Chapters 4-6: Windows & Mirrors

These chapters had a few different topics connecting to transparency and reflectiveness. The magic book reminded me of a futuristic idea of having people virtually pop up, right in front of you. This book is a mere remediation and creates an experience that people find rather fascinating. I personally found this magic book to be fascinating. It’s hard to imagine a book being combined with a three dimensional experience. I think it would take away from the experience of a book in itself. I also believe the content would get miscommunicated through the extra experience. The book gave an example of children being able to create this imaginative world that the digital lorgnette creates. However, small children cannot read the content of the book through words but rather by the images; therefore they have more control of what the book would mean to them, and adults will read the words and define them as far as their knowledge will allow them. Its evident this is an interesting phenomenon, but I am not sure how I would personally feel about such an experience. The world all around us is constantly undergoing remediation and convergence, not just on a technological level. The example of art I felt was perfect because art is something that anyone can do as long as they have ideas. It is an ambiguous field and they are able to constantly try new things and merge a variety of things. This also helps explain diversity of the worldwide web which I thought was pretty simplistic in a sense that there are millions, maybe even billions of users involved and each website has a target they are trying to reach. Cyberspace brings all of these mediums that together. Unfortunately, because of how society is so consumed into social media, cyberspace has no choice but to become a part of our world. I agree that cyberspace is essentially an extension of our social world, which shines through social media.