EPUB

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0BkzdMQkR5VQTBJN0lRWTlsc2s/edit

tumblr URL

http://moderntransit.tumblr.com

Revised Tumblr Intro

For my tumblr project I decided to focus on the unique and comical interactions or happenings that occur on the train. The people in the world today seem to be a lot more out there and act out in crazy ways compared to how we were taught to act in public in the past. It seems like people in the past were much more polite and respected other people more than in today's society. The world back then was also not as excepting of people that wanted to stand out and be unique which may also be a reason why there are so many people taking advantage of the opportunity to express themselves in any way possible just to stand out from the crowd or entertain people. Another reason why today's society might act out more or seem to be crazier than the past is because now everyone can easily capture a photograph of say a crazy person on the train and automatically post it to any social media website. Now whenever there is anything interesting happening on the train it can be shared with the world with a click of one button. So maybe in the past people were more respectable, but even when something happened that was unusual or entertaining, most of the time passengers did not have a camera to capture the moment. Even if someone had a camera and took a photograph of the event then there still was not a way to instantly upload and share the image with the world because technology was not advanced enough until recent decades. All of the images and videos that I have chosen to incorporate into this tumblr I believe are a true representation of today's society not only in how wild the public acts, but it is also a nod to how far we have come in our advancements in technology and the way we choose to use it.

Tumblr Introduction

For my tumblr project I wanted to base it on how people interact with one another on public transportation. This will be mainly focused on the funny and entertaining things that people do on the train, but it will also include some heartfelt stories of rare acts of kindness involving public transportation. I decided to focus in on the train because in today's society many people take the train everyday to work or school and see there are often very strange and entertaining things happening in the train cars and I wanted to make a collection of some of the things that people get away with on the train because people acting strange has almost become white noise to the everyday passenger at this point. Today it is a lot easier to capture a photograph because almost everyone has a camera on their mobile phones so that makes it easier to  snap a quick photo of a funny moment that in the past would not have been able to be captured. I think that some people use public transportation as a way to express themselves or even to make a living. Stepping onto a train could be like stepping into another world where you never know what to expect. Each train car you enter is a different experience. One car could have people break dancing and getting the whole crowd into it, and another car could have one very strange person that everyone else is trying to avoid.

This tumblr will mostly consist of photographs of people doing unusual things on the train. This could be a person dressed up in a strange costume, or doing something unusual or entertaining. I will also include many youtube videos and .gifs of people’s feelings or reactions to certain situations involving public transportation as well as entertaining or funny moments that passengers caught on camera. For the written portion I will include some craigslist missed connects about people on the train as well as police records of crimes committed on the cta.

THE ARTFUL ACCIDENTS OF GOOGLE BOOKS

It was really fascinating to read about how Google Books is transforming the way we interact and gather information from these scanned pages. Now with Google Books growing and becoming more popular to gather information quickly, people are starting to take notice of the mistakes or glitches that appear throughout many of these books. Some of the issues are from the specific book itself. The book might be old and have rips and tears that will now be forever documented. The interesting mistakes are the ones done by the google workers themselves. Their jobs are to scan all the pages of the books and through constant scanning it is easy to make a mistake and accidentally scan your hand. Another issue with these Google Books are coming from the scanner. Some of the images appear rasterized due to the scanning process. If the future of books is for them to all be scanned to Google then books will have these new issues that physical books do not. I think it is very interesting how each scanned book on google already has a story of its own. People may wonder how that stain on page 211 got there or how was that page torn. Reading these books will not only give you information through the text but also the history and the process the book went through to be available on your screen.

What is the Social in Social Media??

