Tag Archives: hypertext

The WWW, the Transformers film, and language-learning

Uncategorized, , , ,

I mean, were the scriptwriters serious?! " We’ve learned Earth’s languages through the World Wide Web"?!

This just tore me up a bit, but its not the first time that screenwriters have displayed such an utter misunderstanding of the Internet; for one, the fact that the World Wide Web is only one Internet-dependent application (and one that is text-centric, not voice-centric) may render the above quote partly inaccurate.

I can only think that, if the two factions and their leaders were able to 

  1. Receive radio signals emanating from digital-electronic, networked machines
  2. Use a voice browser to vocally read text
  3. Manage to pair recorded voice-readings of hyperlinked text to their own native language for comparisons, contrasts and translations of words and contexts

all within mere seconds on an incremental basis, then we might have a more solid hypothesis for the Transformer race’s own networking capabilities, alongside all the other technological capabilities which they possess.

But in the meantime, we only have this alternative hypothesis for what would happen if the Transformers had learned Earth’s languages by rapidly flipping through a web browser:

EDIT: See also this slightly-related writeup from 1996 on extraterrestrials using the WWW. Vos Post wrote a section about the potential hyperlinearity of alien communication, comparing it to the more familiar hyperlinearity of the World Wide Web.
EDIT 2: Someone else wrote a criticism of this same quote, primarily from an SMS/mobiletexting-centric focus, for the Apache Pow Wow newspaper of Tyler Junior College.

Comic addventure, anyone?

Uncategorized, , ,

 The "addventure" is a form of non-linear collaborative fiction that has evolved since the term was first coined by Allen Firstenberg in 1987-88. Primarily a combination of select aspects from both the round-robin style of collaborative, chain-tied fiction with the "Choose Your Own Adventure" method of interactive, non-linear fiction, the addventure is meant to allow for the creation of multiple reality sequences, with authors able to start again from any previous landmark and fork off with their own derivative sequence of following events. 

So while you already have round-robin webcomics and interactive "CYOA" webcomics being published, I wonder if a "addventure webcomic" has been tried yet.

I see such a webcomic as being potentially bigger, more diverse and more rich with parallel dimensions than anything that could be mustered by Marvel Comics.