Beware! I am posting my prewriting and rough drafts, showing my progressive steps, diving into the second stage of academic blogging, and saying social proof doesn't always work.
This isn't my second post for the week about digital tools with Moby Dick, but I will link to it at the bottom after it's published. This is a prologue for what I'll do in that post and how I got to that idea.
This is a post about my final topic. If you guys can comment, it will help me with my theme and tell me if this is something I can actually do a final project on. Even if you only read the last couple paragraphs under the asterisks, that will really help me. Or comment here on Google+ for an even faster read and respond. Give me social proof, homies and peers!
Alright. I haven't been active in the second stage of blogging (or at least, to me, not very successfully) because so far the themes I've researched haven't connected with the other activities I'm doing or the final project I want to focus on. Today's class changed that though. Now I'm finally ready to put everything together in a nice mash up post to set myself up for what I'm doing next.
When I did my midterm post, my "prewrite topic" - a broad and sketched out topic yes I'm coining it - was about the people behind the post. Most of my posts previous to midterm were about this in terms of crowdsourcing. I didn't necessarily want to focus on identity; I wanted to look at how people decide which, of all the curation and creation tools on the internet, to use to publish, create, and curate content.
My "prewrite topic" turned into a "first draft topic" when I narrowed down my topic of every person behind the internet to just authors in the digital world and how they utilize tools on the internet to create and promote their work. I found author Matt Haig who has a blog and twitter account and made this post about him, then used my curation tool YouTube in this post to search out my topic some more by looking at other authors who have taken advantage of digital media by using video. On these two posts, I did get two comments about how it was interesting, but I needed more social proof.
So I messaged several different authors I've found online through different media tools (Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, etc) to get a jump on that. I figured I'd get something but nope. Nothing. Heard from no one and got no answers to my questions or comments (ironic, for such active authors online to not answer). I tried a Google+ post but got no bites there either. Social proof failed on me, Dr Burton! (this is me being provocative and saying it doesn't always work no matter how enthusiastic I am) But that's okay. Lots of things come into play here, like maybe there are too many people messaging or tweeting the authors I tried to contact (I'm not mentioning names to save their privacy) or maybe they got my message but don't care about what I asked. Maybe my tagging was ineffective or I'm not patient enough to wait for an answer. And because I don't have a Facebook, that cuts off lots of my contacts online with people. Lots of potential errors here. Fear not! I have survived my personal Chapter 32, where Ishmael failed to categorize whales and I failed to curate and get more social proof, and come out enlightened.
****READ BELOW IF YOU WANT TO SKIM A QUICK POST****
Now: my "second draft topic" is a mix of the topics I'm interested in, plus it integrates Moby Dick and the book I read and reviewed titled Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan argues that the media (technology, medium, literal technological object) is an extension of ourselves and it is more important to study the hot and cool affects of media than the content itself. I argued in my second to last paragraph in my review that we can't just look media because content means something too. Without content, there's no media. The media has nothing to show for itself if no one uses it (ex: myspace died because people stopped using it). But after +Kayla Swan's post where she takes Ahab's soliloquy and turned it into a poem, the whole class had a new perspective of the text. It focused on different words, was easier to read, focused on different themes, and more...just by changing the media used to present the content. Changing the form, or what I'd call the "written word's media," gave the content new meaning. McLuhan is on to something here: what happens when we change the media for the same content? Do we get new meaning? Can we change it back and forth successfully, like a poem to prose or a tweet to a blog post?
This might be why some writers, scholars, and critics are afraid of going digital. Or maybe it's why some writers are enthusiastic about diving into the digital world (see, my first draft theme is still here!) Changing the medium used for their content means changing the themes and purpose of their content. We read a book differently than we read an eBook (different tools for annotation, different atmosphere). We read a newspaper differently than we read a news article online (comments online vs no comments on a newspaper).
In my second post I will look at Moby Dick in terms of how different media changes the meaning of the text, or what the characters intentions are in the content he produces.
No comments:
Post a Comment