Social media through the internet has greatly impacted the way that people in society interacts with one another. There are many great and not so great consequences when interacting with other people online. The internet is a great and easy way to reach a large amount of people and get your voice heard, but replacing a real social life with the internet could lead to a lonely future, as explained in this quote:

"Keen warns that we will end up in an anti-social future, characterized by the “loneliness of the isolated man in the connected crowd.”¹⁶ Confined inside the software cages of Facebook, Google, and their clones, users are encouraged to reduce their social life to “sharing” information. The self-mediating citizen constantly broadcasts his or her state of being to an amorphous, numb group of “friends.” "

I tend to agree that the advancement in social media allows people to become lazier when it comes to interacting with people in person. Communication through the internet is whether it is through e-mail, Facebook, twitter.. etc. is causing people to be less inclined to make the effort to speak people in person when it is much easier to do it through the internet. I think that we rely on the internet too much and it is starting to change the way that we interact with people. If it was not for the internet I know that I would try  harder to have a social life and leave my house. Most days I would rather stay inside and be on the internet instead of hanging out with my friends. I think that we would all try harder to make real connections with people in person if the internet did not exist. With that said, I believe that social media has made it possible for anyone to be heard and it is great for society as long as we keep it balanced with communicating in person.

Digital Publishing and the Future

"Print and its systems dominated for so long they came to seem not just the marvelous flowering of a technological achievement but practically a teleological inevitability. But just as moveable type would make obsolete the medieval scriptoria where monastic scribes labored for weeks upon single books, so too Gutenberg's invention is now giving way to the creative destruction of an arguably more powerful technology. And ultimately it won't matter much whether any of us prefers print to pixels; just as it didn't matter whether early renaissance readers preferred illuminated manuscripts to mass-printed books." -NANCY LEVINSON, Print and Pixel

Gutenberg invented the printing press to make it easier and much quicker to print books and posters. Before the printing press the typographic elements would have to be hand carved out of a block of wood in order to create the design of the page. This advancement made is so much easier to reproduce and send out information to the world. The internet and e-books of today are an even better solution to the process of sending out information. Up until books were made for the internet, it was much more costly and time consuming to make book. Before digital publishing it would take several steps and time consuming processes to create a finished printed piece. It would also involve sending your idea out to a publishing company, paying them to print out how ever many copies, and then waiting for them to arrive. Now everything is in one place and is very easy to create and upload to the internet without waiting and spending a lot. Many people still prefer physical books over e-books and other online publishing, but I agree that digital publishing will become the dominant way of publishing in the future. It just makes sense for society to turn to the digital because it saves money, time, and lots and lots of paper.

Memory of the Past (Illuminations)

"To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was" (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger." ( Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, pg 255, VI ). What I got from this is that society's "memory" of  history could not possibly depict how the past really was because we were not there to experience it. We can only learn of the past through records and physical objects that have not been destroyed. Although we do not know exactly how people in the past lived their daily lives, we do know a lot of what man has accomplished through the remnants of beautifully constructed architecture, advancement in technologies, and the amazing works of art that have lasted hundreds and even thousands of years. When Benjamin relates history to a memory that flashes up at the moment of danger, he might mean that we only remember something in past as it was when it disappeared or changed. This "change" would be the progress of society, and would therefore leave the old version in the past. This view on how we remember and grow from the past could easily relate to my book about transportation and how society has learned from the past to create an even greater version for the future.

I Have to Reprint Everything?? ( Post-Artifact Books and Publishing )

"To truly understand how strange and special they are, it helps to have experience with their analog cousins. Have you ever made a physical book before? What I mean is, have you ever edited and sent the files to a printer to be reproduced several thousand times? It’s terrifying. There is a pervasive hopelessness to the entire process. You know there must be mistakes. Check page numbers and punctuation a hundred times still, and by the sheer magnitude of molecules composing a book, you will miss something." - Craig Mod. 
I think Craig Mod makes an interesting point here about how once the book is printed then it will be forever unchanged. This makes it really scary for someone who makes hundreds, even thousands of copies and then realizes that they made a spelling error or to find out that they all printed incorrectly. Too late! Now you either have to live with the mistakes and hope no one else will notice or reprint everything and lose a ton of money. Also the larger the book is, the more likely there are mistakes in it that you have missed. I myself have made a huge mistake in the passed when printing out a book that I made for class. I spent $25 to print just one copy in color and when I finally received it I realized that I printed it on the wrong size paper. This was an easy mistake to fix and also to mess up. After that I became incredibly careful not to mess the next one up. Books made for the web do not have this problem. The are first of all much cheaper to create than physical books and if you notice a mistake you can just go bak in and edit it without loosing a ton of money or have to purchase everything all over again.

