Week 2 Lecture Notes covered personal connections and blogging from assigned readings. It discussed the development of digital media from early internet use by scientists for communication and how personal desires drove growth. New technologies like radio, telegraph and refrigerator found unexpected major uses. The internet was initially text-only and used by scientists; personal use grew it. Early communication tools included talk and chat rooms. Gaming and the World Wide Web developed the internet further. New media users have expanded from developers and students to most Americans and other countries by 2014, though global use still varies demographically. Blogs can provide firsthand reports, overlooked stories, and filter other news according to interests, intersecting with journalism. Bloggers differ from journalists in fact

1. Week 2 Lecture Notes
Blogging: chap 4 (pages 90-114)
Personal Connections: part of chap one (pages 13 – 23)
Everybody Writes: Part One: Sections 3-6 (pages 20 – 32), plus section 8 (pages
36 – 40)

2. interpersonal
appeal ofdigital
media shaped its
development
 From the development of the Internet in 1969 the
scientist started emailing each other even before the
whole thing was operational.
 From the text “The Internet was not built as a personal
communication medium” (Baym, 2015, p.14). The
human desire for connection drove the growth of the
internet (p.18).
 “When the first internet connection was made in 1969
through what was then called ARPANET, funded by
the U. S. Department of Defense, no one envisioned
that an interpersonal communication medium had
been launched” (Baym, 2015, p.14).

3. Personal usesthat
drive adaption to
newtechnology
 Gutenberg’s printed press had a personal application.
 The Wall Street Journal (Jan 4, 2018) reported a
University of Oxford researcher finding and indexing
the half a million books printed between 1450 (when
the press was invented) and 1500. The top sellers were
grammar manuals teaching people how to read.
 Dr. Dondi told the WSJ, “We are finally proving the
link between literacy and the printing revolution”
(Clark, 2018).
 Radio was invented to be point-to-point communication
and became point-to-many communication
 The telegraph and refrigerator are techs where an
unexpected use became the main use

4. Thetextual
Internet
 Began in the Department of Defense ARPANET
 Internet was text-only for 25 years.
 Users were scientists and academians
 After the military handoff in 1979, the Internet is
funded and maintained by the National Science
Foundation, which prohibited commercial activity.
 NO ONE expected the general public to have a lick of
interest in the Internet. Bill Gates famously admitted
in an interview in July of 1998: “Sometimes we do get
taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet
came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority.”

5. “Talk”
 “Talk” was an early synchronous Internet
communication genre” (Baym, 2015, p.15).
 Talk was followed by “ Internet Relay Chat” (IRC) and
later by chat rooms.
 Instant Messaging (an advanced version of Talk)
developed in the 1990s.
 IM is a person-to-person medium.
 Mailing lists came along with email, allowing a single
message to be sent to a wide audience.
 In the 1980s came Usenet groups, asynchronous topic-
based discussion forums distributed across multiple
servers. Sadly, Usenets groups are spam magnets!

6. Gaming
developed during
early Internet
 In the 1970s, Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw
developed MUD1 and Alan Klietz developedSceptre of
Goth, interactive online role-playing games .
 Later came MUDs, MOOs, MUCKs, and MUSHers—
all creative environments for gaming.
 Video gaming developed into a $21billion industry from
those early efforts

7. TheWorldWide
Web
 Tim Berners-Lee developed HTLM in the 1990s to
allow images and graphics
 Mosaic browser released free in 1993
 web boards, blogs, wikis, social network sites, video
and photo sharing sites, and graphically intensive
virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and League of
Legends.


8. Web2.0
emergedinthe
2000s
 Characterized by user-generated content
 Wikis such as Wikipedia collected user-generated
content
 Blogs are Web2.0 because blogs are linked to other
blogs, creating a social network site.
 Blogs include a blogroll, a list of hyperlinks to other
blogs that creates connections and drives traffic.
 Social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook,
MySpace, LinkedIn are created.
 We live in a “polymedia” environment where media can
be embedded in one another and all media form
contexts for the others.

9. Whousesnew
digitalmedia?
 In the early years, only the developers used new media
 By 1980s, scientists at universities and college
students used new media.
 During the 1980s, the internet was noncommercial,
and people gained connections through CompuServe,
America Online, and Prodigy
 Access gradually spread to other countries, especially
the UK and Northern Europe.
 In 1994-95 the National Science Foundation stopped
its funding and the Internet became commercial

10. Demographic
differences in
usersin2014
 Whites were 10 percent more likely to use new media
than Hispanics.
 Among young people 98 – 29) 98 percent used the
Internet
 Only 56 percent of people over 65 used the Internet
 In households earning less than $30,000/year, 76
percent used the Internet
 In households earning more than $75,000/year, 96
percent used the Internet
 Of non-high school graduates, only 59 percent used the
Internet
 Of college graduates, 96 percent used the
Internet

11. GlobalStatistics
 Men are 11 percent more likely than women to use the
Internet
 76.7 percent of North Americans use the Internet
 67.6 percent of Australians use the Internet
 63.2 percent of Europeans use the Internet
 42.9 percent of Latin Americans use the Internet
 40.2 percent of Middle Easterners
 27.5 percent of Asians
 15.6 percent of Africans
Much of the global population is illiterate, so mobile
phone use is higher in areas with low Internet use.

12. 3waysblogs
intersectwith
journalism
 1- Blogs give firsthand reports from ongoing event
 2- Bloggers tell stories that mainstream media ignore
 3- Bloggers follow mainstream stories according to
their interests and filter stories according to their
interests.
 Bloggers are gatekeepers for stories and issues,
opening the content that could otherwise be overlooked
by mainstream media.
 Filter bloggers who focus specifically on topics covered
in the news media have been called gatewatchers.

13. How bloggers
differfrom
journalists
 Bloggers fail to engage in the following journalistic
practices required of journalists:
Objective writing,
Avoiding becoming part of the news being covered
Directly quoting sources
Fact checking
Posting corrections
Receiving permission to post copyright material
Linking to original source material out of the blog

14. Youneeda
writingprocess.
 The Everybody Writes text offers a 12-step process for your
consideration.
 Know your goal
 Reframe: put your reader into it
 Seek out data and examples
 Organize
 Write to one person
 Produce the ugle first draft
 Walk away
 Rewrite
 Give it a great headline or title (more on this later in the course)
 Have someone edit
 One final look for readability (Note: See the handout in Week 3
Readability Statistics)
 Publish, but not without answering one more reader question: what
now?

15. References
• Among the Audience (April 20, 2006). The Economist Magazine.
Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/node/6794156
• Baym, N. (2015). Personal connections in the digital age (2nd ed).
Malden, MA: Polity Press.
• Clark, J. (Jan. 4, 2018). Mapping the power of the printed word.
The Wall Street Journal A-9.
• Cox, K. (2014). It's Time to Start Treating Video Game Industry
like the $21 Billion Business it is. Retrieved from
http://consumerist.com/2014/06/09/its-time-to-start-treating-video-
game-industry-like-the-21-billion-business-it-is/
• Handley, A. (2014). Everybody writes: Your go-to guide to creating
ridicuously good content (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
• How video gaming can be beneficial for the brain. (2014).
Retrieved from http://www.mpg.de/7588840/video-games-
brain?filter_order=L&research_topic=
• Rettberg, J.W., (2013). Blogging (2nd ed). Malden, MA: Polity
Press.