Response to Readings for 7/6

"The Multimedia of Texts" by Anne Frances Wysocki

“Attitudes toward the visual aspects of texts change over time” (125).

Wysocki gives a brief and condensed history of printed typefaces, pointing out that it took hundreds of years for the popularity of Roman typefaces to spread across Europe. In the 21^st Century, the way we view text is moving at warp speed. Think about how quickly we are moving from reading everything in print to where we are today. Recently I canceled a newspaper subscription because by the time the paper arrives to my house I have usually already read the articles that interest me on the paper’s website. Other people are buying their books to read on those e-readers. It almost seems an appropriate time to do a major study about the reading habits—related to printed and electronic texts, but by the time the study was completed, it would most likely already be outdated.

“English Downfall” and “Rebuttal to English Downfall”

There are thousands of videos online that use scenes from The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich to make remixes on almost any subject imaginable. The first one I saw was mildly amusing, but since then, they’ve been getting progressively boring. When I opened the “Rebuttal” video, I expected it to be a parody of the remix. I was surprised to see someone else was bored by the Hitler remixes for such a personal reason. I hope we have time to talk about these two videos in class tonight.