woah this ones a doozy but I think I understand!

So I am late with my blog post, partly due to the text needing to be very much depicted to understand and partly because ALL of technology failed me yesterday...

Anyways, after reading a complicated article called "Images as the text:Pictographs and Pictographic Logic" I think I understand what everyone was trying to say, well what the author was trying to say through examples. In the introduction paragraphs the author states "A true pictograph functions as an image whose meaning is communicated through its visual form as a picture of something, whether the communication is effected through substitution or translation into language or not." Now I start to understand his definition of a pictograph as a picture that you can derive many meanings from.For example a sign of a person crossing the street next to a crosswalk. I can derive that if someone is walking and wants to cross I need to let them go before myself.

I should have said authors, so the authors Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann explain a few different pictographic systems and writers that tried to make new types. The speak of the Mayans, Babylonians, Egyptians, etc. that all used a pictographic system to describe multiple things, for example like a picture of an eye, could actually mean an eye or I as the person. However these systems were called mixed systems. This meaning that the picture was also a syllabic, ideographic, logographic, and phonetic. My idea of this would be like a castle. Because it has many depictions, power, god-like, strong, rich, large, etc. Some people even get the phonetic parts of it, i always get that little "AHHH" from the heavens sound when i see old Egyptian tombs which are another good example (symbolize what someone stood for with whats inside the tomb, not death but afterlife,etc.)

Anyways, throughout the paper I am thinking that they are trying to say every image is a pictograph, like a picture is worth a thousand words type of deal. They use specific examples from the Sumerians clay tablets where they drew pictures to speak to one another on tablets. and to do the quantity of like twelve hands they'd draw out a hand and do the symbol for 12 that they had. This is like pictograph 101 the basics of pictographs.

Then it gets more technical....two philosophers Joachim Becher and Bishop John Wilkins tried to attempt to things through pictographs. They wanted to create signs that basically encoded everything in the universe..sounds like a lot of work to me...but they couldn't do it like I thought they couldn't because finding signs to decode the entire universe is way too complicated. as you can depict from the image the article gave us 
Like the authors said the signs were a code of a code, and much too complicated to read.

In the other reading, Text Script and Media by Scott Noegel he gives the notion that every single little thing is connected because that's how the world is strung along. He is more focused on speaking about how the cyber world is now connected to the writing world. As in on page two he says "If the medium is the message, then in ancient Mesopotamia the message was constructive; it was a creation, a message reminiscent of modern technophrases like "build a cyber portfolio" and "create a  website." In his example of Egypt, the clay was the medium of builders, papyrus was the medium of scribes, showing how class systems effected what you wrote on (usually scribes were much smarter than builders in school.) the Egyptians heiroglyphic signs were pictographs, for example the sign for growing, enjoying, and life was an apotropaic symbol that was on magical amulets ( so i'm believing that its saying God is the finder of all these.)

Basically in a broad description Noegel spoke about how many languages had many pictographs having to do with a God or the Bible and how the cyber-world is turning into a pictographic world its self. I believe at least...like the image of google means search engine, endless possibilities...


Okay now onto the actually assignment. So I believe a great symbol especially with all the religion talk is the cross. The cross is a form of text. The cross is a symbol or pictograph meaning sin, purity, death, love, Jesus, care, and more. In the Bible it says Jesus died for our sins; this is the depressing side of the symbolic expression, however on the plus side it also means that God forgives us for our sins so we are pure again, meaning happiness. Now I agree with the text on how everything is a symbol for a word in a way because to me everything is, a peanut butter sandwich, means food, life, giving, etc. thats a sandwich. Overall, like Noegel spoke about how everything is interconnected I believe it is, as well as how the first two authors explained that pictographs can be used, however I don't believe it would be easy to create an image that describes everything in this world, yes everything is connected by a long stretch, but to put that all in one pictograph would be tremendous work.

Hope I understood this right!

Blog Assignment Three :)

In the article "10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books" by Time Carmody he gives a list of 10 defining reading revolutions in history that he believes changed the reading world to a strong extent. In his reading he describes that German Historian Rolf Engelsing made the phrase reading revolution through trying "to describe something he saw in the 18th century; a shift from "intensive" reading and re-reading of very few texts to "extensive" reading of many often only once, showing a step into modern reading, and the citizens of this world were becoming modern readers.

