The Printing Press: Innovation and Zone of Proximal Development

Last week I went to the Crandall Historical Printing Museum for a live tour. The museum is a tiny building that I haven't really noticed before, tucked in among some residential houses. Despite its low-profile appearance, it has some great stuff inside, most prominent of which is a working (replica of a) Gutenberg press, complete with actual moveable type. Learning more about the history of printing led me to think about how the development and use of the printing press teaches us how innovation works.

Zone of Proximal Development
When Gutenberg made the moveable type, he decided to make the letters look as much as possible like they were written with quills. He knew that people regard change with an eye of suspicion, so printing a book instead of writing it out longhand was a big enough change; he would make all other elements as familiar as possible to avoid raising alarm or stirring up the witch hunters.

Gutenberg's Bible looks much like the manuscripts,
including the illuminations (decorations) added after the printing.

Similarly, it's helpful to remember that sometimes incremental changes are better—change one area of innovation at a time, or it likely won't catch on. The idea of the internet and email evolved much faster than users glommed onto the idea—and if you think about it, email has a lot of the same ideas as snail mail, down to the icons, and an email "address." Going straight from snail mail to texting wouldn't have made as much sense as going from phones to pagers to cell phones to texting.

It's also like scaffolding in human development: in order to learn how to do something, kids need to take small steps towards the ultimate goal, called the zone of proximal development. In order to learn how to run, babies need to learn how to roll over and then crawl. It's too much of a jump to try to get a baby to use their legs to walk before they've ever used them to move before; or tell them to stand vertically when they've never even held up their head before.

Just like the baby, we need to see the relationship between jumps in technology in order to understand how they work and use them. The idea of Pinterest would seem strange and maybe even useless to someone still in the world of DOS. The zone of proximal development was to have the idea for and create a graphic user interface, and then have social media with "sharing," and then to have the concept of sharing pictures instead of just text, and then to have pictures as the primary sharing technique.

Midterm Self-evaluation

After browsing another student's midterm blog post, I decided to use the same format, with headings and short paragraphs.

Nonfiction book:
I read parts of Net Smart by Howard Rheingold for the non-fiction book assignment. I liked the optimism Rheingold had for the digital age and its development: he was optimistic without being passive or blind to the problems that can arise from technology. His solution to fragmentation, distraction, and the new media becoming vehicles for only destructive things was for people to be proactive and mindful when they use it. His idea is that the new media is still forming, and how we use it today will shape how it develops tomorrow; if we want helpful and inspiring media uses tomorrow, use it for good and inspiring things today.

Novel:
The novel I read was The Hunger Games. It gave me a new frame to think about how the form of technology can change how we interact within it. I wrote a blog post about it. I've talked with several different friends about how The Hunger Games is like the Internet, particularly with online presence (the tributes must create caracatures of themselves in order to stand out and maybe survive longer in the arena) and the people building websites being gamemakers (but a less malevolent version...usually).

On a related note, I found social proof of this method of using established literary works and their worlds to talk about different aspects of our lives, to figure out what's going on, and to give us some reference to know why things are happening. In the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi explains how she used literature to make sense of the oppression and upheaval she and those around her lived under during the tyrannical reign of the morality guards.

Self-directed learning:
I've found that the topics brought up in class, in the Google+ stream, and in the assignments from this class often prompt outside conversation and investigation. Tools I've learned about and tried are Diigo, GoodReads, HitRecord, Bing (to explore beyond Google land), Google+, Blogger (for the class blog), Wordpress (for our magazine project), Twitter, and Google Hangout (I tried to use it for a work meeting...but it didn't work), as well as using tools I was already familiar with in different ways (Facebook for social proof and group coordination, Skype for a work meeting, and youtube as a place to find educational things).

I've also talked about these tools and talked with different people (in and out of the class) about their strong and weak points. I particularly am interested in the idea of social proof—I like that it's okay to present unpolished things for feedback online. I'm also interested in transmedia and exploring how that works with storytelling, especially since I'm on a team trying to create a transmedia story. I also want to continue to explore how technology and new media can help society accomplish things we haven't been able to before—the TED talk about collaboration I watched earlier this year keeps coming to mind—and have been able to try that to some degree with helping publish Menagerie.

Influence of other students:
Other students in this class have both guided my learning and influenced how I interpret what I encounter online. Some blog posts got me thinking about things and led me to sources of information I wouldn't normally have come across on my own. For example, Shelby Boyer's post on cyber bullying was eye-opening to me on its own, yet the article about trolls she linked to gave me even more to think about, and another source to go to to learn about cyber bullying. More recently, Heather Anderson's post in the Google+ stream prompted me to join the conversation by writing a blog post about some more aspects of our interaction with technology.

Technology Makes Life Easier. Sometimes.

After reading and agreeing with Heather's Google+ post (reproduced below), I felt like this would be a good time to try to flatten out on the computer screen what I think about the effect of technology. 

Initially I agreed: technology has certainly made some things easier for me. One quick example is the waitlist that BYU introduced recently, which allows me to sign up for the waitlist and not have to check back every few hours to try to add a class I need. The ways technology has streamlined and reduced the running around in my life are great!

