Inventing the Medium

"Inventing the Medium" - Janet H. Murray, Introduction 1 of New Media Reader

Murray begins by using two figures: Borges a humanist, and Bush an engineer, to establish a set of dualisms that compliment each other throughout a linear historical narrative of New Media. She does a good job of organizing the content of the chapter around these two frames of thought (humanism and technology) by picking apart each decade and technological advancement in computing and analyzing how each stream of thinking either was relative or impacted changes creating a new discourse surrounding computers.

Although this chapter was more ideology-oriented than expected, I think it captured the essence of what we love so much about technology, and for me specifically, the extreme captivation and awe I have over the web.

Particularly for me, the fusion of humanism and technology hold great personal weight. I encounter some collaboration of the two on a daily basis and find that when the two compliment each other just right, a truly amazing phenomena occurs.

What comes to mind is a client my company works for, Wordnik. Wordnik was founded by Erin McKean, an editor of the American Oxford Dictionary. As she so eloquently explains in her talk at TED in 2007 on "Redefining the Dictionary," there seems to be no place online that actually fits her needs as a linguist and lexicographer. Yes there are online dictionaries but they are merely digital versions of their print counterparts without the fun (for word nerds like me) serendipitous element to it.

To remedy this issue, she began a project, now a startup with web 2.0 capabilities. Quite simply it functions as a search. It is a data archiving system, the same way a dictionary is. What the site does differently is try to archive words in a new way. Wordnik does not edit new words. McKean believes that any word be it slang, made up or traditionally in the dictionary deserves to be not just culturally recognized but systematically archived as well.

Erin and the team at Wordnik archive in a unique way. For example when a word is looked up - seriously try it - there are definitions from multiple dictionaries, excerpts from essays, poems, articles, etc., pictures from flickr, real-time updates from Twitter with usages of the word, user comments and graphs, origins and history on words.

McKean articulates it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4VzuWmN8zY

With this, I begin my journey into the digital world not just as a blogger but as a employee, and finally as a student.