out in space, never changed. It's always been the same good ol' Pluto. However, it was people who discussed and argued with each other and decided that Pluto shouldn't be a planet anymore.

So what does this have to do with technology? For one thing, there's a huge difference between watching a full-length documentary about, let's say, sharks and the ocean and reading this meme:

Yes, this is meant to be funny and is in no way close to the truth, but who knows, there might be someone gullible enough to believe that. Some of the people I see on the Internet lead me to believe that there is. Exhibit A:

(Yes, dogs do have brains. That's how they, you know, survive and function as living creatures.)

 

I digress.

 

Technology doesn't always cause misunderstandings and suppress the passage of information from one person to another. In some ways, taking advantage of a certain medium can efficiently pass information in ways that other mediums couldn't. Twitter users, the really experienced ones, can efficiently communicate an idea in 140 characters. If you aren't very good at using Twitter, it can be difficult to say everything the way you'd like to in such a small amount of space and make it have an impact. Instagram is another medium that often proves that a picture can be worth a thousand words. The things that people post on social media shows exactly what their reality is, and it is through media and discussion that can change just what you know about the people and the world around you.

Benefits of the Internet Cat Sensation

It all started with a simple, poorly spelled question:

and an Internet sensation was born. Lolcats entertained millions of viewers across the world with their poor use of the English language and silly antics, but what started as mere entertainment has since created a useful niche for animals everywhere. I've mentioned in previous posts how the Internet can have negative affects on society, but this medium can have many benefits, one of which we can thank our furry friends for.

 

Lil Bub, Pudge, Tartar Sauce (better known as The Grumpy Cat), Colonel Meow, Nala, Hamilton the Hipster Cat, and Oskar the Blind Cat are among many felines who have become famous via the Internet. Several of these cats were either found as strays or rescued from shelters, and some of them were considered "unadoptable" because of physical deformations. Lil Bub is perhaps the most notable of these cases.

Born the runt of a feral litter, Lil Bub has a number of genetic anomalies including an extreme case of dwarfism, a short lower jaw, no teeth, and extra toes on each of her paws. Fortunately she lives a very happy and healthy life and has used her unusual appearance and cuteness to raise money for animals in need. According to her website (Lilbub.com), Lil Bub has raised over $60,000 for charities through her online store and meet-and-greets at animal shelters across the country. She encourages pet adoption, spreads the importance of spaying and neutering your pets, and serves as a reminder that being different is a good thing.

 

Grumpy Cat and Pudge (pictured above) are also cats who use their fame to help animals in need. Proceeds from the sale of their merchandise goes to animal shelters. Many of these cats have banned together for the sake of charity (see below):

It's really quite amazing what the Internet can do to help those in need. Not only have these cats all found loving homes, but they've encouraged others to donate money, time, and love to a good cause: the overall wellbeing of cats everywhere. Does that make anyone else feel warm and fuzzy on the inside? If nothing else, these animals have provided millions of people with a much needed laugh or an "aww" after a long day. I encourage everyone to adopt from a shelter, or at the very least volunteer at a local humane society. The animals will thank you.

R.I.P Colonel Meow



 

There is a Time for Technology, Just Not All the Time

I've said in previous blog posts that I have differing opinions on the use of technology, and many of my negative opinions come from the way I was raised: mostly without a lot of "new" technology (i.e, the Internet, cell phones, and social media) in a very rural town without a whole lot going for it. While I believe there are many good uses to technology, I'd like to take a moment to vent about some of the things that bother me about new technology and how it has changed our culture. Hopefully I'll get enough of it out of my system so I won't spend my entire blog complaining like an old man about "those darn kids and their celluar phones!"

A good example of this comes from an advertisement I watched for Pocket, an online and mobile app that allows users to save websites for later viewing. The video can be found here, although I had some trouble getting Vimeo to work correctly: Pocket on Vimeo. If that doesn't work, perhaps it can be accessed straight from their website here: Get Pocket. There are a lot of good intentions behind this app, namely convenience. If I find something interesting or important on the Internet and would like to quickly access it later, I can do so using Pocket. However, something that stood out the most was that the woman in the video (who is very busy and often needs to save online articles to read later) struck me as someone who was hooked on the Internet and didn't quite seem to have her priorities straight. For instance, in one scene she and two other people are standing in line at a coffee shop or bakery of some sort. All three of them are glued to their mobile devices, seemingly oblivious to anything around them. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them missed their order because Instagram was so riveting at the time. Some might call waiting in line a perfect opportunity to browse the Internet, so I'll try to give them the benefit of the doubt. (I, as a shy introvert, would probably never engage a stranger in conversation while standing in line, but I try to make a point to be a little more aware of my surroundings while in public).

Later in the video the woman walks her dog to a park, all the while telling the audience the benefits of using Pocket in the hectic world we live in. She then proceeds to sit down at a bench, throw a ball for her dog to chase, and continue catching up on her Internet reading via smartphone. By this point I found myself yelling at the computer screen, "WHY AREN'T YOU PLAYING WITH YOUR DOG??!!" 

This is what annoys me most about society's overuse of technology. Instead of enjoying a beautiful day at the park and socializing with her dog (and perhaps other dog owners) the woman chose to sit on a bench and catch up on reading that could probably be saved for later after the sun had gone down, her dog was happily napping someplace, or perhaps a rain storm had rolled in. Why do we find it so necessary to be glued to technology instead of interacting with the world around us? I'm not the most sociable party animal in the world, but I hate when I find myself in a situation like this one: 

So...does anyone want to chat, or drink...or anything?

 If left unchecked, this reliance on technology can definitely have negative consequences. Sure, not chatting to your friends at a party isn't exactly going to have a huge political or environmental backlash, but the reliance on the media to do our thinking certainly will. One of my favorite heavy metal musicians/artist/activist/all-around badass Otep Shamaya says it very well in her song "Smash the Control Machine":

(If heavy metal isn't quite your style the lyrics can be found here: Otep: Smash the Control Machine )There are plenty of political and social issues addressed in this song, but the lyrics that really seemed relevant were: "So we live our digital lives On multiple screens And we forget that The blood of the workers Grease the machines."

The idea here is that we should stop giving so much power to the media to the point that our lives become nothing but "work, buy, consume, die" when there is so much more going on around us, whether that be important political and social issues, or something as simple as taking your dog for a walk or having an uninterrupted conversation with a friend or relative.

I've used enough of your time though, dear reader. Turn off the Internet for a while and take your dog (or roommate) for a walk. I'm sure Fido (or Frank) will thank you.