But, rather than only look at the ways it has changed things for the better, I want to consider ways it has changed things in ways that don't make my life easier. 

As far as school goes,while I feel that a lot of things are easier, general expectation is higher as well. Some of my professors have expressed that their students should be able to manage short deadlines for papers because "everything is online now"; and while I admit many things are easy to find online, sometimes specialized knowledge of how to find them is still necessary, and so many more resources available requires more "sifting" time than if you don't have a lot of resources. 

I don't have data for this, but I feel that the expectations of professors in the pre-online-database era would have had lower expectations for finding sources for research or turning in polished drafts (when you have to write by hand or on the typewriter, you can't tweak as much).

Socially speaking, people expect you to stay in touch with them—because it's so easy, right?

There's also more uncertainty. Sure, I can access resources more quickly, but that's only when the database is working; when there were only copies of something, you knew you had to plan for going to the library to look at it, or place it on hold, etc. But now we expect to have it all the time, and if it's not there, we're not sure when we can access it again. While we do have convenience past generations never had, We have inconveniences that they didn't have to deal with as well. 

More on the topic of uncertainty—Looking to the future, technology has made it easier to search for jobs (no more are we restricted to looking through the paper for jobs posted), but hasn't it also demanded that we use resources like Monster or LinkedIn in order to be "in the loop" with job finding? And all the other ways that have been concocted to help people find jobs...you need to know those, too. The democratization of access to the internet also means that organizations are still struggling to find preeminence and establish that they're the best. I could also go into how technology is changing the actual jobs that are open, and how people approach making jobs. 

The disruption of technology to the system (economic, social, etc.) may or may not outweigh the ease it brings into our lives, because the uncertainty and higher expectations contribute to our stress, and force us to re-think how we interact socially, how we work, how we play—how to live our lives.

Design with Purpose

After reading the part of the Hunger Games where Katniss and Peeta beat the Capitol by defying the unwritten rules of the game, I thought that this could easily relate to people making companies or websites with a certain use in mind, only to see it changed by the users. The Capitol was furious because Peeta and Katniss turned the power of the Capitol crowds against the gamemakers—just as youtubers started pirating songs and movies on a site intended for sharing personally-shot videos. What's a site to do when its usership loves the site, but for a reason the creators didn't intend?

So, as we're thinking of ways to design our website for the LitMag, I think it's useful to think of ways that people might "defy" our structure, or ways that our structure could lead to the kind of participation we don't want. Sooo....I looked at some other litmags, or writer-workshop-type websites to see what their form told me about what they were looking for and how they wanted people to communicate with them.

The Bird Sisters:

http://thebirdsisters.blogspot.com/2011/03/literary-citizenship-by-cathy-day.html
This site has the feel of a blog, and simply by looking at the layout and design, I would guess that it's mostly a place for the blog owners to highlight authors and write treatises on writing and how to do it better. The parts of the website that clued me in were the lack of tabs (so it's more of a serial site, not an archive or browsing-type site), the picture and "about me" link on the sidebar, and the personal nature of the top blog post.

Narrative:

http://narrativemagazine.com/

This homepage looks somewhat like a news website with its many banners and pictures, its cramming of a lot into as small a space as possible, and some ad-like clutter. This look leads me to believe this website is run like a corporation, and feels a bit distant from its readers. It's a bit intimidating as an author—I feel like my submissions would get lost, and would be seen by inpersonal people of a corporation, instead of a community.

Exquisite Corpse:

http://www.corpse.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=443&Itemid=49

This looks like a text-based tabloid or newspaper with its header font and the way the sidebars, tabs, and banner are formatted. That kind of layout makes it feel more like an online publication, where works go to get presented to the world, as a kind of hyperlinked version of a physical tabloid. There are options to facebook or tweet the articles, but other than that, user interaction is at a minimum (there isn't an option for comments, at least not that I could find at a glance).

Jer's Literary Weblog:

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/

This blog actually looks like a website, but it still retains the "flavor" of a blog because of the name and the personal profile on the side. It's interesting because this blog also sends the message that it is a disseminator of knowledge, that the content provided by the blogger is above the reader—the content is provided top-down for readers to learn from, not for them to talk about. While looking at this site, it struck me that sites that cram a lot of stuff on pages are not only overwhelming, but also discourage participation. The people behind the site seem to be saying "We have so much information to give, we can't spare a breath or a box of free space!" That message doesn't make me want to submit something.

The Orphanage:

http://theorphanagemag.com/

This site's homepage is simple, has tabs, and showcases some pieces with pictures at the bottom. The white space is inviting and makes the site seem more accessible. The submissions tab was readily noticeable, so I saw that this is something they want people to contribute to. There is a sense of community in that the site creators are saying "give us what other people have rejected," the authors preface their pieces with a bit about why it was rejected elsewhere, and there are many options to share the content (Fb, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.). It has a readily noticeable niche (previously rejected writing), show in the banner and the "About us" page. [Sidenote--this makes me wonder if we need to focus more on a niche to set us apart and focus our submissions more.]

