Going Feral

A point made by Hayles and others this semester, that other people in the class seem to have a better handle on than I do, was brought up briefly today: that of how hypertexts change and become something new when they are released to the world.

This has suddenly become a very real concern to me in designing my final project. One of the major components of my project is a blog which I set up on a public forum. I didn't really think about comments when I set it up, assuming that the chances were low that a random person would stumble on it and really take time with it before it was done, but today I got my first comment, and it was extremely disturbing. This reader took my fictional characters and the fictional situations I put them in to be real, and commented accordingly. Expressing hope for their future and wishing a character luck in a specific venture. He also made the point of how much he had come to enjoy the main character through reading his blog.

Now, I have dark plans for this character. His future is not bright. And somehow this direct interaction with some random person who took my character for real has made me very uncomfortable with enacting those dark plans. They could really freak people out. There isn't the line between fiction and reality in the blogging world, no keys for the reader to pick up on to denote that this blog is, in fact, fictional (though a diligent reader could fact-check and discover fictional aspects.)

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, I suppose it just suddenly made me aware of how important it is to think through how a text could change and be taken when it is released on an unsuspecting internet public.