Apparently I'm not the only one who found the process of writing an appendix for my final project to be somewhat bewildering or frustrating. While I do not intend to quarrel with its necessity, I will admit that I felt like my project lost something in the process. Maybe it's because I increasingly tried to get my project to convey a sense of ambiguity. Maybe it's because I felt like explaining what I was trying to do robbed any of those who might read it of the chance to make certain connections for themselves. Or maybe it's just that I had been seeing it from the inside for so long that I found it difficult to step back and attempt to consider it from an exterior perspective.

Tophat made a post a while back about the "Voice of Our Generation," which had me thinking about the question of why no author seems to "define our generation" in the way that past writers such as Fitzgerald and Salinger had. I sat down to write a comment, but it got pretty long, so I decided to just write a blog entry instead. Then it got pushed to the back burner and I decided to revisit it. Naturally this has nothing to do with needing to get my post count up.

Anyway, I have to say that I'm not sure I buy the idea that any writer can really function as the voice of a generation. Fitzgerald and Salinger only really spoke for white middle to upper class males as far as I can tell. Maybe somebody disagrees. If we accept this proposition, then it makes sense to say that Fitzgerald and Salinger only really spoke for a minority of a generation. Under these terms, it might make just as much sense to call Ralph Ellison the "voice" of the same generation as Salinger, but then he wasn't speaking for everyone either. Considering these examples, it seems rather unproductive to look for a singular Voice of a Generation, but rather we should consider a plurality of Voices. The Time Magazine article Tophat mentioned mentioned a number of different authors as candidates if you will for the mantle of Voice of the Generation, but I really don't see why we should attempt to whittle the list down to one and attempt to place the burden of speaking for the present generation on their shoulders.

The Onyx Project seems to have been one of the most blogged about readings of the entire semester, and for good reason I would say. Unfortunately I may be hopping into the game a bit late, but what I find most interesting about it is the tension between its determinedly "new" form and the familiarity of its subject matter.

The creators of the Onyx Project are practically dogmatic about disassociating their "NAVworld" from movies and games. They write on the website, "We love movies/games. This is not a movie/game." However much they want to deny it, I think that they have a considerable dose of the old "anxiety of influence" going on (there it is, the first and last Harold Bloom reference on this blog). Pimm already wrote a post about how entwined the project is with the conventions and establishment of movie-making. It's unavoidable, as an aptly chosen Mcluhan quote in that post illustrates, that new forms will display a heavy debt to their immediate predecessors. The very fact that the creators denounce comparisons to movies and games so strongly indicates to me that there are more similarities than they want to admit. If NAVworlds were as radically different as they claim, wouldn't those differences be self-evident? Given that they do acknowledge a debt to movies and moviemaking, their efforts to differentiate NAV seem like a playwright saying "No, I'm nothing like Shakespeare, nothing like Shakespeare at all."

I'll admit, I was a bit skeptical about the wiki at first. However, as the project has progressed, I've noticed that the project has actually started to cohere in a rather interesting fashion. This is all the more fascinating because I have not noticed a great deal of communication between the members of the class about the direction of the story. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place, as there are undoubtedly corners of the wiki that I haven't found yet. This seems to indicate that collaboration may in fact be anonymous, that any one person may perceive how to connect the various points of the project without much input from the others. Admittedly the way that they choose to do so may not be the way that someone else would have done it, but it's generally an equally valid direction.

I wanted to carry on the discussion of how people create themselves online. There have been several fine blog entries on the subject, and I think it's been fairly well established that people self-consciously create a persona in their interactions with online social networks.

What I find interesting about this is that people often react to this self creation with skepticism. In reading forums for my final project, I have often run across people reacting to others' stories in an interrogative way, looking for holes in the information provided, and going so far as to check the details of the story in real life. For example, in one story that I read (which was admittedly somewhat outlandish), the teller claimed that it had been raining at the time, and provided information on the general area that the events took place in. One skeptical user actually looked up the weather reports for the area and found that it had been clear. However, other less incredulous users pointed out that the skeptic had not gotten the reports for exactly the right area. The whole discussion basically degenerated into an argument about the veracity of the story itself. Some people took the story at face value, and others acted on their doubts with a somewhat creepy zeal.

