Web 1.0

September 17, 2008’s reading for com 430z was titled “New media and web production” by Jason Whitaker, which was published in 2002 in The Internet: The basics. This reading was very tough for me to stay interested in. To me it was basically a list of internet and computer technologies followed by a wordy explanation of each.

In the introduction Whitaker explains that new and old media can be viewed as being closely related. New media are just developments of the old ones. He then goes on to say there are two main differences between new and old media; the first being that digital formats, like CDs, are becoming way more popular than analog, like tapes and vinyl’s, which we can see for ourselves. The main difference in format between analog and digital is that “analog is a continuing stream of data and digital information is discrete with distinct breaks between one piece of data and the next (Whitaker pg.58)” I want to add that the author gives a good analogy to describe these two. He says, "analog can be compared to a rolling down a hill and digital would be like walking down steps" (Whitaker pg. 58). From the reading I see there are many advantages to this switch, like the fact that video and picture production and editing are much easier and efficient. Whitaker explains that this does not mean that people automatically think these are better (Whitaker pg.58). I noticed that many people who are professional photographers will not use digital cameras. There are also many people that say vinyls sound more authentic than CDs do today.

Now, after a brief mention of hypertext is where the reading gets though. The author goes on to mention and explain, digital imaging, audio and video, AV basics, Web Radio, webcasting and DVD, web production, HTML, Colour and images, Hyperlinks, and finally Scripting and Java. These are all hard to give a brief summary on so I would suggest to find which of these you think you would be interested in and do a little research. I think it can be interesting, just not all at once. Whitaker, Jason. (2002). The Internet: The basics (chapter 3). New York: Routledge