The Song of the Alphabet in Cyber-Space

1. What are the differences between the pre-literate acoustic world and the alphabetical visual world? How does the media of television become a part of the acoustic world?

        A pre-literate acoustic space comes before the alphabet. It is the world view through pre-illiterate eyes, a world of no boundaries in which information emerges not from fixed positions, but anywhere and everywhere; total immersion. The alphabetic visual word is different, as it was formed as texts only capable of being translated by those that are capable of doing so. It is a fixed place in which media is filtered and distributed by a more singular means. Television can become a part of the acoustic world because it can obtain and distribute content from anywhere and everywhere, and can allow a form of total immersion.

2. Why does the alphabet have the segregating tendencies? How exactly does the printing press reverse the segregating tendencies?

        The alphabet has segregating tendencies because it was only able to be interpreted by those who were able to, and that single person would then carry the message out to the masses, The printing press, however, has been able to reverse that effect, because it now allows more people to reach out to a much wider audience, and that way the information becomes much more true to the original creator, and not as open to interpretation.

3. How was the alphabetic communication in online communication make cyberspace acoustic? How is the online acoustic world different from the television, radio, or print acoustic world?

        The alphabetic communication in online communication makes cyberspace acoustic, because the alphabet itself is a set structure in which we base our languages and communications off of. We are still using the alphabet as it was in strictly print form, now just in a different medium. There is a major difference between online communication and that of radio, television, or print, because the internet gives us the ability to alter and change in the fly, creating a sort of avenue for evolution of our own means of communicating. 

4. Not only do we invent media and media technologies but also we select their uses in different contexts. What are two selection criteria? According to the selection criteria, please discuss what will happen to our online communication in 20 years.

        The two types of criteria are: 1. We want media to extend our communications beyond the biological boundaries of naked seeing and hearing, and 2. We want media to recapture elements of that biological communication which early artificial extensions may have lost- we want, in other words, our hearth of natural communication even as we exceed it in our extensions. According to this criteria, communication will be constantly evolving until the end of time. Just as many of our means of technology have replaced the more primitive versions of themselves, the current iterations of our gadgets will eventually be replaced with more efficient, necessary versions.