In Ong's Writing Reconstructures Consciousness it speaks about how we took writing from the get go, how it has evolved, and why we need it in our daily lives now. It speaks about languages developing in different areas of the world, from Hebrew, to Greek, to Japanese, to Chinese, to Korean, speaking of vowels, consonants, and characters, as well as, how languages created themselves, such as using other languages to develop their own. Without writing we could not have the strong technology we had; however this has its positives and negatives.

In Carmody's article I connected most  revolution #7 or the electronic age. The electronic age is the age of audiovisual media, cylinders, reels, and cassettes, etc and how they have become essential in our culture today. The electronic age has caused us to become more reliant on technology than ever. Technology to us is now a second-hand thing, at least in the United States and most European countries. If you don't know how to use a computer and you are under the age of 60, then you are considered an outcast of society.

This is where the positive and negatives come in to being such a technological driven world. With technology we are able to create and find things we could never compute before. Astronomically huge numbers are being solved by the computers in 3 seconds, while it'd take us 30 pages just to figure out the equation. The computer can hold information, edit information, and double-check our information, but with stronger intelligence comes the weaker less intelligent society that relies on the computer for most information, such as I. My computer is my internet web search, dictionary, fact sheet, calculator, thesaurus, and spell checker. My computer is my brain, not my brain is my computer. So many people rely on computers to solve all their problems, use great too much in a paper, the thesaurus on microsoft word can change that for you in two clicks! Our society has weakened in effort from technology but at the same time our technology has let us discover and solve tremendous (no I did not thesaurus tremendous) things.

 My thoughts correlate with Ong's text because in the section Plato, Writing, and Computers  Ong speaks about how Plato urged to resist the use of anything that did the work for you, such as writing things down so you didn't have to remember, because that caused your brain not to be exercised. Ong goes on to explain about how today parents fear that calculators provide an external resource just as writing does so it furth weakens the mind. Written text is also unresponsive, while a conversation is a banter of back and forth talking.However, without text Plato could not spread his word as far, and without books that were printed they could not put it down in text. As Ong says " Once the word is technologized there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available."

Overall once technology was made it couldn't be stopped, it'll continue to grow with words and calculations and will never stop as the mind grows to new heights on what to create.

BLOG ASSIGNMENT TWO

       While reading Ong's handouts it was clear to me that language has been remediated from just spoken, to slowly written with pictures, to actually making letters, then making an entire alphabet with vowels and constants (there might be a few more steps but this is basically the mini history).

      Written text is always going to be related to oral communication by writing down how the sound is heard (or spelled). On page 9 of The Orality of Language, it is said that people learn words through listening and repeating, or through oral speech, rather than studying. Greeks were fascinated by oral speech and believed writing enhanced oral speech rather than reducing it.

        Before words, letters, etc. were created stories were told by word of mouth and if a mouth forgot to tell the story the story/history would be lost once they had passed. There are pros and cons of oral language compared to written such as written you can write down important history and have a larger vocabulary to describe, however oral language uses the persons verbal skills that help explain and interact with the listener as well as socialize with the listener. On page 14 of The Orality of Language it explains that without oral communication written text could not be made, and without written text the human mind could not reach its full potential, so hand in hand both types of languages are important to us and how we communicate as people.

      In The Modern Discovery of Primary Oral Cultures Ong shows an example of how Homer used previous poets works and put them together in the Iliad and the Odyssey. As the handout says poets were educated never to use cliches, so when it was found out Homer used mostly cliches for his poems it was threatening to dead literates. Nonetheless Homeric Greeks embraced cliches before a written language was developed because through oral language if the words had not been repeated they'd be lost.

     The Greek Alphabet was created between 720-700 BC. This creation caused a whole new phenomena. The making of the alphabet allowed Greek poets, philosophers, and even civilians to write down whatever they please no matter how random it was. One philosopher hated writing, his name was Pluto. He hated writing because he felt it was unresponsive and destructed the memory, losing intelligence and social benefits.

     However, after much thought, and actually noticing that my big interest and benefit was knowing that the original alphabet was made by the Semetic people had consisted of only constants and  some semivowels I decided this would be my remediation topic, since it was the thing that came up when I went to ask the question.

     The Semetic people made the first consonantal alphabet back in 2000 BC in Egypt. They derived the alphabet from the hieroglyphics. This is where the Hebrew and Phoenicians lived near the Mediterranean. It had 22 characters in it. It had names and a character list that was easy to memorize. The Greek actually came up with the word alphabet, because the Semetic people hadn't yet created vowels. The Greek made the word from their first two words alpha and beta.

