Materiality: Material Communication

As I understand it, Materiality is the context and format within something is written. For example, newspapers are papers with news that are printed on what we call, guess what, newspaper. They can have crazy headlines like, "One-Armed Man Applauds Kindness of Strangers," or "Tiger Woods Plays with Own Balls, Says Nike," and get away with it because that's what's expected of newspapers. Those incomplete, fragmented titles wouldn't fly anywhere else except maybe Yahoo! News or Twitter.

So what happens when the medium changes? Now we have electronic newspapers, which are thin, sleek computer screens that allow you to not only display breaking news stories, but can also hold entire books. They attempt to mimic the look of a newspaper, but certainly not the feel.

In this case, even though the medium has changed, the message is still the same. However, this example seems to be the exception when it comes to technology. Ever since the first text messages were sent and the first chat rooms were opened to the public, people have been finding all kinds of creative ways to express themselves with as few characters as possible. The new mediums generated a fresh frontier for 21st century communication, ultimately bringing every english teacher's worst nightmares to life as bad spelling and horrible grammar became an overnight pop culture sensation. This online literary craze would eventually spawn buzz-worthy social networking sites such as Twitter and Digg.

Here is a video that captures perfectly the essence of life on web 2.0