Journal 6

Mobility, we have learned, has had a major impact on the world of writing. Due to advances in technology and social media, circulation is faster than ever before. Articles posted minutes before are shared on Facebook, Twitter, etc. for thousands of people to read. But, many of these ideas are not new. Even in writing's beginning, writers put their thoughts on paper (or clay tablets) for others to read and share. Through the process of time, as travel to various countries became more popular, so did the travel of books and other texts, thus contributing to mobility of texts. Due to this, I don't think mobility has necessarily "changed" writing in the long run, but there are exceptions to this. When breaking news occurs, websites such as Buzzfeed, TMZ, etc. will post unedited articles just to get the news out to the public. This has its downfalls because although they are trying to inform the public of an event, they may be putting out an article with grammar mistakes, misleading or untrue information, and so on. We can thank mobility and circulation for this because, according to the news sites, the basis of what’s happening is often more important than fact and grammar checking.

            The concept of collaboration is also interesting to bring into the conversation of mobility. Because we can now post things on the internet for various audiences to see, we are able to connect with people who will read, share, and even make their own comments. It is fairly common to see people write a reply letter to an article that they saw online, either because they liked the ideas, or because they were against it, and wanted to say why. I think because of this, people will read articles and automatically think “how can I reply to this? What can I say to this person to let them know I disagree?” This trend is extremely popular with Facebook, with many people getting into arguments over various topics, such as sports and politics.

Journal #6

I really appreciate how this piece analyzes mobility on several layers.  Kinetic mobility of writers (be they authors, texters, etc) is just as important as the physical, often digital, mobility of the text.  As a whole, both forms interact on a regular basis as a tool for the writer to form and spread writing as efficiently as possible,

Mobility has changed writing on the basis that limitations on audience and information have been stripped away.  If a writer needs evidence to supply content, it’s now far easier to either travel to the source or to “travel” across the internet to borrow from others’ perceptions.  As far as audience, where a writer may formerly be limited to an audience within their locality, modern times grant the ability for widespread publishing so a writer can establish contact with a network interested in their content.

I think one of the greatest things highlighted by mobility is that while we fully utilize all our capabilities with writing, it is in a far more rapid manner than in previous times.  For example, we can compare the age of ancient noodles in China with ancient noodles from the Roman Empire and argue over which was made first, because people are capable of sharing the information, penning papers on the analyzation, and sharing all of the ideas until a consensus is found.  All of this occurs in a fraction of the time it could have taken even just a few decades ago.  Aside from the internet, other developments still prove this concept.  Pamphlets can be front-and-back, laser-ink printed in seconds while a person is in the comfort of their home; these papers are then quickly driven and taped or handed to their destinations, with the entire process costing the creator only a few hours of work.  

With writers fully exploiting the speed of the writing process, and with mobility further connecting writer and audience, writing as a whole simply becomes more efficient.  If the purpose of writing is to achieve a successful spread of information, then this is surely being completed better in our time now than ever before.

Journal Reflection 6

              Mobility has given a great number of affordances to writing, especially in the modern age. Early writing, in fact, most of writing historically, was severely limited by a lack of mobility. This lack of mobility also limited the circulation of written works, but that is another topic. Enhancing mobility has enhanced the level of written work that is being produced.

              Although mobility in writing has been around since the beginning, influencing writers in various ways, it has taken on new meanings in the digital age particularly. Whereas in times past an author may publish a work after a long journey, perhaps by compiling and synthesizing notes taken on the journey, or maybe through a journal, today a writer can write, edit, and publish in real-time while still travelling. This means that the the product the audience is receiving is a more direct reflection of the author’s actual experience.

              Additionally, social media is almost completely reliant upon mobility. Twitter, Snapchat,  Instagram all use mobility in unique ways to convey information to an audience. While Twitter can be used from a desktop platform, it is typically used from a smartphone, and twitter content often involves the daily life of the individual as he or she moves from place to place, recording observations and musings about their day. Snapchat also involves recording a sort of slice of life of the user, relying upon the mobility of a phone to be able to capture via first-person whatever the user thinks is interesting or relevant enough to be shared with an audience. Overall, it  seems that mobility has shifted into the center stage of modern writing, shaping what will come next.

#6- Andrea Terres

Q: How has mobility changed writing? Or alternately, what
does mobility highlight about writing that we may not have realized before? 


A: mobility through social media has changed writing. It has opened up new jobs titles to get and new majors that seem funny but are great for all the new social media jobs, example: Editing, Writing, and Media. Writing has become a short cut. Short cut to words like wat, b/c, gr8, lol, omg, lmao, ect. these words have become a short cut words. This has to do with social media limiting how many characters to write on a post. 

