CONVERGING DIGITAL MEDIA

CONVERGING DIGITAL MEDIA
This week’s course readings about the acoustic space and the internet was a very good learning experience for me, I read the papers once I was not able to follow them as much ,when I read them the second time they sounded pretty interesting.
According to McLuhan (Levinson, 1999), acoustic space came before the alphabets. We have to know the alphabets, for example different languages have different alphabets that can be totally different from the alphabets we learn initially. Alphabets have the segregating tendency, like doctors, lawyers, and other different professions, they all have different construction of meanings or different languages. A child requires schooling in order to read and write, but they grasp the speech as they hear. Sound is all over our environment, in this digital world McLuhan writes about television being on the same wave length as Internet.
The web has changed the way we store organized information, for example the information stored in library. Each web is one note and we find web by association.
The three key ideas in the readings:
• Acoustic World
• Visual World
• Digital World
It is amazing how things being delivered and how things being relayed for example some programs on radio are better than watching on T.V. It is more enjoying reading a book than watching the movie based on that book and Broadway shows are much more realistic than a movie. We can see the world in real life, total emersion is acoustic world, and our eyes work like digital camera through retina, visual world is the perception. Digitalization makes the whole world a segment, latest technology is digitalization. Communication is more effective with text message for example if we do not feel like talking to someone it is more convenient and more effective.
The most difficult reading for this week was “The song of the alphabet in cyberspace”(Levinson,1999). It was hard to grasp the concept of McLuhan’s acoustic space. After reading the paper a couple of times and referring back to the lecture, I understood the concept.
The discussion questions are:
How do you determine the accuracy of the Internet?
How much will digital communication effect verbal communication?
This week’s readings and lecture will definitely help me at my work and my future classes.