As my senior year flies by, the most common and irritating question I'm confronted with is, "So, what are you going to do next year?" I suppose this question would be more enjoyable if I had a good answer ("Well right now I'm fielding offers from several firms and it's probably going to really come down to signing bonuses and health benefits.") But I don't.

As a joke, since being in this class, I've started telling people I'm going to be a blogger. This rarely fails to impress my older relatives. To them, being a blogger means being on the cutting edge of internet technology, instantly trading information across the world. Why shouldn't a person be paid handsomely for that?

I was flipping through the NY Times today and came across an article, written by Stephanie Rosenbloom (still unsure how to naturally citein the blog--is the blog footnote far off?) about a new study done by Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson in the field of proxemics. Proxemics is the study of personal space and how people perceive it. Their study concluded that avatars in a virtual universe have the same relationship to their surroundings as real people: "digital beings adhered to...unspoken behavorial rules of humans even though they were but pixels on the screen."

At first, this struck me as obvious. Of course these characters react in such a way because the gamers controlling them instinctually tell them to. If someone gets too close to you, you move back, whether its in a game or reality. But the more I thought about it the more strange it seemed. If we are really so instinctually connected to our avatars, should we also be troubled by allowing them to engage in explicitly amoral behavior? To clarify, is it easier for us to hack a stranger-avatar up with an ax than make eye-contact with them for an uncomfortably long time?

The expanding prevalance of social software makes me distinctly uncomfortable. I can't put into words exactly what I fear will happen, but there is something about the opportunity to manufacture and maintain a personality for oneself that I feel could affect society in unforseen and possibly adverse ways.

While I was initially resistant to social software devices, such as AIM and Facebook, they eventually seduced me. There is a reclamation of power that comes with the process of carefully controlling an image of oneself that will be disseminated to one's peers. On AIM I can take a few moments to run over possible witty responses and decide on the wittiest. I can actively decide whether I want the person I'm talking to to think I'm a jovial type, or a deep intellectual (how succesful I am is certaily questionable, but the process is there.) A Facebook profile is essentially a carefully chosen compilation of information designed to present an image you think will be attractive/endearing/popular/etc. Real tastes aren't even portrayed, let alone real personality.

Reading over the Electronic Book Review and the Future of the Book I was particularly interested in how the internet and the process of electronic writing will change the position of editor. It's my belief that it's only a matter of time before electronic literature gets commodified in some way, be it through an online publishing company of some sort or a community of writers/critics who filter and market content, or some other variation. The possibilities for creation within the form are so great and the internet audience is so large. There's big money to be made.

At the same time, it seems unrealistic to think this electronic editor will be similar to those that control the publishing world. Sure the basic task of cleaning up grammar and punctuation will still be needed, but in electronic literature the form and interaction between the different types of media and the user are in many ways as important as the words that make up the literature. Thus I see the electronic editor as having more in common with Hollywood talent scouts than with traditional publishers. The mark of a good electronic editor will be their ability to find and develop talent. Comb the internet for the next artist or face that can be sold to the internet public.

Something that has disturbed me about Writing Machines this entire semester has now clarified to the point where I can at least try to enunciate it: never before have I taken a class in which form and theory so far outstrip content. Our discussions have been lively and insightful, I've learned a great deal and been exposed to a world I didn't even know existed, but if you asked me to name a single character from a text we've read this semester and describe them to you, I'd be hard pressed to do it. Or, to put it another way, when a friend, after I've finished describing our class and all the exciting things we talk about, asks what hypertext she should check out I really don't know what to tell her. I stammer and stutter and end up saying something like, "Well, the idea behind this one is pretty cool."

"As soon as we say 'I' we begin to lie." I'm very curious about this approximate quote of Shelley Jackson's. By extension we assume that, since Jackson is a writer and explores this quote in her writing, it can also be stated, "As soon as we write 'I' we begin to lie."

I'm curious about this not so much because I agree or disagree, but because I fail to see the importance. I have never seen pure objective truth as a goal of writing. Perhaps more so in a supposedly nonfiction autobiography (but even then not some inarguable mathematical kind of truth,) but never in a fiction, even one based on real characters. The goal is to take little snippets of truth, character tics such as a boy who expresses himself through his toes, and meld them together into a character that reads as true, regardless of whether he or she is or not. The truth that writing strives toward is the truth of empathy. The establishment of an emotional connection between writer and reader.

I just came across this very cool site. The creators use the web of emails that made up the Enron scandal as a way of showcasing their new SONAR software. This software organizes and visualizes the reactions of all those involved as the "noose began to tighten" on Enron's management team.

I came across this article today proclaiming that Google just purchased Jotspot, one of the wiki sites KF recommended I look into as a forum for a final project. The lead of the article states that this was the latest step in Google's "designs on the web 2.0 market." I don't know exactly what this means, but it sounds like Google is trying to monopolize the programs it thinks will be influential in the next generation of web interaction.

Joe Krauss, the co-founder of Jotspot, was excited by the deal. "We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online," he said. While it is apparent that Google can use it's resources to increase the usefulness and availability of programs, I'm not sure I'm so excited by the prospect of a Google monopoly over the web 2.0 market. Part of it is my old-fashioned fear of any kind of monopoly, but I also think it could lead to an over-centralization and homogenization of web resources. I'd be curious to hear what the more tech-savvy among you think.

Our brief discussion about copyright law and the internet at the end of class today left me with some questions about our final project: is it legal to pass of real media as part of a fictional world, that is to fit it into a fictional framework?

For example, if I found a news article about an unidentied body mysteriously discovered in a Louisiana swamp, could I write a mystery in which that is the body of the victim and link to that article as part of the evidence?

Another example, if I found a particularly hilarious picture of a super wild party somewhere, could I link to it as a photo of a party I describe in a story? To go more extreme, could I state that some of the people at the party are specific characters in my text?

I've just delved into Scott Rettberg's Kind of Blue, and so far I'm impressed. It's the first hypertext we've looked at in which I really feel like the form is elevating the content. Kind of Blue could not function nearly as well in book form. It's the kind of story that needs to be a hypertext, and, as such, it doesn't feel forced--like the author is shaping the story to fit the form or vice-versa.

The device of emails from many senders allows the author to naturally assume many voices, and makes for the kind of story that I at least was seduced into trying to figure out. It's a simple concept: going through someone else's inbox and one common enough that it doesn't feel gimmicky. The multiple perspectives also give Rettberg tremendous freedom in his writing. You can tell he's having fun, throwing in cryptic snippets of poetry, lists, and the butchered spelling of children at different stages of keyboard adeptness.