The Hejirascope reminded me of a lot of things. At first because of the way the stories just seemed to end, it reminded me a lot of Italo Calvino’s On A Winter’s Night a Traveler. After reading for a little bit longer, I then started to compare it to the Create Your Own Adventure books. For obvious reasons, you have a choice on which link out of the four to click on. There were two ways which I found seperated this exercise from a CYOA story. The first is that the stories typically don’t match up. I think I did click on one link that went to what seemed like an extension of the previous link. Another way that they are seperate is that there seems to be a time limit. You are given a certain amount of time to read each blurb that comes up, and then to choose a link or destination. Thanks to the ‘back’ button, however, it is up to you whether or not time is a factor. The first time I ran through it, I hit the back button every time it cut me off. After about 10 minutes of this, I decided to just go with the flow and see where it takes me. Just as if I chose my own destinations, the resulting pages that came up were just as random as the ones that preceeded them. At times though, some of the blurbs did match up — only not in succession. An example of this are the stories of Mr. Perlmutter. In a matter of about 5 straight minutes, I read about three or four blurbs on him, but at very random times. It seemed like you’d get the end of his story in one blurb, and then the beginning of his story in another. In a way, it did sort of tie things together. Maybe I just read too much into though.
I couldn’t help but notice the aesthetics of the site itself. Due to the color combinations of the text and the background, it was very easy to read the text. However, I think that because almost every successive page presented a different look to it — sometimes a radical change, not a sublte one — it seemed to be more of a distraction than anything to me. I’m not the quickest reader, so the changes threw me off and sort of frustrated me at the same time. This activity did relate to the Bush piece on how technology is changing and has the ability to advance. The internet is a new media that has given this Hejirascope the chance for being. Without the Internet, it may not have the same affect, say if it were presented to a person through note/flash cards or something like that. The immediacy of it is what makes it important. The ability of the media and technology to keep on throwing the new blurbs out on a timeline, for example, is what makes this activity effective.
You know you’re college student when it’s past in the morning and you’re blogging for a class. hehe…
Anyways, I just read Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think.” Basically Bush describes and predicts various inventions for the future that will come as science and techology advances. It takes place in 1945 which just after WWII. He talks about how what will scientist do after taking part in the war effort. He talks discusses how physicists ” left academic pursuits for the making of strange destructive gadgets.” I knew instantly that he was refering to the atomic bomb. He then says “where they will find objectives worthy of their best. ” I think for physicists this was maybe the beginning of the Golden Era of the Nuclear Age where people had a love affair with nuclear power it seems. The splitting of the atom is scientifully named fission. In fission, a neutron hits an atom. The atom splits releasing more neutrons which hit more atoms. This is a chain reaction that goes very fast. The heat and energy created by fission could level cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki which was deomostrated via the atomic bomb. However, the technology and science used to destroy cities was later used to power cities. This was before many knew of how dangerous radiation and radiactive was could be.
Bush talks about all of these great inventions that may come in the future. He talked about a miniature camera. Today there are very small digital cameras that built on thin circuit boards and that have like a pinhole aperture to them. I don’t think he would have foreseen digital photography. He predicts the creation of a personal device called the memex which stores vast amounts of information on microfilm. He was right in predicting this device. However instead of the being called a memex, we have “notebook” computers. Instead of microfilm, it stores information on a harddrive. Another modern day tool is that is similiar to his memex prediction is the PDA’s that a lot of people use in their everyday life. He also talks about something that scans a replicates a picture. This implies what would become the xerox machine. He discusses a card used for credit. This grew into the modern day credit card with it’s magnetic strip. He talks about being able to matching fingerprints fast on machines. Today there are databases on computers that contain thousands of fingerprints. A set of prints can be compared to the ones in a database very fast. Bush was fairly accurate in developping ideas what future devices coudl be able to. However, they did not exactly develop and work the way he expected.