Programmers

One of our readings for this week refers to things like quotations, footnotes, and proper citations and the foundations of basic literacy. While I'd argue that you don't need to know how to do ANY of that to be literate, it also raises an interesting comparison later in the reading. None of those things just sprang into being. The author actually references when they were invented. At some point, some dude somewhere had to sit down and say "You know, I've got a GREAT idea!" Then they had to convince everyone else that it was brilliant and we should ALL start doing it. Someone had to write a paper (or maybe letters) describing these processes and extolling their virtues to convince everyone else to adopt them. The author later states that similar standardized methods/practices haven't crystallized for video media yet. That you can't "link" a particular hat of a character on the screen to other hats of a similar type in other movies in real time yet. Thinking about it, as a comparison, if somebody DOES establish a "standardized" way of accomplishing this, they'll need to write about it and convince others to use their method. But Computers don't exactly work like that. What this means is that some programmer and/or mathematician somewhere will eventually tackle the problem and write out a mathematical formula or function in code to perform this task. They'll package it in a library and everyone else will just include that library and call their function.

Programmers are writing the "research papers" of "video literacy" in math formula's and software functions. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If one person gets a function to work decently, then other people will just use it in their libraries. They don't NEED to be convinced by anything other than results. I guess that's this generation's different way of looking at things, eh?