Weekly Blog Post 2

The purpose of the video is to discuss how writing has changed since and during the advent of the digital era. Where physical text, laid down by pencil, pen, or quill, has been and is generally unilateral, requiring a 'start-over' in order to make a change, digital text can be edited during any state without destroying the text or physically copying it. The main change that digitizing text has brought about is the ability to manipulate it, especially after the fact. With digital text you can change the style (bold, italic), font, color or even create links to other digital texts, all after the writing has already taken place. And even as technologies grow, the impact of digital text changes. Where in HTML, form and content couldn't be separated, XML can easily pull them from each other to display the text seamlessly in new different forms. Furthermore, the ease with which users can upload text digitally is continuing to grow as well. With the creation of blogs and sites like Facebook and YouTube, uploading personal digital texts, and even videos has become a simple, just seconds long task.

His medium is an excellent example of how digital text is different from text written on paper. Not only is his writing done through different examples of digital space (from inside the coding to search boxes) but it is assembled into a video posted onto YouTube. In the video he is demonstrating his subject matter by actually manipulating, moving, and changing the text digitally. This serves to strengthen and support his purpose especially in the fact that it simply gives and example of what he's talking about, both providing a warrant to his claim and clarifying by demonstration. You could say that his medium contradicts his statement that content and form are now separable in that we cannot separate his context from his video (except manually which would be the same as with text written on the paper), or I should say, we cannot yet. Software does exist that can pull text from video (think of the automated postal systems that create digital text from a video feed of passing addressed envelopes), it is mostly just an issue of its availability (as per demand) that it is not in widespread use. It will be interesting to watch the technology and innovation continue to grow and how this video will stay or change in relevancy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE