www.dichtung-digital.de/Theorie/index-e.htm - | 15 I + I new Crisis of Understanding. Reading Competence after PISA [German] The threat by new media to the book seems to be over. The PISA study underlines: German students should spend more time with books than with their computer. Do teachers with such an approach really meet the demands of pedagogical responsibility? About reading competence in the age of digital media, the teacher's willingness to learn, and the return of the Mandarines. http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/1-simanowski.htm When Hypertext became uncool. Notes on Power, Politics, and the Interface [English] Henning Ziegler describes some of the structural limits of authoritative hypertext works and of the cultural interface in which they are perceived by looking at new media objects such as Victory Garden, the AOL interface, and the Netscape/Mozilla browser software. Rather than 'unmasking' hypertext as something that does not have the potential for resistance that it seemed to have, Ziegler argues that hypertext, when understood as the totality of computers that are linked through the internet, on a formal level does promote an authoritative shift in the politics of new media objects http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/1-ziegler.htm Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy [English] While hypertext has not proved to embody the qualities of the ideal post-structural text and the WWW has not fulfilled the document-association function of Bush's Memex, weblogs do facilitate the exchange of information across the Internet. Dennis G. Jerz sees in Google’s purchase of the popular weblogging platform Blogger a shift towards content production that may create a conflict of interest but nevertheless sees in Google the synergy necessary to fulfill Vannevar Bush’s vision. http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/1-jerz.htm Matter of Time: Toward a Materialist Semiotics of Web Animation [English] John Zuern is not satisfied with the generalized genuflection to "code" and the fetishistic faith in immateriality in new media studies. He calls for the rematerialization and rehistoricization of our reading of new media and advises to ask small, old-fashioned questions about craft. His discussion of extra-textual details shows how what begins as a functional characteristic turns into a more ''purely" aesthetic element (Dakota) and how technological equipment creates the "mystery" of a piece (Iris). http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2003/1-zuern.htm Bodies and Technologies in Multiplayer Role-Playing Games [English] Role-playing games create fictional spaces within which imaginary, exotic, and often heroic identities can be acted out. MMORPGs, Massive Multiplayer Role-Playing Games, offer increasingly complex and complicated networks of player interaction - here playing becomes especially time-consuming and at times even boring. Randi Gunzenhäuser compares Diablo II and Dark Age of Camelot and concludes that MMORPGs do not form a homogeneous genre but offer very diversified, even oppositional playing experiences. http://www.dichtung-digital.com/2002/11-10-Gunzenhaeuser.htm Nika Bertram's Der Kahuna Modus as Novel and as Computer Game [German] Bernd Hartmann analyses the Kahuna Modus following the question what governs a transcription of a linear printed novel into an interactive computer game. The computer game is a medium of its own but supports ways of reading and interpreting the novel under new perspectives. http://www.dichtung-digital.com/2002/11-10-Hartmann.htm