Being a digital reader/meaning-maker involves more than reading, researching and exchanging information online. It involves negotiating everyday life within a world where the media shapes who we are, what we know, how we access information, our expressions of ourselves and our various negotiations with others (e.g., personal, professional, social, political, economic, cultural). Being a digital reader is not a fixed or static destination but an everchanging journey, involving relative, fluid and multifaceted engagements. In some ways, digital readers are likely to be involved in a conglomeration of engagements that draw upon their digital web-based meaning-making skills, especially their abilities to navigate the multiple dimensions of visual and text material within and across websites. In addition, they enlist various social strategies and plays as they engage socially on different platforms with different groups (e.g., friends and family, colleagues and project teams, affiliation groups or solicited others) by text and image, synchronized and asychronized with prescribed and less prescribed parameters perhaps dealing with people from different language groups and cultures more or less accessible and familiar with the digital frames. ...

In Stanley Kubrick’s’ renowned 1968 science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a computer named HAL (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer) controls operations on a group of scientists’ extraordinary venture into space. Demonstrating his artificial intelligence capabilities—which include natural language processing, voice and face recognition, and an ability to reason as well as make judgements—HAL introduces himself to the crew: “I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H-A-L plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January, 1992.” The film’s plot hinges on the crucial moment when the crew’s judgement is perceived as conflicting with HAL’s logic, at which point HAL proceeds to override them—in some cases by cutting off their life support. While the movie is set in the future, it is noteworthy that the technology as well as the human-interface tensions had already emerged at the time of its release. In conjunction with its imagined journey into deep space, the film was thus adept at envisioning developments with computers that now seem commonplace—anticipating the shifts in our digital worlds and the more pervasive and encompassing role of computers and the media in our lives. ...