the reading today is totally related to my final project

Kinda.

But first, this is awesome.

Go there.

I'm not kidding. Now.

This is not actually related to anything, but it is hilarious and will take less than two minutes of your time and I was encouraged to put more media in my blog. Although this is not in my blog because no embedding code was provided for it, you will still appreciate it, guaranteed.

...Back to class material, the reading IS actually directly related to the historical contextualization part of our project, which I just happened to write and so is stuck a bit more in my head than most people, I would imagine.

Our historical contextualization has to do with how back in the day, print revolutionized how people could come together. Making text more accessible to the general public, although still expensive, allowed groups to spread their ideas and thus to group together to get their goals accomplished, in religion and politics, for example. (Martin Luther is obviously a prime example of this.)

Now that text has become even MORE accessible and relatively inexpensive for people to publish and spread their ideas, a similar thing is happening, except it now seems that groups are being formed for less vital things (banding together groups of people who share your ideas to accomplish a goal is more important in politics than in literature, for example), which opens up a whole new way of thinking about things.

We look at medical support groups and often there are support groups for diseases which aren't common, so people who are not close together geographically can still share their experiences. Support groups, while important psychologically and emotionally, are not vital to overcoming a disease, so they seem to be more a result of this online accessibility in many ways. Many more groups can be formed, and they can learn from each other. How great!

This relates to the reading because it talks about the organization of information, how people are banding together with shared interests, goals, and/or situations over the Internet, etc. It's interesting to see. And now we have a good reason to investigate and observe this phenomenon, and compare our observations to others'! What a good deal.

Update on project: Well, I've evaluated 5 sites. I need to compile the trends I see everyone noticing so that I'm prepared to share it with my group tomorrow, but my concern with that is that it's currently very late at night, so I will probably do this in the morning. I am OK with this since then it will be fresh in my mind at the time when I discuss it with my group! Whoo! I will see you all tomorrow! Come to class yay