1. Is design really infinite? Will there ever be a point at which the ‘reflective design’ process mentioned on page 76 becomes outdated, just like the technologies we discuss with it?
2. When it comes to the relationship between form and content, to what extent does one outrule the other throughout our modern day society? Although form is often able to mask content, can this occur the other way around? Is it possible for content to become the cover rather than the inside of a book, or can they only mirror each other because design of certain technologies has become too ingrained in our current culture?
3. On page 94, the process of taking apart and then reassembling a work is discussed. Have order and chronology lost importance in the information era, especially in art forms such as literature and cinema? What system of mapping human society and culture has replaced the linear code we’ve always been more adapted to using?
1) Over the long term, what do you think the roles of books in society will become? Since the beginning of the 20th century, we have seen a massive shift in what purpose books serve, do you think they will continue the trend towards being an artifact of nostalgia, or, given that generation z is perhaps the last to grow up with book ever being a large part of their life, they will become even less relevant?
2) What are your thoughts on the death of the author? How does this function in a world where we feel obligated to hold creators accountable for their work, but also give value to free interpretation? At what point does a harmful interpretation become the responsibility of the creator and at what point is it only the responsibility of the reader?
3) At what point does the means and medium become a text itself? It feels like the way we think about books and multimedia has taken on a life not too dissimilar to the actual work presented by those mediums. How can we analyze our relationships with forms and what can we gain from treating those relationships as text?
1) Concerning “The Hollow” do you think that this perspective of viewing certain books as relics or “artifacts” of their own time could be marketable on a small or large scale? Could this be the next hipster thing to do, acquire books that seem stuck in their time and laugh at them?
2) Concerning the “five observable structuring affordances of the traditional book” set out by Matthew Kirschenbaum, are there certain limitations that you believe don’t apply to some books, specifically the finite and bounded observation? Are there any changes you would make to the list? (Not including e-books)
3) Concerning The House of Her, would it be possible to compose a narrative using a platform like twitter in an effective enough way as to draw in public interest? What would need to be done for it to happen? Do things like this exist today, but maybe not in a way that most people are expecting?
1. Do you think that book publishers that utilize/promote the implementation of the transmedia aesthetic to their literary works will help salvage the decline of said publisher’s physical book sales seeing that Generation Z has been born into a world where nowadays most text they read is derived digitally?
2. Do you agree with Carlea Holl-Jensen that in order to draw people back to reading physical books one must alter the presentation of the physical content-scape in order to make for a entirely new physical reading experience that can’t be appropriated into a digital format without losing the integrity of the presentation?
3. In Marx’s Capital Production, he speaks on how you can’t see the labor value of an object, meaning that you can’t see the work that the person who physically crafted the object put into it nor can you see the environment that the object was created in and thus you can’t relate a human/labor value with the object. With that stated, do you think that the processes that Cliffard Hichar utilizes in his book, The Pussycat Said to the Owl: Electronic Circuitry in an Altered Book, will be implemented on larger scale? I ask this because by giving the reader access to the backstory of the creation of the book through microcontrollers, which Hichar implants in his book, he is able to show the reader of his book what went into its creation, thus implanting renewed human/labor value into it that otherwise wouldn’t be there in a standard book format(88).
1. On page 77 the paper describes Hichar and Mozafari’s books as enhancing the functionality of physical books through the addition of miniature computers. To what extent do you feel this is true and do you not think that whether the functionality of a book is enhanced or decreased through technology is subjective to each individual reader?
2. Much of the paper draws on the idea of animating or enhancing ‘otherwise static print pages of text and illustration (78)’ using technology. Do you not think that sometimes in our modern over stimulated lives the simplicity of old bibliographic mediums can be nice change?
3. In the end, the pure essence of a book comes down to the words that are written inside it and the story that the author has chosen to tell. To what extent do you think different bibliographic techniques can actually alter the readers connection with this story and if it is to a large extent do you think this is always a good thing?
NYU Gallatin First-Year Writing Seminar, Fall 2014