A Cloud of Confusion

For my master’s class, Writing for Electronic Communities, the class read Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work, which focuses on how we inhabit an information flooded world. Eilola further discusses symbolic-analytic theory and articulation theory in an effot to point out how we weave our way through technologies and remain of the edges of dense texts and masses of information. I was most fascinated with the final chapter of Eilola’s book, Coda: A Text in Fragments where what appears to be (as described) fragmented pieces of information: quotations, images, website shots, a total mish mosh of information which doesn’t seem to make much sense – at least not to me. This last chapter is split into segments but all of these pieces of information obviously allude to technology in some way or another. What is Eilola trying to point out? That a deluge of information, as we are often confronted with online and with new technologies, just leads to confusion and a lack of comprehension? Or is he trying to be clever and point out that fractured texts lend to new contexts and avenues of comprehension that a linear presentation of text could grant the reader/user? I don’t know, I just don’t know…..