Updated my book cover!

http://www.lulu.com/shop/alexandra-shock/transportation-of-tomorrow/paperback/product-21453937.html

Print is Dying?

With the internet becoming the dominant form of media, print is rapidly becoming less popular. Although many people adapted quickly to using the internet for everything, many of us still cling to old forms of printed media. As soon as something new is invented it usually replaces an older and less effective or out of date version. These older versions can then become more popular because of people becoming nostalgic for the past. I believe that this is one of the reasons why books are still around. In retrospect reading books from the internet is in my opinion easier, faster, and saves a lot of trees. Instead of storing all the books you have collected on say a bookshelf, you can store hundreds of books on your computer without taking up a ton of space. Even though reading books on the computer is more practical, books are still around because of the experience or memory that a person has with books, and now that books are more rare they have become even more precious to the owner.

POD Transforming Publishing

There are many benefits that Print-On-Demand has brought to the publishing world. POD makes it possible for anyone to publish a book for very little money. Now that we have the technologies to create a book that is cheap, easy, and quick to reproduce we can save money not only for the author but for the reader as well. Now that it is super easy to make a book, there is no need to find a company to publish your book. You become your own publisher. Society's recent technological advancements help lead to the creation of the Espresso Book Machine. Instead of uses old printing presses that would take forever to create one book, we now can make a book in minutes with the Espresso Book Machine.
"The machine can process a 300-page book (including cover and glue binding) in a few minutes,
which seems to support the American manufacturer’s definition of its product as an “ATM for books”."-pg 72.


Now people can create a book about anything they want. Philip M. Parker decided to use this cheap form of printing a book by compiling a bunch of information he gathered from the internet into organized books. He ended up publishing 200,000 books that were then sold on Amazon. Since POD is so easy and cheap, it is much easier to edit and update your book whenever you want. POD has aloud for anyone to create a book were their creative will not be stifled and it won't break the bank.

Post-Digital Print / Villemard

In the past as well as the present it seems as though with every new technological advancement related to the media is thought to be the new form of communication that would get rid of print. In chapter one of the book entitled, “Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894,”  Alessandro  Ludovico discusses the French artist Villemard. In 1910, Villemard made a series of postcards that showed his vision of the future. Some of these were depictions of people using audio instead of print. He envisioned a world where the audio had taken over all print medium. Instead of reading a book in school, children would wear strange helmet-like headphones that would play a recording of the book. The same idea would be used at home by listening to the newspaper that was recorded that morning. Although today it is true that we do use many audio based media in today’s world, print is still very relevant.

After the many years of trying to replace printed forms of communication it still exists. Even though the technology has advanced tremendously in the past 100 years, we are still holding on to print. No matter how hard designers try to replicate a paper made book onto the computer screen, there is nothing compared to holding the physical book in your hands. In the future, no matter how advanced our society becomes I believe that we will still hold a place for books in the media and also our hearts.

William H. Gass Article / Evolution of a Crazy Artist

In William H. Gass’ article entitled, In Defense of the Book- Why Books Are So Good, he examines the characteristics that a book has that a screen can not replicate. The materiality of the book itself is an import characteristic that can not be reproduced on the screen. The book becomes worn over time and gains charter from its many hours of use. A person can not tear a page in a book made for a screen nor can he mark it up with his own notes. The text along with the physical object of the book itself holds a certain place in your heart/memory but on the screen you only have the written text. A person could  build his own library with books. Without physical books there will be no libraries. A library is a place where one can go to satisfy their curiosity of whatever they can think of. It provides an environment where you can come to learn more about the world through factual books or escape from it with fictional writings. The look and feel of a book can attract a person that might not have otherwise been interested in it right away, to pick it up and read it.

About two years ago I went to a small bookstore in Wicker Park called Quimbys with my friend so she could get some books for her classes. Evolution of a Crazy Artist by Sophie Crumb was the first book at caught my eye. The giant lettering and bold graphics on the cover interested me enough to pick it up and look through it. This book is a collection of every drawing that this artist have made sense she was born. I ended up leaving the store empty handed because I did not have enough money to buy it. A couple of months later my friend surprised me with it as a present for my birthday. Now from time to time when I feel uninspired I will go through this book to give me motivation because I feel like my artwork relates the Sophie Crumb’s.