I can’t screenshot a whole page without it looking too tiny/messy. Since the newspaper is a digital copy, it’s hard to do a substantial analysis of it, but at the very least, it appears that it must’ve used large sheets of paper and a lot of ink. Every little bit of story is in its own box, and they’re small too.It makes everything feel condensed. It seems like it’s set up this way to make it easier to browse until you find something that’s either interesting or important for you to read. If you come across something you don’t want to read, it’d be very easy to skip over it. As far as any sensory engagement goes, looking at it makes me feel like I can smell musty old pages, and for some reason I tend to associate newspapers with black coffee. I’m not sure if this makes sense either, but newspapers feel rather soft as far as paper goes, almost like felt. It’s hard to attribute a lot of this to a digital newspaper excerpt, but overall this newspaper just screams the following words, coffee, soft, musty, old, and for some reason, winter and cozy. In my mind, I just can’t picture newspapers as a whole but this one in particular in having anything to do with any season other than winter. That’s definitely not the best way to describe what a newspaper is to someone who’s never seen one before though. I guess it also depends on how many other things they’ve seen, like I can go into how paper comes from trees but I’ll just assume they’re a kid in today’s age. I would tell them that a newspaper is more or less exactly what the name entails. It’s a paper with newsworthy stuff written on it in ink. They can include advertisements and other stuff too though, so it’s not all just newsworthy events, but overall that’s what they tend to be.
With Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” part of me felt like I was reading it from an old-timey newspaper. Since it’s a murder mystery story, that’s probably why the relation exists. Murders and things of that nature are often written in newspapers, but it’s even stranger when you notice that newspapers exist within the story as well, including snippets from them in the story. Since the mystery in the story spawns from the main characters reading a newspaper, and they get a relatively large chunk of information from said newspaper, one could argue that Dupin and G find “meaning” in periodicals in the sense of finding a purpose for doing something, rather than finding an answer to a problem or question. This relates to the difference between “analytical power” and “simple ingenuity” by portraying how Dupin doesn’t just take the information from the periodical at face-value, and rather thinks outside of the box in order to find the true culprit.The story asks you to do the same, rather than just think in the same way you always have. That’s further supported by how this story was one of the first of its kind, and already the genre throws such a massive curveball at the readers.
With how Poe describes the balloon in “The Balloon Hoax,” very generally he seems to be saying that the balloon is easier to use and more effective at what it does than before. Comparing this to the new era of mass publication, the same concept applies. Mass publishing of books is easier and more effective than it was before. Both the balloon and the new methods of publishing are more built for their intended purposes and succeed in doing just that. For example, the balloon was stated to have plenty of items on it that help the passengers survive on it as they made their journey. In that same way, the new publishing methods made metaphorical “journeys” of becoming a published and successful author more survivable with how much more convenient and easy it was as a whole.
