I didn’t really think about how different reading online is from reading something in print until going through this. New Media alters the experience. With print, I feel like there’s a clear path. You start at the beginning and move through it in order. But with digital text, it’s way less structured. I have the freedom to jump around. I can highlight or annotate through comments without filling up the page. But also get distracted by something else before I even finish what I started.
When I’m reading on a device, whether it’s my phone or computer, I have a tendency to check my notifications in the middle of reading a passage. It’s instinctual. I don’t even realize I’m doing it until I’m halfway through responding to a text. It made me realize that I’m not really “reading” in the same way anymore. I’m kind of multi-tasking where digital reading loses the focus that printed text provides.
The idea of the internet being more like a database than a narrative was interesting. It explains why everything feels so disconnected but still somehow related. You don’t need a beginning or an end. You just need enough pieces to keep moving. I think that’s why it’s so easy to spend so much time online without feeling like you’ve actually completed anything. You constantly move from one thing to the next. You can go from watching videos to texting to reading an article for school. Everything is so easily accessible.
Media Expression
The section discussing early psychological theories stuck out. Especially the comparison between mental processes and photography. It made me stop and think more critically about how much we trust technology to represent what’s going on in our minds. It’s interesting that even back then, there was this idea that thoughts could be broken down into separate images. These images could then be arranged in a way that supposedly reflects how we think. But that doesn’t fully make sense to me. Our thoughts aren’t that clean or structured. New media kinda changes this up a bit.
Even now, with tools like Photoshop or Canva. It feels like we’re still trying to do the same thing. Especially with how these posts are curated on social media. We take something complex and internal, turning it into something others can easily understand. But I feel like something always gets lost in that process. Our thoughts and identities are constantly shifting. Trying to capture them in a fixed set of images feels limiting.
It also made me think about how much we’ve normalized reducing ourselves into simplified versions that fit certain formats, especially online. When I think about it, I don’t know if a handful of images or posts could ever really reflect everything that makes up who someone is. Acknowledging how new media affects the ways we express ourselves can bring more awareness on how we share our emotions.
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