ARTS 2090 week 5

ARTS2090- week 5 Archive Fever

Come to think about what Jacques Derrida said about how archives have changed the way people lived kind of make sense. People store useful information for the future access, Bible for example, was recorded down for later generations to read. Consider what if Bible was passed down through orality? There should have been different versions of Bibles. Fortunately, thanks to archives, there is only one version of Bible. What I am trying to say here is that archives helped to standardize literature. However, think about how archives have changed the way people lived. For me, everything. Study definitely has been affected by archive fever. Academic transcript, a piece of paper that is the most important thing than any other things when applying for an university. Hand written exams, books, and libraries, all of them are in different forms of archives. In addition, the world today is made up of different archives. Social structure for example, was marked by the amount of money people have in their bank accounts, thus, criminal records helped to separate good and bad people.

Archives in a way helped people to become civilized. Even before the printing press, people knew how to store information in different formats for example such as the cave paintings. It is after the printing press that escalated the amount of data stored in archives, it was then followed by the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and the Renaissance. Archives in another word, is the data base of the entire world. It stores history.    

ARTS2090 Week 4

ARTS2090 Week 4 -Assemblages and Actor-Networked Theory.

         This week's topic gave me a headache...In my personal opinion, "theory" is a scientific term that includes a thesis of "if"... "then". If a theory is proven, then it becomes a law, which is agreed upon universally, like the law of universal gravitation, objects accelerates at 9.81 m/s².Basically a theory has two functions, one is to assume or address the matter, then prove something that is true, and the other function is for people to know these things exist. Today we are learning ANT, namely Actor-Networked Theory, which combines technological determinism and social determinism together. For a long period of time people have been arguing whether technology drove the society or vice versa. These three men Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law came up with the idea of combining human and non-human actants that acted as an assemblage. The theory seems very complicated at first, but after looking at some examples, I grasped some ideas. The example Wikipedia gave were cars and a black box. People do not necessarily know how a car functions, but they still drove them. Until some vital parts of the car are broken, people started to realize without some parts they cannot drove. Which leads back the things that collaborated the whole car as a system, without any small parts, they cannot function. Actor-Networked Theory simply put, is a cause-and-effect theory. It does not explain why and how it functions, but it states because of this, and this happens. The theory somehow reminded of an ecosystem in terms of the environmental science. An ecosystem is a community that functions as a food chain, for example sun provides energy for sea weeds, and sea weeds provide essential nutrition for microorganisms, and shrimps feeds on microorganisms, then fish feeds on shrimps and so on. Without any of these, the ecosystem will collapse. The same goes to Actor-Networked Theory. It helped people to draw out the relationship between each components and how it affected each other.          

ARTS2090 Week 3

Week 3 Genres, Processes, Tools and Techniques of Publishing

       In order to publish a book, the writer must agree upon the conditions given by the publishing companies. Each companies has its own special rules or conditions that the writer must follow. The MIT press for example, have different requirements in different types of work. The publishing company Pan Macmillan allows writers to submit their works through the website. In order for their works to be reviewed, writers must follow the conditions the company set out, or else the submitted works will be deleted. It may be troublesome to follow the rules and condition, but in return, the writers or authors have the copyright of the materials they owned. Publishing both hard copies and electronic copies are also protected by the copyright. Entering the digital world, the Internet allows everyone to be a publisher. People are able to publish their own works online and share it with others. The problem is, people usually take other people's information for granted, therefore it was hard to trace where the original source of materials came from. This is where the copyright kicked in. Copyright is a complicated matter. Although there are laws to protect copyright materials, a lot of people still take online materials in as their own work. And to be honest it is hard to create something new when there are so many precedent prototypes out there already. People have no idea that they have committed copyright infringement until they were charged. 

       

It is interesting to take WikiLeaks as an agent to propose the information on the Internet serves equal to everyone. The United States has been one of the most powerful countries in the world, in order to maintain its supremacy, it constantly check the power balance between countries by any means necessary. Julian Assange, the founder of the organization WikiLeaks said "I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination." Julian Assange can be described as a publisher as well. He published the information to others in order for them to acknowledge it. As a publisher and a writer, Julian Assange was charged with several crime commitments. Was he right or wrong? This issue has been a controversial debate. It has generated several perspective viewpoints about publishing. Are writers subject to censorship? Are they free to publish whatever they want? If not, is the information still reliable and not biased?                     

ARTS 2090 Week 2

History of publishing-

Publishing underwent series of changes. It was first known as to make public, or to be generally known, for example the messages carried by the courier and went from city to smaller villages in order to set out information to the citizens. Before the printing press was invented, different countries have their own unique ways for recording their writings. In China it was first known to use turtle shells or other harden body parts of animals (such as bones) as the tool to record down writings. 

These writings (甲骨文) then became the ancestors of the Chinese characters nowadays.

source: http://baike.sogou.com/v31430.htm;jsessionid=FB90DB1558F0712CCAD71D7FAC61CA79.n2

   

The invention of printing press was revolutionary, it dominated the ways of reproducing texts. Originally people made copies and replica by handwriting, imagine how long does it take for people to copy such a long book like bible. The printing press was then spread across the world. It was said the invention of the printing press helped to escalate European Civilization by disseminating information quickly and accurately. It also played an important role in Enlightenment and Renaissance that followed up shortly.  

source:http://bibleworkbench.wordpress.com/2011/07/

The word publishing went from to make public or generally known to an industry. In order to publish a book, the book writers must negotiate with publishing companies and to make agreements. There are upside and downside of hiring a publishing agent. Although it costs a lot of money to publish a single book, the copyright is ensured. I personally think publishing agents or companies took the advantage of the writer, as the information was meant to be "published", in which to make public known. Entering the digital world, the publishing companies are gradually losing their profits, since anyone can publish an article or blog online like what I am doing now.

Bonus: The history of printing reminds me of the film The Book Eli. It talked about how the "last book"(imaginative bible) contained the mysterious dominating power. The setting set in the future where everything was post-apocalyptic in the warring era. Everyone wishes to gain control of that book. In the end, the protagonist reveals that the book was actually empty, he has remembered all of the contents in his mind. As he preaches the bible, people recorded it down by hand then print it out.

      

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1037705/