Final Exam-Chris Langer

Through Reading W/ the Digital Human, our class confronted the quickly changing world of technology. To what extent are these conventions, reading with paperback books, merely just habituated muscle memory actions that just need to be readjusted. We have naturalized the experience, and part of this class was talking the nostalgia that is reading. How can we get over the passage of the medium and appreciate the content, as opposed to the medium? When did we move past it with paper? It is relatively new, and was seen as an impediment to thoughts and speech at first invention. The habituation of new tasks is the new challenge. What we are experiencing through this transition is a movement from a work to text. Barthes describes a work as “concrete, occupying a portion of book-space,” with the being experienced “only in an activity, a production.” The book is transcending, the novel can cut across works; the medium has changed. This class delved into the world of technology, explored the pyramid of the e-book, and looked forward into what could be the future of learning institutions, as we know it. One of the main fallacies of the rise of digital technology is that technology has lost a human aspect. No technology is “human-less,” and by absorbing new features and implementing them in different fields, technology only furthers human progress. Our study through the Ipad broadened our scope into the penetration of technology in our world.

Additional Text.
I would add Michael Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces” to the syllabus, using it to show the implication of the Ipad as a space itself, something unlike other, but also playing off the influences of the past. Foucault describes a heterotopia, an other space that embodies the functions of society it resides in. A heterotopia is able to, according to the third principle, “juxtapose in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” An e-book is a representation of this, with it’s ability to bring in multiple forms of medium into one, whether it be the video, audio, or text, the e-book brings all of these together.