At the beginning of the semester I set out the learning goals for this course. To recap, they were (and continue to be):
Know the history of “language technologies” (orality, writing, print, digital) and how emerging media reshape our conception of “literature.”
Be able to identify the major forms of electronic literature and know how to read them in both a technical and interpretive sense.
Know how to use HTML, blogs and wikis to create electronic literature of your own.
Understand how technology informs and refashions human identity, and how that refashioning is represented in literature.
Know how digital technologies reshape our relationship to electronic, textual, and physical spaces.
Understand the cultural and technological complexities that arise from our increasingly globalized world.
For this week’s post I’d like to hear about what you feel you have learned in this course. Were we able as a class to meet the learning objectives above? Was there a particular unit that you felt was significantly more valuable to you in the semester? And what skills (both writing and technical) do you feel you’ve improved on over the last few months?
Just to be clear, I’m not looking for either praise or criticism of the course in your response (though you’re welcome to include either if you like). Instead, I’d really like to know what you feel you have learned so that I can continue to improve the class and how I teach it. In addition, I will do my best to draw questions for the final, particularly the essay questions, from your responses.
Thank you all for your thoughtful and engaged responses on this class blog over course of the semester. I have truly enjoyed reading your thoughts on the texts and issues we’ve explored. I know that many of you don’t necessarily feel that writing is your greatest strength, so I encourage you to take a moment and look back at your posts and comments and take pride in the significant writing you have produced over the course of the semester. I hope you will use this experience as a starting point as you join the ranks of the digital content creators, whether that be as a blogger, as a Wikipedia (or Wookipedia) editor, a digital poet, or just someone who is able to thoughtfully engage in meaningful discourse via web 2.0 tools.
Best of luck as you finish the semester and in the coming year,
This week we finished Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, a novel that, among other things, helps us to think of how borders function in our digital world. For this week’s discussion, think about how borders come to define each of our characters. Feel free to write about any characters other thanGuy or Arjun (I think we’ve covered them sufficiently in previous posts). In particular, both Leela (both as a digital being and the person) and Gaby find themselves limited by cultural, political and physical borders. You might think about how these characters escape these limitations as well as how they remain constrained by them.
This section also asks us to think about the “transmission” that happens between borders, and the “noise” that prevents us from clearly understanding the messages being transmitted. This focus on the act of transmission across a border helps us to see the border as a space in its own right. Scholars have talked about border spaces, spaces that are neither one thing or the other, as “liminal” spaces. The question is, then, how can we apply this idea of liminalty (the space between the known and unknown, a home country and a foreign country, the virtual world and the physical world, etc.) to Arjun? Extrapolating from what we see in Transmission, how might this notion of liminality apply to us as citizens of a wireless world?
In Transmission, Kunzru directly links the spread of a computer virus to the spread of culture by using Leela, a Bollywood starlet, as the visual signifier of Arjun’s virus. In this week’s discussion you might think about how the model of contemporary culture can be linked to that of a virus, and what connections exist between biological viruses, computer viruses, and cultural viruses (i.e., internet memes)?
You might also think about what value computer viruses might have, despite being associated with annoyance and lost productivity. Chris Baraniuk quotes Jussi Parikka, stating: “According to some commentators, viral disorder should not mean solely anarchy but a space for variation and experimentation that resist the one-way ideology of computer rationalism.” What is meant by this is that viruses, however destructive, open up a range of possibilities that didn’t exist before. Our digital world, if we follow this line of thinking, is a tension between forces that seek to order and dominate the digital spaces we inhabit (Microsoft, Apple, etc. ) and those who resist that order in the form of virus writers like Arjun and hacker groups such as Anonymous. The question, then, is how do you see Transmission coming down on this debate? Are computer viruses a benefit or a dangerous wrench in the workings of our digital world?
For a third question, you might speak about the paralleling of Guy and Arjun. We mentioned last week that Guy and Arjun represent two ends of the globalization spectrum: those who benefit from it and those who are exploited by it. How is the juxtaposition of these two characters continued in the later portion of the book? You might specifically think about their relationship to computers and technology.
As we see on page 36 of Transmission, Arjun sees himself as Dalip, a character in a Bollywood film. Therefore, to understand Arjun we must also understand a little bit about the film genre that he uses to define himself. In many respects Bollywood film, with its bright costuming, melodramatic plots, and impromptu dance numbers, is reminiscent of American musicals of the mid 20th-century. However, there are still a wide range of cultural specificities in these films that distinguish them from their Hollywood counterparts. I suspect that your first reaction with be humor, but remember that tied up in globalization is the idea that, like people, culture spreads bi-directionally between countries. So it behooves us to take seriously non-US centric culture, just as we assume India and other cultures take seriously our Hollywood films (even if they’re dross, like Titanic).
Feel free to post comments about the book below. None are required this week due to the holiday, but for those who are behind on their posts and can’t afford to miss a week, here’s the space to wow us with your reading of Transmission.
I don’t have a specific question for this post, but I invite you to discuss your reaction to the places we visited today (Immersiva and Two Fish). If we think of these spaces as electronic literature, what new “ways of reading” or literacies do we need in order to read them? How does reading a “text” like “The Rabbicorn” differ from other forms of elit? How is it the same? And, thinking of Two Fish, how can we compare our reading of this “virtual space” with Muri’s reading of Yosemite Valley?
Feel free to follow this line of thinking or pursue your own thinking.
Jason Farman opens his essay “Site-Specific Storytelling and Reading Interfaces” by relating a story where he annoys a colleague by constantly looking at his phone. He didn’t intend to be rude and was in fact using his phone for a class, but none the less, his colleague rightly asked him to stop looking at his phone because, his colleague said, “it feels like two people are whispering back and forth right next to me and I’m not included in the conversation.” What this anecdote demonstrates for Farman is the way our mobile devices have the potential to divorce us from those around us. The mobile interface, he contends, is perceived as a device for individual reading and when we are engrossed in our mobile devices, we leave our physical world and community behind.
But while Farman acknowledges the individualistic design of mobile interfaces (meaning your Android or iPhone smart phone), he wants to argue that these devices can in fact help us connect with our community through mobile and collaborative storytelling. To demonstrate this potential, Farman describes a number of “locative story projects,” including: Paul Notzold’s TXTual Healing, the[Murmur] project, and Sticky Bits.
The TXTual Healing project seeks to make public the private conversations we have via text on our phones. On his web page, Notzold describes the TXTual Healing project by writing:
I created TXTual Healing in the early days of 2006, and it has become an ongoing mobile technology platform to transform public action into theater. Using a laptop and projector strapped to a bicycle cart, I project speech balloons and/or graphics onto buildings, with a phone number to which anyone with a mobile phone can text a response. Typically a private form of communication, in this project text messaging becomes an open, anonymous, and uncensored dialogue; a means to engage, rather than to escape.
Consistent with Farman’s argument, then, TXTual Healing demonstrates the capacity for our otherwise individualistic mobile devices to participate in community driven, collaborative sites of reading.
Through the [Murmur] project Farman is able to demonstrate the importance of spaces and place in the cultural narratives that surround us, even if we are unaware of them. Participants in the [Murmur] project place green signs at key locations in their city and then call and record messages about the significance of that place. Messages can include either personal or historical information, but in either case the “crowdsourced” messages demonstrate again the capacity for mobile interfaces to exceed the perception that they are limited to individual reading practices, because through our mobile devices we can be connected to a wide range of “readers” and “writers” who have contributed to the collective knowledge about a given location.
Stickybits, like the [Murmur] project, is an example of how digital devices can be used for collective reading. In this case, Farman uses Stickybits as a way of demonstrating how the content of a database attains meaning as it is narrativized. He writes:
If a user scans a common barcode, on a can of Coca-Cola for example, the narratives, videos, and images many users upload as associated with that object culminate to produce crowdsourced narratives about the object and its use in daily life. Collaboratively, we give relational narratives to our objects, which serve to embody us in space as sensory and culturally inscribed subjects. The crowdsourced nature of Stickybits demonstrates the intersubjective process of engaging the narrative of an object (perhaps the company‟s marketing story of why we should buy the object) and giving it new meaning.
What Farman is getting at here is that we have a world of information tucked away in databases of scanned bar codes. But to actually give that content meaning, to have it be useful to us in any significant way (even if that “use” is just to hear a marketing message), we have to move it out of database space and into our embodied, physical space, and we do that through narrative and collective story telling.
These three examples help to emphasize Farman’s main thrust in this chapter: the importance of the body and embodiment in digital world that is increasingly dependent on mobile technology and less on the computer desk. As mobile computing devices allow us to simultaneously embody physical and digital spaces (i.e., Foursquare), the importance of lived, not just digital, spaces becomes apparent. And if that’s the case, then projects such as those listed above which enable community-based and collaborative sites of reading become increasingly important if we are to avoid the “not being there” trap.
Discussion Questions
1. Have you used your mobile device for reading other than texting friends, coworkers and family? What creative ways have you used your mobile device that might be considered “site-specific reading”?
2. How does your mobile device help generate a sense of community?
3. How do mobile devices redefine our sense of what computing is and what it is used for?
4. Choose a location in Second Life that you’ve visited already. Go back and “read” the location as we did with “Imersiva” and “Two Fish.” Feel free to include screen shots. (If you’re thinking of doing a SL travel log, this is a good way to get started.)
