The Garden of Forking Paths
First Chapter by Jorge Luis Borges, 1941
This certainly is an intriguing and morbid story. It is fascinating though that someone found a connection between this story and hypertext or even took the story as an inspiration.
I remember loving those stories as a child. For easter me and my siblings would each get an “old fashioned hypertext”, a book that gave you options, ‘if you want this to happen continue on page 5, if you want that to happen continue on page 10′
Hypertext also seems like an interesting class project. Each student could work on one path of the story.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Two introductions
Inventing the Medium
Janet Murray
This introduction gave very detailed information of what is to come in the book. It sort of summarizes the chapters, but not really. Actually Murray kept referring to passages in the book and to me it felt I can only fully understand what she is talking about once I read the chapters. So I felt like her introduction would have been better as a sort of summary, because she reflected on the book and shared her thoughts with us in the chronological order of the development of New Media.
New Media from Borges to HTML
Lev Manovich
Well this article starts out much different. The author talks about my hometown right on the first page and the fact that he thinks my hometown Karlsruhe is this important just makes him sympathetic. 
His approach to introducing the New Media to us, just seems much more interesting to me because he compares cultures and tries to give answers to the question why there was such a big difference between European and American New Media development and the Art involved. I am fascinated by cultures and just love to explore and understand the differences. I also am the generation that got to experience the development of this New Media first hand. And I can relate to what he tells us about paying for the internet by the minute. Though flat rates are becoming more common nowadays, that still wasn’t the case 2 years ago and there are still plenty of people who pay by the minute in Europe to this day.
Manovich gives us definitions of New Media, so his introduction complements Murrays introduction very well. They have such contrary ways of introducing the book which makes me even more interested in what there is to come.
To get started-introduction
This blog is for the Intro to New Media class, so if you aren’t interested in New Media don’t read it…
Most blog entries will be thoughts on the class readings and most readings will be from “The New Media Reader”
Enjoy!
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