Author: zy1193

Actually, I’m a person who doesn’t have any special feelings about comics. I remember the last time I read comics was probably in elementary school. But after reading “Understanding Comics”, I  have a further understanding of comics in an art form. Scott McCloud defines comics by “juxtaposed pictorial and other images deliberate sequence”. Basically comics are a sequence of images based on space that has a narrative-like quality and visual direction to them. A comic book artist tends to use diverse types of painting style, line work and color to convey certain emotions, physical or mental characteristics for the reader to interpret. He somehow gives us an understanding that the more simple a comic, the more personality and diverse meaning, because if a comic is created too specific as well as vivid which is closed to the reality, it will limit people’s imagination and lost the basic function of a medium from the narrative itself. The space between one panel and the next is called a gutter, which helps with the flow of the story and carries the reader from one picture to the next. The comics author can regard it as a technique to not only shape the readers’ understanding of the comics but also give readers more space to imagine.

I learned that comics serve a very strong purpose in terms of storytelling, and everyone has their way of reading comics. The comics really dig down to the core of what really needs to be envisioned by the reader in order to create events happening throughout time. It is a concept, that when understood, can be applied to other forms of media that require a significant amount of engagement from the reader.

Before reading this article, I didn’t have such a deep understanding of the medium. I simply thought that the medium is used to convey information. But McLuhan offers a new perspective that characteristic of all medium means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium, for instance, the content of television is movies, the content of newspapers is words, and the content of words is language. Excluding films, television, radio, newspapers, and magazines that the average person can imagine, McLuhan pointed out that clothing, houses and so on are also media. Everything is the medium, everything is the transmission of information. He also pointed out with great foresight that the truly meaningful message is not the content media of each era suggest to people, but the evolving and changing media themselves, which change the way we transmit and receive information and shape the way we live.

I realized that only after the possession of a certain medium that human beings are likely to engage in communication and other social activities commensurate with it. In the age of agriculture, people passed on information through bronze wares. Only after bronze wares came out did they know what kind of information to record and what kind of information to convey. In the industrial age, human beings transmitted graphic information through newspapers and books, and audio and video information through television and radio. In the information age, people transmit all kinds of information through the Internet. In the new media era, various forms of information have emerged, such as live broadcast, interactive VR and virtual communication. Moreover, the emergence of each kind of media will affect people’s way of thinking. Newspaper era of in-depth reporting and biting criticism makes people think deeply with a critical spirit; In the age of television, people’s thinking ability declines due to the visualization and entertainment. The information explosion in the Internet era is rich and diverse, which makes people’s ability to think in a fragmented and diversified way and reduce their deep thinking mode.

In “Long Live the Web”, Tim Berners-Lee both talked about the positive principles as well as standards and the threats to the internet. He first introduces the principle of universality which allows the Web to work no matter what hardware, software, network connection or language you use and to handle information of all types and qualities. Before reading it, I take the internet and website for granted like many others. But actually what we so easily and conveniently see as well as use today is benefiting by the designers who follow the principle of universality. There are also open, royalty-free standards that are easy to use create the diverse richness of websites which can stimulate innovation. But on the other hand, internet monopolies and snooping become even more violent. I recalled what I learned in the last term’s digital identity EAP class that some network company like Google will collect and analyze the information you often browse on the internet and then use a special algorithm to rank the topic that they think you would like to see in the searching bar and searching page. Even if you search the same keyword, everyone will see the different type of information on the page, we all live in our own filter bubbles, is it kind of violate the principle of universality? Is it mean the internet actually isolate us rather than connect us? Considering this, I think, we should pay more attention to the threats on the internet, because as the author said in the end “The goal of the Web is to serve humanity”, we should use the web and internet to benefit human more rather than snoop and isolate.

In “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud”, the author briefly talk about the overview of some aspects of international cloud infrastructure. Although I nearly use the cloud every day, I have totally no idea how it functions and what its material carrier is. After reading the article, I was introduced that massive infrastructural developments are following the data centers, with new submarine cables. I suddenly realized why the appealing climates and comfortable temperatures become one of the necessary location conditions for high-tech industrial parks and the data centers in the geography class in senior high school. Moreover, the climate and the latency aren’t the only reasons to expand the data centers. As the Cloud absorbs more and more global data, the concerns about data sovereignty become controversial. To be honest, before reading the article, I would never have imagined that the ownership of the data can cause such a battle for such a long time. But later, I reflect a bit. As we live in a period of big data, all our valuable information like living habits and consumer tastes is stored in the data. So, mastering the data is mastering the business opportunities even the politically dominant. Perhaps that’s why the battle will last and even continue in the future.