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I agree with what he says about the future of comics. I mean, he's right, they have been pretty much the same since forever and with comics going digital, it opens up so many possibilities. It's a whole new world...
But in all seriousness, I think that designers are going to keep coming up with new ideas, and expanding on old ones, and a bunch of die hard comic conservatives will denounce it all as the decline of the comic genre and make nostalgic comments about the good old days and comics will keep growing and changing until they run out of ideas. And even then it won't stop.
One of the texts that I think is the most important is Foss, Foss, and Trapp. Their definition and explanations of symbols and signs are so important to digital media that without understanding them you can't really understand media. I mean, the whole concept of signs and symbols is so pervasive that it would be important for anyone to understand, but even more so for a technorhetorician, because the boundaries of the digital realm, what applies, what doesn't, have yet to be worked out, and are constantly being redrawn. Its about something that is superficial versus something with depth and complexity.
The second I think of as important is the Non-Designers Guide to Design. It is sort of like a text-book for the basics of design. Well, actually it is a textbook for the basics of design. But what I meant was that it explains all those things that lots of people think are incredibly obvious and other people don't understand in the least but pretend like they do because everyone else seems to find it easy.
The third is actually, and I can't believe I'm saying this, I must be mad, Blair's "The Possibility and Actuality of Visual Arguments". Despite how incredibly complicated it was to read and understand, and I'm still not entirely sure that I got it all, I think that it forced me to look closely at how to make an effective argument, which is the point of rhetoric.
And those are the three readings I think will help me, not just in the near future, but the distant future as well.

Blog #6

The most straightforward way in which links reveal is that by pressing on them, more information is presented to you, and therefore revealed. But links do more than just show new information. They show similarities between where they are linking from, and where they are linking to. Simply by existing, the link reveals a commonality between the two points, whether one actually exists or not.(Burbules 104-105) An example of this would be a link from a page on the Great Depression to a page on the stock market in the 1920's.
Links conceal in two different ways. They conceal through omission. The same way that presenting a link can reveal a connection between two points, not having a link can conceal that a link exists.(Burbules 105) For instance, a page about the presence of nicotine in cigarettes that does not have a link to the detrimental effects of nicotine on the human body conceals that such a connection exists.
The other way that links conceal is by limiting the reader to only the connections presented, hiding the fact that other connections exist. Returning to the Great Depression and 1920's stock market example, if the site about the Great Depression only had links to sites about the 1920's stock market, that would lead the reader to assume that the stock market was the only reason for the Depression, hiding the other causes from the reader.


Burbules, Nicholas C.. "Rhetorics of the Web: hyperreading and critical literacy." Page to Screen 102-122. 7 Jul 2008 .