Text can circulate within medias and that mobilizes the text to appear in different platforms. "New mobile technologies keep travelers connected and linked in to their social networks in unprecedented ways."(Molz). Connecting your social medias account is easy now. With big companies like google and Facebook buying smaller companies and integrating themselves within each other makes it easier to post one thing and it moving to every social media you own. 

In a way mobility does hurt writing because with limited characters we have become adapted to using emojis to express the feeling or tone of the text. Adding an angry face to enforce anger or a silly face to backup the sarcastic mood has become a new way of setting tone in writing. Writing essays and papers are harder for younger generations because we have become accustomed to writing short to the point ideas that explaining that idea in 5 paragraphs is hard for them. 

Journal#6 - Eric Calderon

The main way that I think mobility has changed writing is by how the author approaches how he or she will write the piece to begin with. With the emergence of the internet and social media, it is now a lot easier than probably ever before to get a writing piece out to the public. We no longer have to depend on paper exclusively to get a large audience to see either scholarly articles, short stories, or novels, since we live in a world that has several types of mediums that we can now look at writing on anywhere that internet connection is relatively available. Even now, with the emergence with e readers like the Kindle, you can now download entire novels to this device and read it anytime you chose to. Also, our internet dominant society has allowed the audience for a writing piece to expand drastically, to say the very least. When a writer posts his or her writing piece to either a magazine website, or a social media website like Facebook or Twitter, within seconds, it can be shared across thousands all the way to millions of people .The restrictions that existed twenty years ago are much different than the ones that existed one hundred years ago, costs and ability to not only spread writing to a large amount of people, was extremely more difficult than it is today. Now, we no longer have to worry about the ability to spread writing to the entire world, since it is now far easier to spread the This can be a good thing and a bad thing, in the sense that many people can have an opinion on this topic, which can create dialogue if the article requires or implies it. However, there is a great chance that a large audience can take a writing piece heavily out of context, which can hinder the overall perception of the wiring piece and ruin the intention of the writing piece. Overall, there are significant advantages of the mobility of a piece of writing being exploited to its maximum potential. The amount of people who can access the given piece of writing can both help and hurt the writing piece.

Journal #6 - Megan Quinn

In historical context, mobility of text has been responsible for the spread of literacy throughout societies. From its origins in cumbersome clay tablets to papyrus to parchment to books, the evolution of bookmaking has increasingly made movement of literature easier. What mobility has given writing is expansion and versatility. The Internet is responsible for creating greater connectivity across societies. Molz discusses travelers and the variety of ways they work together to share advice, information, or how to contact family and friends in remote places. Combined with recent advancements in technology, obtaining information is nearly an instantaneous process. Mobility has transformed from the physical transportation of texts to the accessibility of information online.

Molz also brings to mind the concept of collaboration in connection to mobility. Writing can usually be thought of as one person composing a text. Due to the ingenuity of the Internet, writing now has the capabilities of allowing two or more people to work together in writing. An example Molz uses is Wikitravel. Anyone is capable of contributing or modifying information to articles for other travelers to utilize. Online forums are another example of collaboration, as are social media websites. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have made it remarkably easy for one user to respond to another. Facebook allows its users to create specialized group pages designed specifically to allow for collaboration.

Mobility assists in highlighting writing as a tool of interaction in addition to its long-understood use of disseminating knowledge. Technology makes it easier for people to combine writing and ideas. To return to Molz's main topic, traveling has become a collaborative effort as people create blogs and articles to share their experiences and to ask for help or for ideas on how to spend time. A new craze circling on the Internet are blogs showcasing how to travel on $20 a day or featuring a similar concept. The purpose of all this information is to encourage others to partake in traveling and form their own experiences. Writing, at its core, is about the spread of knowledge.

Journal 6 Chris D'Avanzo

            It may not be fair to say that mobility changed writing. The inherent fundamentals of the writing process, the central discourse between those crafting text and those interacting with it, doesn’t change because the writing became more mobile. Mobility is an enhancer to text, allowing the greater spread of content across different forms of media, creating new audiences otherwise not possible to have. Molz discusses the idea of connectivity in her book, the idea that people from reaches otherwise not connected have some sort of means through which to enter discourse. The fact is that this just the idea of community on a macro-scale. It’s been discussed numerous times by different authors read in this course that one the key elements of writing is the connections shared by the author and the reader. Mobility expands that concept. It doesn’t fundamentally change it in any real way, but it certainly fits in with that central theme.

            Digital mobility is what stands out as the obvious example. Information online exists in every corner, in every language, and all things being equal, is available to anyone who finds themselves there. The mobility provided by that digital technology comes in the form of being able to explore that information in the only feasible manor. Consider the example of having to find five books in five libraries and the amount of effort that action would take. Being able to access those same five books through digital technology means that people have a means to fully gain access to information not always possible to access before.

