Project Guide

Communication has changed drastically over the last century. It has in a sense gone in a full circle. Whether it be the evolution of music sharing or the details of online communication it is certain that nothing is the same as it was a year ago. The ideas, production, and use of electronics are always changing.
Man always dreamed of the day he could talk to his fellow, who may be standing on the other side of the world. Science-fiction novels predicted these occurrences long before they were actually realized. One of the early uses of electronic devices was recording music. Once music became available to share digitally, stealing it has become a huge problem. P2P networks increased sales of music online. Music being available for free increased album sale and popularity of independent bands.
Online communication has also seen its changes. Recently, instant messaging has grown to be a major part of online communication, bringing new changes to social and business models. However, the effects of instant messaging have taken their tole. Online communication lacks face-to-face social cues and can be detrimental to your mental health and social lives. Video chat applications are helping to bring back social cues into electronic communication.


For more information:
-http://uanews.org/node/35220
-http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/
-Science Fiction and the Prediction of the Future by Gary Westfahl, Won Kin Yuen and Amy Chan
-http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug00/3on1/movies/talkies.html
- Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Implications by Jane Gackenback

Science and Technology

Science and technology are topics thought to be 2 developing fields, considered appropriate for those that are knowledged enough to understand the field. Science and technology can dive into some very complex realms, such as quantum physics and robotics. The truth is that these ideas are fairly advanced. The majority of the population will not completely understand the depth that these topics can go into. This does not mean, however, that it has to be written for only those capable of “understanding” it. As demonstrated in class, the reading “On the Electrodynamics of Stationary events” by Peter Stimmel was comprehendible to a certain degree. Once the class looked at it in full, it was easier to understand. The way the response was written gave it a more scientific approach, for those that had a background in the field.

The audience seeking science and technology writings may not always have a higher degree of learning that allows them to fully know the depth of the document. To adhere to this group of people, the author must maintain a tone of reading that is better fit for the common person. This is not to say that all “common” people go looking for readings about science and technology, but the select few that do may need it to be more broken down. Bill Bryson has the touch of sounding completely scientific in his “Short History of Nearly Everything” while having little background in the subject himself. He in turn was able to convey to the audience that he was a well-knowledged individual, capable of writing for a large audience of people. The Random House website gave excerpts from a collection of Bryson’s novels, proving that a scientific author is not limited to a less than interesting tone.

Knowing your audience

Over the last few weeks we have gone through a variety of readings. Unsurprisingly our class enjoyed the Bill Bryson readings the most. His work was well written and humorous to read. Even when talking about scientists who changed the world, he portrayed them as real people with real emotions (not as beings of perfections as most science texts are prone to do). The other readings were not as enjoyable though. Some, simply because they weren’t meant to be read by us (eg. the article from the physics journal) . The authors targeted different audiences and the material often went over our heads. For the other articles, such as “The Sobel Effect” and “Leviathan and the Air Pump” the quality of writing was just bad. Evidence of this pertains from the fact that my readings of these texts were characterized by frequent naps in between.

Thus when it comes to writing about science and technology, one must have a firm understanding of who one’s audience is. We see that Bill Bryson appears to have done this perfectly. Being a layman he has written for the laymen, and written very well on top of that. The author of the physics article was originally writing for a journal. His article describing the quantum effects of electrons, was never written to be understood by us. Since we as a class, are writing mainly for our peers and fellow Georgia Tech students, we must keep our work interesting, characterized with good quality writing. The material we cover should not be too complex but can be above the average person’s comprehensive ability. This is TECH after all.

thoughts on writing about science and technolgy

In the same way science and technology have pros and cons, writing about them have pros and cons as well. Researchers may find text to not be comprehensive enough while the average Joe might find it to be mind-boggling and overwhelming to understand more than a few lines. In some ways, this range acts as a filter to disregard baseless discoveries and promote rigorous analyze of discovery if they occur. If writing is geared more towards the average Joe, writing science and technology would be more focused on appealing to readers than to comprehensively report a discovery. If science and technology are to advance, the goal should be to make new advances rather than informing people of all walks of life so they have the same knowledge as you to the extent that they should be capable to contribute new ideas from their background. If the writing assumes knowledge of the topics addressed, the average Joe would be faced with a monolithic tree of prerequisites. Some might be irrelevant. Since science and technology are funded by others, making writing to difficult to read would not benefit anyone.

The above just mentions a few issues of writings about science and technology. One idea to fix this could be to catogorize writings into a system of levels. First, only reputable sources would have a level on them. This would prevent anyone writing an article on the internet from self-publishing and categorizing their work without scientific merit. Having a levels system would not create a huge bureaucracy. Writings can be categorized fairly quickly. With several levels, everyone has the chance to know what level writing they could understand for a specific topic and can move up to a higher level once they studied enough. This model seems to already exist in modern day except the number of researches in the highest level drastically decreases. In conclusion, writing in science and technology should be clear, concise, and well documented with references. The rest is up to the effort readers put in to understand, think critically, and perhaps contribute something new.

Is Anybody Out There?

One of the hardest things in writing is entertaining an audience. From a combination of scientific readings it has become clear to me that there is a WIDE variety of ways to write. It seems that these ways to write are a direct reflection of who you want to read what you write. The terms and sentence structure used become more complex as you dive into scientific papers while children's stories are very simple.

As a writer choosing a specific audience might be a difficult task. Most writers tend to pick audiences that are too broad. A writer should pin-point their audience so that they can expound upon examples and terms without the worry of losing readers.
I feel that best sellers are written by authors who have a special lure that appeals to a much wider audience. They are able to write specifically, yet each different audience member is drawn to their stories (i.e. Bill Bryson).