Summary - 2

Hypertext
Hypertext was the main topic of class in this week. I read a lecture about Ted Nelson and Engelbart who was brilliant works in area computer science. Many people know them for inventor of hypertext, ‘mouse’, basic of window, etc. They were greatly influenced by the ideas of Vannevar Bush who wrote the article (As we may think) we read last week. Well, Ted Nelson mentioned “'hypertext’ mean nonsequential writing, text that branches and allows choice to reader, best read at an interactive screen.

Before taking up the main subject, in the class we discussed what does a ‘digital media’ mean? Everyday we say digital media, but when we ask them what is digital media? Actually many people cannot answer it. Generally, digital media is like digital audio, digital video and other digital "content" (cellphones, compact disc, internet, video games, WWW, etc) can be created, referred to and classify by way of digital information processing machines. Digital media represents a profound change from analog media.

After that, we saw an advertisement of Nike. They show one mini-tv who keeps on speaking, and that exist and can see any place in the world. Then, final scene came out one basketball shoes. The meaning of this advertisement is that shoes is composed all technology. Also, we watched many videos; it looks like very complex and contained abstraction. I think they sublimated a technology in art.

Then two key points was: 1. When a medium is new, it is often used to simulate old media. 2. New media do not replace old media, they displace them.

Ok, return to the subject, we focused on a hypertext and Engelbart. Ted Nelson made plan of ‘the xanadu model’. The main idea of project Xanadu was a network system that would store and index all of the world's private information. So Hypertext is text which is not constrained to be linear. Hypertext is text which contains links to other texts.
And now, we have to talk about one great scientist. Douglas Engelbart changed the way computers worked, from special machine that only scientist could use, to a user-friendly tool that almost anyone can use. He invented to several interactive, user-friendly devices: mouse, windows, hypermedia, groupware, email, word processor, the Internet and more. We can find a motivation in a lecture augmenting human intellect. “Man’s population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater” Engelbart wanted to use technology to augment human intellect.

Finally, we suppose the computer when we’re using in this day, which was an idea of these scientists. The idea became a reality, who knows that the idea could be reality. So! we must be creative. We have to think a different way, different method.