Continuing from the discussion we had yesterday in class about authorship in a collaborative work, I wanted to delve a bit into the problem of authority on wikipedia. In browsing through Many to Many, I was most interested in the "debate" between Clay Shirkey and Larry Sanger about whether primacy should be given to "experts" in the editing of various wikipedia pages. Shirkey quotes a comment that the debate drew, the most interesting part of which (I thought) was "Wikipedia has seen several recent incidents, including one this month, where notable scientists have joined the project and engaged in patterns of edits which demonstrated utter contempt for other editors of the encyclopedia (many of whom were also PhD-holding scientists, though lesser known), attempted to “own” pages, attempted to portray conjecture or unpublished research as fact, or have exaggerated the importance or quality of their own work. When challenged, said editors have engaged in (predictable) tirades accusing the encyclopedia of anti-intellectualism and anti-expert bias—charges we’ve all heard before." While I cannot speak to the validity of this statement, if it is true it highlights a relatively ugly debate lurking behind the apparently harmonious face of wikipedia.

I'm doing my project on internet forums, so I naturally read the wikipedia page about them that was linked from the social software article that we were assigned. The main example that I'll be drawing from is the forums at somethingawful.com. As I browsed through wikipedia, I came across this article about a former poster on that forum who killed two people and then himself over what most of us would deem a trivial slight. Apparently, he had posted on somethingawful and other forums about the incident and his plans for revenge, even asking for and receiving information about where to buy ammunition on the forums.

It seems to me that the discourse of the blog and the discourse of our actual class meetings are on kind of parallel and seldom interactive tracks. Every now and then in class somebody will reference a post from the blogging that has been done in the intervening time between class meetings, and we may occasionally expand on what general topics are currently in vogue "on the blog." However, I feel that overall the blog and the class are existing as separate, sometimes adversarial spheres.

How are they adversarial? I don't know if anybody else is experiencing this, but I have been finding it somewhat difficult to balance the need to participate to the required degree in both.

I finally got a chance to have a look at Winchester's Nightmare just now, and I have to say that I found it to be far more bearable than either Zork or afternoon.

As far as Winchester's status as a hypertext goes, what I appreciated about it was that there is at least an attempt to provide a spatial context for the exploratory kind of reading that the text demands. Winchester takes as its central conceit that we are exploring the mental space of Sarah Winchester (at least that's how I see it). As such, the confused, associative way of moving from one scene, one lexia to the next at least makes a certain amount of sense. For example, you start out on a beach with a seashell in front of you and the way that you actually start the story (probably after some time spent wandering Zork-like to no particular purpose) is to listen to the shell, which the text compares to a rifle shell, and then boom, there you are in an armory. I'll admit, I didn't just randomly decide to listen to the shell. The text will give you a hint or a prod every now and then if you get stuck for awhile, which I appreciated. The beauty of Winchester's premise is that it actually works with the structure of hypertext, rather than being almost incidental to it. Arguably, afternoon's premise of reconstructing an accident was in harmony with this as well, but Winchester casts you as Sarah Winchester, whereas there is no clear point of entry for the reader in afternoon.

I am almost unnerved by how furious the basic conceit of Skin makes me. Apart from the cult-like nature of Jackson's recruitment methods (Hey kids! Get an inane tattoo, in book font mind you, and I'll tell you the real story!), the idea of a text that you basically need to join a club to read is the height of elitism. I suppose if one accepts the whole indie mentality of obscurity as the highest good, then one might be inclined to be really excited about this. Not that I really have any right to tell Shelley Jackson how to express herself, but it seems to me that the goal of art should be to spread one's work as far as possible, to reach as many people as possible. I find it hilarious that Shelley Jackson has managed to practically pull this off, and is getting attention for an experiment without any accessible content to back it up. Let's just hope that the scientologists don't catch wind of this one. That said, the one thing that I do admire about Skin is the way that the "words" are free to express their own interpretations of their tattoos on Skin's website. At least they get some input here.