For my blog post today, I would like to focus on one specific section of Stolley's manifesto--
"In digital form, writing is nothing but strings of characters, endlessly and potentially losslessly manipulable under conditions that menu-driven graphical software short-circuits in the name of intuition and user-friendliness. More than any other mode of expression, writing demands revision. There is no hope of getting it right the first time. Or the second."
I would like to use MySpace as an example of what Stolley talks about. In middle school, almost all of my friends and I had MySpace pages where we would spend countless hours picking songs or background images to customize our personal pages. What I am just realizing, some 10 years later, is that all of these changes were made using code. MySpace was (or still is?) a digital platform on which users would write "strings of characters, endlessly and potentially losslessly manipulable…" While some people used the same standard code to set the format of their site, everyone would manipulate it in some way in order to customize a music player or the way their "Top 10" was arranged. Just as Stolley states, "writing demands revision," and MySpace code was no exception.
In reference to the GitHub tutorial, I will be honest, I was initially extremely confused as my digital coding days ended along with my career on MySpace many years ago. However, my reaction to Stolley did not change. Writing in any form-- including the composition of digital media that we will learn how to do in this class-- is a string of manipulable characters that demand revision. Not everything makes sense or is absolutely perfect on the first try, therefore it is important to take the time to learn more and use new knowledge to add on to previously crafted projects.
