Anchored in Humanity: Digital Insights in Literature

Studying literature in the traditional way is a key to powerful insights into digital culture. It's because literature and digital culture stem from the same thing: people. The literary tradition has a long history of delving into the human condition through its forms, and it helps people better understand the effects and biases of digital culture in and among humanity. Here are a couple of examples of insights I have seen this semester.

Our classmate Aleesha saw correlations between Pinterest and her literary study of Moby Dick. Her questions about the identity (e.g. genre) of the novel Moby Dick prompted questioning and a project about how the individual and collective pins of a person's Pinterest board reflect (or don't reflect) the identity of the pinner. Kayla pointed out how Captain Ahab deliberately gathered people around him and sought the advice of his peers in going after the whale. With their help, he succeeded. Sure, you could say that that was the way everyone had to do things, back in the day, but - it was effective. 

What literary study helps us discover can and should change digital habits. The amount of information online and in print is overwhelming, like the amount of organisms in a world of ocean. As well as consulting his fellow captains for up-to-date information on Moby Dick, Ahab had on hand with him more traditional aids in his search: "yellowish sea-charts" and "piles of old log-books" (177). These print resources were also invaluable to him in making his "reasonable surmises" (177) about the route of the white whale. Recognizing the limitations of each method, Ahab used both textual information and social research and proof to accomplish his goal. While many Web users might be tempted to favor either a search engine or asking people for help to find what they are looking for, we would do well to follow Ahab's example and use social and mechanical ways to find what we want. 

Aleesha, Kayla, and I are digital natives, but studying Moby Dick gave us valuable insights into our world.

Final Project Thoughts (Extra Post, Prologue to Post 2 of this week)

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!

Which Character are You?

I found this article by Wil Gesler focusing on how Melville's novel can be used in geography classes to explore these five themes: "the journey, human/environment interactions, social relationships in space, acquiring knowledge, and ambiguities and their resolution." I decided to take on the Journey theme and use it as a "which character are you" kind of set up.

Captain Ahab: Gesler states Ahab "will use every means at his disposal to find and kill the white whale" (pg 30). He points out that in Chapter 44 on page 177 that the captain has brought out "a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts...intently study[ing] the various lines and shadings...and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank." He also has piles of books which contains his research on other ships and their voyages, as well as logs of where sperm whales have been caught or spotted. I would liken him to an internet user who can find plenty of information on the internet, who participates in the world of digital culture, but maybe spends too much time thinking about the internet and all its possibilities rather than the consequences of spending hours online and not also living in the world outside of digital life.

Ishmael: Ishmael is on this journey, but for two contradicting reasons.  In the first chapter on page 5 Ishmael stays "I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage...I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment...chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself." So he is on this journey because he wants to be and is interested in whaling, but also because Fate made him go. So to liken this to our class, I'm going to make the connection that Ishmaels of digital culture are the ones who are only interested in "mainstream internet sites" like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Youtube, or Wikipedia. But when they start thinking about the "fates," like the importance of digital culture or all the other aspects of the web like crowdsourcing or consuming, the Ishmaels don't really know what to say about it yet. But at least the Ishmaels are engaged with the internet and willing to explore it by going on different long tail tangents.

(sorry, couldn't get a white whale!)

Starbuck, Stubb, and the crew of Pequod: Chapter 38 has Starbuck realizing he is bound to this journey despite feelings it is suicidal and mad: "Oh! I plainly see my miserable office, - to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with a touch of pity!" And we have Stubb in chapter 39 believing that what will be will be: "I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing." So for you crewmembers of the internet, you all must be in this digital culture journey for the ride. You don't know how far in you'll go, and maybe you'll end up lost in the surf of the digital sea, but at least you'll go down with a smile.


Maybe you guys would like to look at the other four themes? Or add on to this one - what was your journey through reading Moby Dick or getting through the first unit of this class? Which character are you?

Avatars of Moby Dick

In our recent class discussions about creating our own internet avatars and how that defines us, I thought about all the avatars Moby Dick creates for itself.

First, the characters. Ishmael right off the bat creates his avatar by saying "Call me Ishmael." He makes a biblical allusion to call him the son of Abraham. Then there's his character development. He is educated, religious, but then rambles and goes on tangents about education and religion and whaling. All of this creates an image of him. Who is he really then? This jouney has become his Harvard. What does that say about who he is or what he wants others to think about him?

Second, the book itself. We have already discussed how Moby Dick has elements of an allegory, epic, novel, and recently play. Which avatar do we focus on? The fact that this is mostly an epic novel can make readers focus on its purpose as an attempt to harness nature and make a deep connection withnature in the story. If we focus on avatar allegory, readers focus on its purpose as a story with symbols to represent abstract ideas. As a book with stage direction like a play we see building drama. All of these avatars combined though is what makes the book a unique and forces us to look at ALL these elements.

So with our own avatars, whether on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, each avatar reflects different pieces of ourselves. Maybe the same way having so many avatars on the internet feels overwhelming also reflects how the avatars of Moby Dick makes it a difficult book to classify and overwhelms us with its many definitions.

Classifying Literature and Blogs

This post is inspired by our fellow Team Stubb mates Victoria and Brittany (find their post here and here respectively). They both made great points in the debate on categorizing Moby Dick as a novel, and more generally speaking, the debate on making these types of classifications at all. Personally, I like the idea of having classifications for books. It sets up a basic framework for writers. Even if Moby Dick fits into many categories such as myth or allegory or epic, I would say overall it generally serves as a novel. That statement itself can be room for debate (one that would be better suited to discuss in the posts earlier mentioned); however, I want to focus on another question. If our current standards and classifications of literature are "flawed" and currently evolving to mixing genres, then when will it start including blog posts and other internet driven writing into such categories? Have these categories already been made?

I liked on the first day of class, Dr Burton posed this sort of idea: out of the best books we learn knowledge - now switch "books" to "blogs." Out of the best blogs we learn knowledge. Some of the class seemed to mentally repel that idea. Maybe that's just my imagination. Think about it, though. I've read blog posts, personal essays, and other pieces on the internet that, to me, were worth more merit than what I've suffered through studying Romantic era poetry. Yet authors from hundreds of years ago are considered literary geniuses. What of the authors today? What of the authors that aren't the professionals submitting items for publications and just posting them right on the internet for anyone to find?

I've been told by many professors that literature is work charged with meaning. If a simple blog post has just as much or more meaning than what Melville or Shakespeare or Austen have to say, do we get to log that into literary categories recognized as something important enough to call a novel or nonfiction or classic? Or does everything in the digital age get categorized as hopeful writers, nobody's, fanboys and fangirls putting whatever they want online?