Doug Eyman in his article titled “Defining and Locating Digital Rhetoric” talks about the relationship between texts online vs. offline. He also speaks about the pros/cons of these different intertextualities. Intertextuality for web users is mainly based on the texts they come across while searching the internet. Which means that they are able to access a lot more information than traditional medium users. This also circles back to the conversation of personalization of your web browser. This could push you to see only the narrative you are researching. Leading us to potentially never fully see the other side of the story due to the algorithm.
Eyman says, “contemporary users of Web-based discourse have at their fingertips resources that enable them to seek out information in the moment”. This could have both negative and positive effects in my opinion. Eyman also argues that it is important to keep developing both online and offline mediums. By doing so, we are able to keep the “sense of historical trajectory of the Web’s development”(Eyman, 2015). I believe developing the media both on and off the web is very important because we never know what the future may hold.
Technology is always advancing but if an unexpected turn of events ever took place and we lost all access to the internet, we would not be able to access anything documented digitally again. In the grand scheme of things that is very scary to think about. Another concern many people have is exactly who can access what we save on our computers. Hackers have the ability to take important documents we have saved and completely wipe them from us. Many people store photos, videos, school work, information for their jobs, and much more on the internet. It makes me think that maybe it is time to go back to more traditional ways to save my most important media that is stored digitally as of right now.
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