How this affects how we design the website:

Our purpose is to create a community that produces, shares, and celebrates each others' art, particularly the written word. Key words: community, share, celebrate. I think the number one way we can avoid "rebellion" is by making it clear what the site is for, not only in a stated purpose, but also in how it looks and how it encourages people to interact with it.

After looking at several websites, including the ones I just talked about, I thought of several ways we could encourage people to use the website in the way we intend: to create community, share, and celebrate art. 

1) Make "submissions" tab obvious.

2) Don't have "about me" sidebar—have an "about us" tab instead. We don't want to make this appear like top-down dictation.

3) Make comments available and obvious so they're essential to how the website works. 

4) Avoid looking too commercial and also avoid looking too one-person-produced—a clean, inviting look is what we want. Then people can come and create a community. 

5) Have white space. We want to invite people in, not intimidate them.

Any other ways we can make a website that helps people create a community where they can share and celebrate their art?

I think we should also look into how voting may backfire, since that is a function that I don't see much on other literary magazine-type sites. 

Saw this sign in the library today, and it made me wonder: Do we lose something when we only read online? What's good about electronic publishing/subscriptions to online content? And more specifically with libraries and educational institutions, how does it change how people access publications? Will it make publications more accessible more quickly? Does it make it easier to control privileged information? 

I did a little digging around and found that some research has been done on this topic. 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC100770/
This research article, although published in 2002, had some interesting information. The results of the study reinforce some of my thoughts on the matter. faculty used print journals while students and fellows used electronic journals. One reason I see for this is that the faculty likely know their way around the print journal section of their institution's library, while students might not. Students, who tend to be younger than faculty, were probably more familiar with online searching and the advantages of using an electronic copy, such as using the search function to find key words in the text.

This page lists out some pros and cons of electronic information: http://ctlonline.net/webreadyplus/lesson10_elecinfo.asp

How Do Hunger Games and Literary Magazines Relate?

As we see in the differences between comments on Ted talks and YouTube videos, how websites are set up, including how they portray their content and how well they show their purpose, influences how people participate on that site. 

One way to look at this interaction between form and participation is to use the arena in the Hunger Games as an analogy. Because of how the hunger games are set up, Katniss doesn't trust Peeta. The premise of the arena—what the gamemakers and the Capitol arranged and set up as the rules and the purpose behind the arena is that the contestants must all kill each other. That is how the game works.

Katniss enters the games knowing the form: you play a part, and the more successful you are at doing that, the more likely you are to receive help and survive the games. Entering the arena, she knows (from watching previous hunger games) that the arena provides some kinds of sustenance, which she will have to find, and that she must play for the unseen audience in order to receive gifts that she needs to survive (cream to heal her intense burns, food that Peeta can eat). Her knowledge of the arena (and on  a larger scale, the games) informs how she acts—she kisses Peeta because she knows the Capitol audience will react favorably.

The frame of the arena also influences how Katniss and Peeta interact. Knowing that in the context of the games only one contestant can ultimately survive, Katniss is wary of Peeta and his acts of friendship. Knowing that most people put on a persona during the interviews to survive, Katniss distrusts Peeta’s declaration of love for her. Knowing that the star-crossed lovers angle was what prompted the gamemakers to change the rule so two tributes could win, Katniss admires Peeta’s ability to act like he’s in love with her. It doesn’t seem likely to her that his declarations of love are real, even though in other contexts she would at least have to confront that possibility.

Ok, now for the connection to literary magazines. Let’s say, for instance, that the intent of the vast majority of online literary magazines is the same as that of printed literary magazines—to provide good content and polish it and give it to the grateful consumer, who reads and enjoys quietly. The purpose of the magazine is to provide literature to be read and enjoyed—in silence. The form of those magazines reflects that, with PDF (static) displays of the works, limited commenting abilities, and scheduled issues that are “published” (sent to the Internet) in chunks. The form fits the purpose—people can read the material made available online, perhaps congratulate the author on a piece well written, and then move on.  

But what if the intent of the website was to provide literature as a center of something to talk about? What if the purpose was to provide the starting place for a great discussion that continues, where even the author can participate? That would be a different model for a literary magazine, different gamemakers.

How would we frame the organization (game)—and in a smaller way, the website (arena)—in such a way that will encourage the kind of participation we want?

We could ask for the author to also send in a video of them explaining their work, or we could randomly pair pieces (including any art or other media we get as submissions) and ask how they relate to one another. That would be more stimulating than just having a piece to respond to or talk about. Participants could request certain pairings, so they could feel that they’re part of the game-making.

Another idea for form is to request that readers write something in response to one of the higher works, and then post that on the site as well. Then the pieces will be interacting, modeling how we want people to interact on the site.

The Capitol created the paradigm of the game arena by forcing all people of Panem to watch the hunger games every year. What cues could we give to people who visit the site so they know what’s going on and how they need to act and interact with other participants? (I hope we wouldn’t have to inform them that the purpose of the forum isn’t to harm other participants...)