"Counting Electric Sheep" & "Cut, Copy, and Paste"

WOW, what a way to begin this semester. Both of these assigned readings were exciting, insightful and very interesting. In my personal opinion, I found “Cut, Copy, and Paste” a bit more interesting. The reason being is that most of the material covered in “Counting Electric Sheep: Understanding Information in Context of Media Ecology” I learned in the Media Ecology course, which was offered in the fall 2013 semester.  It was still very fascinating to reenter the field of media ecology and expand my knowledge of its theories. This article was very well written and it allowed me to comprehend some of the aspects that I didn’t understand when I took the Media ecology course.

In Professor Strate's article "Cut, Copy, and Paste” he compares the three basic computer editing functions to historical tools in which they were developed from. I found this article very intriguing because of the knowledge I’ve obtained such as the fact that stone tools were the innovation for modern technology today. Before reading this I would have never thought to even compare the two tools but now I realize that although there is a substantial gap in years between, stone tools and modern technology in one way or another correlate.  In a quote by Professor Strate, he stated “Just as our ancestors used stone tools to hunt, gather, and process their food, we use digital tools to hunt and gather alphanumeric data,and to process words, numbers, images, and sounds.” This quote puts this article into clear perspective in my opinion because it shows the correlation between the tools and there usage.

Overall, both articles were great reads and if these two readings are any indication of the future assigned readings, I’m very excited for this semester!