    The Greek alphabet was created by a Greek who had learned the Phoenician script very early on when it was created. The diplyon inscription was the oldest substancial text dated back the the 8th century BC. The need for vowels was infinite for the Greek because so many of their words had vowel sounds in it, or sounds that weren't in the constants.The system of only consonants was called abjad and the Phoenician and Aramic alphabet both had it. The Aramaic alphabet actually occurred after the Phoenician for the script of the Persian Empire.

   The Greek remediated the Semetic people's alphabet because they did not have several Phoenician consonants in their language and many Phoenician letters didn't have Greek sounds, such as, the h sound became alpha instep of alep. So the Greeks made the new alphabet system to remediate, or better, the alphabet made.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet)

Music Devices Remediation

So as I read and looked at the definitions of remediation on pages 3 and 4 of Chapter 2's mediation and remediation, one thing kept popping up in my head...musical devices. I for one never even owned a mp3 player until ninth grade and never owned any sort of apple device until this year getting an iPhone. The way we have listened to music has been forever changing and will continue to change in the future.

The world has had many forms of listening to music. The world first started out with the phonograph.

This device was made my Thomas Edison in 1877. He learned how to record sound, and the first lyric ever recorded was Mary Had A Little Lamb...Quite different then what we usually here on radio stations today.
After this device was made, not another music device came around until the bulky jukebox after WWII. After the jukebox was created though, America began to see a much quicker musical device delivery system then before.

The record player came out in 1957. It was more modern of a system then ever before (well duh...) and it had an electric motor, another plus side about it was you didn't have to crank it at all like the phonograph. It was probably the coolest things to have, and the more records you had to play on your system the cooler and wealthier you seemed to be, kind of like the iPods, iTouchs, and iPhones today.

The cassette player, which my mom used in her teenage days to record music off of the radio, came in 1963 by the Phillps corporation. They were smaller then the record players, and the cassettes were much smaller than the records. I believe the cassette player started the hand held craze in the world because it was easier to carry around

The boombox was the big basically BOOM of the 80's generation, it started out a lot heavier then boomboxes today, and started out only playing cassettes. However, by the 90s when CD's came out they were playing CD's, cassettes, as well as continuous playing of the radio.

The cassette player was the first handheld device with earplugs and all. It came out very early in the 80s, and was along side the boombox on portable music. You could carry the cassette device for personal use while carrying the boombox for public use with friends.

The CD player was created in 1982 which began the crazy $20 a CD event. I remember I at least had 2,500 dollars in CD merchandise at the age of 8...crazy to me in fact. The CD's I believe actually weren't as cool as cassettes however, the CDs didn't have film so they broke a lot less easier and also later had cool designs on them to attract merchants.

In 1998 the first MP3 player was created by our east side Korea. This was a HUGE deal, I mean you could choose different artists and songs and put them all on ONE device. This was like with cassette players and boomboxs however, you just clicked and saved rather than sat and recorded. It brought the word into a whole new genre by using a computer to download and transfer music onto a device. The modern MP3 player, the kind and design we use today though was created by a German company who patented and licensed for their design, making billions in this market.

THE FIRST IPOD! Duh duh duh...Apple invented the Ipod in 2000 and it was the most advertised music player around. Tony Fadell is the person who have to thank for this music player and with this music player the entire world changed. I am guessing over 65% of Americans have owned some form of the Ipod in their life.

Something I never heard of until I researched the subject was a French company made the Mp4. This player started out the revolution of not only putting music on your music player but also videos, images, and text files...helping out apple immensely with ideas.

The Ipod craze continued with the touch controlled Ipod nano and then later producing the Itouch in 2007 where you could also get on the internet and receive millions of apps to download. In fact the newer Itouch has a 64GB of space availability, which could put what like 15 CDS on one device? Thats a huge step up in the medium.

The medium of musical devices is continually being remediated from the phonograph to a CD player shoe made in 2007. So much has been done in the musical device section of the world in the 130 years since it began.

I would go with the definition that "the goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media. Furthermore, because all mediations are both real and mediations of the real, remediation can also be understood as a process of reforming reality as well" (pg. 3-4). Remediation as a reform in other words.
I would believe this because all inventors have done is refashion/rehabilitate or recreate the original music device the phonograph.  The phonograph started out as an amazing recording and sound invention and now has transformed into something huge. It started out as only few homes having phonographs to now all homes have at least some type of musical device (at least in America). I know my family has like 12 used and using musical devices, and this is not including our phones. Overall this is the best definition because it literally defines what has happened to the musical device world perfectly.
REFERENCE:
http://www.xtimeline.com/timeline/History-of-Music-Playing-Devices