As Molz alluded to, however, her with examples, ancient forms of writing such as stone tablets and papyrus or the modern equivalents of computers and smartphones, mobility has always been part of the writing process. It is nothing new or unprecedented. But the mobility provided by the rise of digital technology and the communities that are created as a result are certainly new, and have mobility to thank.

            

Journal 6 - Van Williamson

Because we come up with ideas and generate knowledge when we are mobile, it only makes sense that we would want to share it as soon as possible. Writing and instant access to social networks allows us to always be in contact with others, so that we are never really “alone” anymore. To me, this makes writing almost feel like a tether of some sort. If we go out in the world looking for new experiences and trying to understand a world apart from our own, the act of writing and sharing ones experience without any delay keeps us in our old world. All the assumptions, subtly racist fears, and marketing campaigns stay with us no matter where are. One time I went to Thailand for a month over the summer, where I found myself avoiding social media even when the internet connection was decent. People from home would ask me ridiculous questions like “Can you drink the water there?” Their concept of a foreign place was so far gone and misinformed by the culture they live in that I didn’t even want to speak to them, because they wouldn’t get it.

I honestly think travel blogs and the like are cheap, almost dishonest. People try to write about their experience and what they learned, but most of the time it just feels like they’re trying to share the same view you could get over here. The inability to detach oneself from their original place of learning keeps us ignorant, because we thicken the delusional filter of American perception. We try to explain everything in our own terms, as if the people of Thailand or Haiti see the world as miserably and perspectiveless as us. This isn’t to say that writing stops us from thinking, but I think the connectivity we have available only strengthens the ignorance we try to get rid of when we travel. If we could put down our thoughts and let them sit a while, so that the whole experience can wash over us, we might figure something out about how other humans live and think. Instead, we lay down in a hostel bed and just hammer out what happened that day so everyone can see. See? See what I did today? I didn’t listen to anyone, but I looked around and saw cool stuff that gave me more American ideas.

Jack Quinn - Journal #6

In the modern world the incredible mobility we have available to us rarely crosses our minds. It’s hard to imagine a world where ideas can’t be spread instantly. A world where the latest news transports to a device in your pocket instantly. A world where a computer can be can be carried in a backpack. To really appreciate the mobility of the modern world it is important to compare it to the past.

Early rhetoricians established schools. They had small dedicated groups of students that learned the teachings of Aristotle and Plato. These students were the earliest form of a network and up until then were the primary platform to give an idea mobility.

This limitation could be seen in the writing. Spreading simply by word of mouth meant that every person’s opinions and experiences would shape how the next person receives the ideas. Not having the wealth of information available to us now instantly meant that research was a tedious and a rarely accurate process.

With the printing press we saw improved mobility. Now ideas were written down and copied, meaning that they would retain their original meaning. Collections of books and texts were available to those who had accesses to physical copies of them. Writing became more crafted for a wider audience.

Fast forward to the modern day. With technologies available to us now writing is different than ever before. Essays are published online and available to everyone. Books can be immediately searched and downloaded. Hundreds of thousands of articles are published every day and videos of the latest speech or rally are always available.

The sheer availability of knowledge has allowed for a massive spread of ideas and a monumental improvement in research. We are a smarter and more well-read species due to our new technologies whether we realize it or not.

Many argue that the internet and computers is slowly killing local libraries and by extension research and primary documents. While casual writing and opinions may be favorable online, the idea that the internet is making research irrelevant is simply absurd. Mobility has made writing into a more researched and higher quality essential part of the world we live in.

Journal 6- Mia Batansky

From the beginning of time, there has always been mobility. Although the definition and the act itself have evolved over time, it has always basically been the same thing. Molz introduces mobility to the reader say that it has always been there since the beginning. She uses examples of connectivity and collaboration to show how mobility can occur. She uses the example of traveling and how people are able to connect and collaboration with each other throughout their trips. She always talks about how through mobility, people are able to create communities.

            I believe mobility has been able to change writing due to technological advances. Nowadays, people are able to constantly be writing as long as they have some kind of technology with them. Anyone who wants to be a writer is given the opportunity to be one because of technology. They can also post whenever and wherever. With that being said, just like Molz states, technology has helped mobility to create a connectivity between people. Due to social media, people all over the world are able to connect with whoever they want if they desire to. Molz gives the example of how new technology allows for people who are traveling to connect with those at home through interactive traveling. For example, people are able to share pictures, update their Facebook status, even snapchat what they are doing. Molz explains how collaboration is an aspect of mobility by giving the example of travels being able to ask other people who may have visited that place how long they should stay there or what the best restaurants to eat at are located. In the current 21^st century, technology has a big part of how mobility works. Before technology was created, people had to spread they work by paper. Now, people are able to send emails and even upload their work to websites. Due to such how technological advances, more and more people are given the opportunity to become writers. Without mobility, people would not be able to have their pieces read and without technology, not as many people would be able to read what they have written.