What is the social in social media?

What if social media websites like Facebook take over our face-to-face communications, what will happen to our friendship, is it going to be on Facebook? Is it going to fade out and we no longer are able to communicate face to face? Well ­no one knows what happens. 

According to Albert Benschop“If people define networks as real, they are real in their consequences.” For Benschop, the Internet is not some “second-hand world.” The same could be said of the social. There is no second life, with different social rules and conventions. 

Basically, the online world is not like the real world; it is not the place we can communicate we whoever we want, or if we want, we wont.

However, every conversation we make on Facebook as communication with others is much simpler and faster but it still does not replace the face-to-face conversations.   

Social media websites has become an important issue to millions of people life, each person in any age have a Facebook or twitter, and people are connected to each other from commenting posting on each other’s wall so this has become a new life for them. Most of them cannot resist to not having a page for themselves.

This is how social life will work, people post the stuff make it creative, mixed up, others share it with their friends their friends also share them, people comment on them, it goes on and on the data goes around the social network websites so rapidly. The way programmers do it and the way we all live in this social net work virtual world.  

  

Print and pixel

The revolution of rising digital publishing is pretty significant and it is spreading all over. The day will come that there wont me much hard copies of books in bookshelves or stores.

The revolution did not start just with PDF and digitals books online, it started with the very first innovation that Gutenberg made which was a machine with hand-cast movable type, it was the beginning of book publishing and what we have now days as digital books. It literally made the human mind to think of how a book is made, and later on how it can be replaced by something more accessible to anyone. It became to be PDFs or articles of the books on websites, iBook, and iTunes.

So it is a new way of reading, understanding and giving people knowledge about anything.

Walter Benjamin

In this essay Walter Benjamin discusses issues about historicism and historical materialism through the present days.  He points out these two concepts sees the history, one of them which is the historicism see the past but out of unknown place, but the historical materialism sees it as time that makes history be still in the present.

He also explains a process which is appear in the one of the Klee’s paintings “Angelus Novus” which is an angle that doesn’t have wings، his mouth is open and according to Walter Benjamin his face is toward the past therefore, it is shows that the painting is against the future and is still in the past. It is what he calls the progress, which we never achieve if we go toward the future. He defines the future like a storm that destroys everything so he calls it the progress. A progress which we all have to get out of it and think of our future, and how we face it, or how it is going to happen; these are the things we never understand in terms of knowing the future. It is like something that we don’t know what we will see in heaven as Benjamin says.  I think this progress that he talks about is a pretty magnificent thing that we all have to wait for it and see what happens. 

post artifact

Mod believes that digital book changes the way of reading books. It is significant change that gives away the old bounded book and replace it with digital books, simply through kindles, or IPhones.  It made the way of reading easier and faster plus it saves the time.

Reading books digitally is significantly easier and faster, now days most people prefer to read digitally because they don’t want old fashioned books with hard bounding. Bounding hard cover books will eventually destroy through time. So it is much better to use digital book that never get old or destroy.

According to Mod “The future book, the digital book is no longer an immutable brick. It's ethereal and networked, emerging publicly in fits and starts. An artifact completes for only the briefest of moments. Shifting deliberately. Layered with our shared marginalia. And demanding engagement with the promise of community implicit in its form.”

So it is more efficient to use digital book also because we don’t waste paper anymore to

make a book.

Book

Book Link

Medium

The medium is the message

To really think about what medium is we can refer to many things. It basically, defines that everything has a content, which is related to another one. It is translations of something that is creating but first cause of it was a medium that happened to start a particular medium.

The thing that appears in McLuhan’s essay is that there is a cause to everything that has been created, it brings up the common question we all heard about, chicken came first or an egg, the answer can go on and on with different reasons. What appears in the essay is that actually the chicken was the reason behind having eggs, so this chronological order happen that there should be a chicken, as a source to have the egg.

I think there is a reason and order for things to happen around us, mediums happen to help us in different ways, to either exceed our life and ability or help to improve it. For instance, a printer created to ease our work of developing texts, photos, and other things to improve our works so we don’t have to do old fashion traditional way of printing. Another example is technology, it happened to help us to do things faster such as computers and phones.    

Print on demand, the balance of power between paper and pixel

Printing on demand had an extreme change on printing process. It has many beneficial potential to paper printing.  There are some reasons that printing on demand is better, it can save more papers, many people can have access to copies of book much easier, it can sell through websites like amazon, and people can avoid handling hard copy papers.  It also changes the fundamental of publishing books.

POD printing made the possibility for people and publishers to make PDF files and be able to sell them online within few days. As the essay points out “ Anyone can easily raise the nominal charge (typically much less than 100 euros) required to publish a book or magazine”. Furthermore, the only technical knowledge required is the ability to properly generate a PDF file you can also spend few hundred euros more, and have the POD generated it for you. For example, the book “My life in tweets” by James bridles in graphic format, which can be purchased for display; that made this possible to have tweets format.

I think it is more efficient to use, it allows the customers to choose their own content in which case that each customer have another possibility of POD is, people can update their content, so each content can be update all the time and it is by author, publishers, user and contributors.  It also makes it possible for huge number of printing on screen and it is easy to use, it is also affordable and more accesses able than actual book.

Overall I think POD had big impact on the way of publishing books and accessing it to everybody with easier way, that is cheap and pleasant, and it is almost about what paper is about.