The Medium is the Message

This blog post is for the lecture on September 26^th, 2019.

The revolutionary idea of hypertext brings me back to a blog post a few posts back: the idea that older generations have a linear train of thought and the newer generations have almost a “multi-tasking” manner of analysis. I believe the examples I used included Judge Judy and a new show like Judge Faith. (I’m a fan of the court shows obviously.) Judge Judy, who is around 70 currently grew up in a drastically different world than Judge Faith and I did. I would venture to say the hyperlink contributes to the reason current generations think this way. Before the hyperlink, people were required to read literature in a linear manner, from start to finish in a chronological fashion using the page numbers. If you skipped to the middle of the book, you would miss connections due to the author assuming you have read everything prior. However, with hyperlinks it is possible to skip to the “middle” of an idea on the internet to get more information. Plus, authors using hyperlink are going to assume that you are going to skip certain parts and thus will reiterate parts more often in order to make sure if you skipped the page you still get the point. This jumping system has allowed, or even trained, the current generations to be able to pause mid-thought, read some other relevant information, and then continue on the original thought without losing the point.

I suppose that means younger people are the hyperlinks of our population.

Additionally, the revolutionary nature of the access of information literally changed the way the world thought. People that weren’t defense agencies all of the sudden had access to all of this information that was not available before. The world of paper pages has now become the world of internet pages! Advertisers, too, have access to a whole new world to sell and push products and companies to people that aren’t even in their state. Companies were also allowed to get information on the people they were advertising to, or hiring. This also started the idea that once something is put on the internet, there is no way of getting it off because it’s everywhere. Without a central source, it’s impossible to delete something from every source. In the end, it’s best to write on paper the things that could come back to haunt you, or else you might end up like this guy: