Category Archives: proposals

For my project I would like to enhance the sum total of all of my data. Don Delillo contends that “You are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.” Instead of trying to escape this debatable truth, I want to embrace it by recreating my life digitally through personal essays with visual and aural accompaniment. Three days ago I began writing a blog (http://thelockativecase.blogspot.com/) that I would like to continue to format and develop; the posts already up exemplify (albeit very, very succinctly) the style of the writing I intend to do, but not necessarily the subject matter or length. The posts will be illustrated namely with my own photography.

The blog will pair original content with some level regurgitation (e.g. songs) in order to create an existence online. It will certainly explore McLuhan’s ideas in “The Gadget Lover: Narcissus and Narcosis,” in which he theorizes that people become so fascinated with technological extensions of themselves that this amplification of the self leads to “self-amputation” or numbness to other ways of perceiving oneself and others. Can I amplify my existence so much that I will self-amputate? Perhaps, but then I wouldn’t have much to blog about. I would also like to probe the concept of online morality – Ong claims that when writing a diary the writer fictionalizes the reader, writing for some other self and creating one’s own fiction. Is recreating oneself online a method of building an unstable personal fiction? Do we, as Manovich suggests, have a moral responsibility to recreate ourselves and the world around us accurately?

The analytical essay component will be a page formatted to look like a paper essay, a sort of remediation of the paper essay to the electronic essay. However, the essay will attempt to avoid the drawbacks found in Manovich’s work – namely representing new media through an old medium. All of the terms I use will have examples, so the essay will be in a variable “Choose Your Own Adventure” format where it can be read differently every time and requires interactivity.

Check out http://thelockativecase.blogspot.com/ and let me know what you think of the idea. Thanks!

So this is my working proposal, and I might adjust it a little bit.  My project is based around the idea of authorship and new media,  specifically focusing on blog content.  What I’m going to do is choose different blog at random each day – there’s a feature on blogspot that let’s you do so – and write a blog post based on their most recent blog post.  I’m going to mimic the form and style, and write commentary on the content of the blog.   Doing so, I hope look at the different ways that amateur “publishing” is achieved, while considering how we define the “author,” and how what creates legitimacy in writing.  Is it be published?  Are blogs consider a valid form of publishing?  etc

In essence, I’m making a blog about blogs; using the medium I’m analyzing as a tool of analysis itself.  I recognize that I’m partially limited by my lack of computer code skills.  However, this ties into what draws me to the blog.  Limited computer knowledge is necessary beyond the basic computer skills.  You don’t need to be a computer programmer or an academic to write a blog – it is accessible to anyone with a computer and the Internet.  The Internet is flooded with blogs about everything and anything, written by people ranging from all ages.  Through this I hope to gain a better understand of what compels people to write blogs, what they write about, and what makes us read specific blogs as well.

I’m probably going to expand on the form of my project over the next week, but as of now, this is my working idea.

For my project I was inspired, in fact, by the name of this course. Writing Machines—seeing as I consider myself a poet, I really wanted to incorporate my lyrical skills into this project. This aspect of my project reminded me of the idea that Landow brought up considering “poetic machines” and how they work according to analogy and association. Throughout the course, I’ve realized how much passive interaction is involved when it comes to machines and human beings—my goal in this project is to move away from that. I was also inspired by the website we had to explore for last class: “The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot”.  I wanted to incorporate the idea of interaction yet not have it be one that’s as passive as clicking on links or pictures that lead to different sites. I wanted to use Landow’s idea that technology isn’t merely that which is digitally developed in today’s society.  

            For my project I plan to use a variety of different types of mediums, some of which we’ve come to disregard as mediums (writing) in order to compose a chain of poems that are all interconnected and linked together, although they won’t all be on the internet. I want my project to take my audience’s ideas and opinions into consideration. I will compose a series of poems, all of which are a part of one fluctuating and interconnected story, kind of like Afternoon: a Story , only they will all be written up in different forms of mediums. Think of it as one of those detective stories we all used to read as children, only instead of going on to a different chapter, you’ll either have to go onto a recording I did on tape, a site on the internet, a piece of paper I wrote a poem on, or a video. I wanted to come up with a project that’s almost “hyperinteractive”, if you will. After reading each poem, you’ll have to make a decision based off of your opinion on the poem that will lead you to a different one that will be on a different medium. By the end, hopefully, everyone will have gone through different readings of the story after having gone through different routes in my poetry. My goal is to see how the different mediums and different paths shaped my audience’s idea of the story.

For my project I plan to continue my exploration of the indigenous uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army). Last semester, I wrote a chapter of my dissertation which explores the theoretical aspects of the movement as a neo-marxist approach to the pursuit of social justice. This semester, I want to complete another chapter where I explore the use of media (mainly the internet website Enlace Zapatista, as well as several newspaper articles, videos/documentaries, and songs about the movement). I would like to explore the complexity of the incorporation of media to this revolutionary movement and whether or not it has been a more effective method of achieving social justice for the indigenous people who make up the majority of the movement.

I plan to review the content of the various letters and communiques sent to local newspapers by Subcomandante Marcos since 1994. The book titled Shadows of Tender Fury provides a list of the communiques since the public emergence of the movement, which will be a great source for the first part of my project. Secondly, I plan to explore other books, as well as the EZLN website (for which I have been a member for years) to explore the direction of the movement through the past years.

Finally, I plan to incorporate the Media Studies’ theoretical models we have been studying in this class to the analysis of the effects of the media in the development and evolution of the EZLN.  Using McLuhan and the effects of technology, media and society, and media and our thought processes. McLuhan also discusses the “global village” which would be very relevant to the strategies used by the EZLN to appeal to an international audience.  As well as others as our course develops.