Week 8

@CailinJohnson

New media allows an old, well known story to be told in a completely different way. In the case of the original text Red Riding Hood you are reading words on a page and letting your imagination interpret the story. However by turning Red Riding Hood into an electronic literature piece it changes the way the story is interpreted. The electronic piece shows animation and sound with very little text showing a story instead of letting a reader read the story and interpret it themselves. Now instead of being able to imagine what the wolf or red riding hood looks like you are being shown. Also instead of being able to determine the mood of the story the music that is being played sets the mood for you. “Media, by altering the environment, evoke us in unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act-the way we perceive the world.” (McLuhan p. 41)  Media is changing the way we understand and interpret things such as Red Riding Hood. “The metaphoric associations put into play by the device’s physical form include traffic between machine and biological organism, companion animal and parent, printed marks and oral production, static book and dynamic text-to-speech generation, artificial intelligence and human cognition, reading text without understanding it and (for young children listening to the Reading Eye Dog), understanding what is said without being able to read it.” (Hayle’s p. 94) Old stories are being told in ways that they never would have been able to without the aid of electronic media.

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