Skip navigation.
Home
Writing Machines
 kathleen fitzpatrick | course sakai site | course wiki
Home » blogs » crashingintowalls's blog

Conclusion (?)

Submitted by crashingintowalls on 10 December 2006 - 12:03pm.

Now that I've written the recap of my final project (which felt a little violent considering how far I had been from the project itself throughout), I'm deciding where to go from here. Part of me wants to be throught with the long walks to go photograph an unchanged landscape on Walker Beach or to repost another blank page of the journal. I did not feel like people got much out of the visual space, but there was a very interesting conversation going on in the journal when the project "ended." People were saying some very meaningful things, using the journal as a cathartic tool. Also, the journal "broke the bubble" when a group of sixth-graders happened upon it and joined the conversation.

With the late activity in the project, I'm tempted to keep it going in some way. The "visual space" did not really draw a large community, and a number of people I talked to indicated that they felt more comfortable with the journal (something to explore in itself). I've thought of just leaving the journal out on Marston, which would be a very different gesture than the project was, but a vehicle for real-world creativity nonetheless. I'm not sure what the journal does that a blog could not, considering that the purpose of my project was to create dialogue between spaces and media. Still, if people are writing in this thing, who am I to take it away?

» crashingintowalls's blog | login to post comments

This reminds me of a story

Submitted by marmalade on 10 December 2006 - 1:50pm.

This reminds me of a story that I came across researching my final paper--

I'll copy the portion of my paper here for you--it makes a very interesting parallel:

...

Indeed, sometimes the conversation becomes entirely independent of the initial creator. Biz Stone gives the following example:

Blogger Jason Kottke once asked the question: ‘Who owns the conversation on my website?’ when the number of comments on one of his posts exploded to over 700 in two weeks’ time and continued to grow. […] Surging bandwidth costs dictated that Jason turn off the commenting, but he was torn because the conversation seemed genuine and intelligent. He even compared the comments to a kind of group-authored series of books: ‘Those 700 comments comprise a total of ~125,000 words (~180 per entry); that’s about 3.3 150 -page books […] Who am I to shut down a conversation that I’m not involved in? This may be my site, but the participants own the conversation. As much as it makes sense to shut it down, I’m inclined to let the participants go as long as they want.’ (Stone, 105)

In the end, Kottke let the conversation end naturally and then archived the comments for public viewing. Stone, however, reflecting on the affair, makes an interesting claim: “It doesn’t really matter whether or not Jason owns the comments; he is responsible for them either way” (Stone, 105-106). This seems like a radical new vision of authorship—the author is the facilitator a conversation, a vision that gels well with Kline’s and Jenkins’ images. Here Stone takes that idea a bit further, making the author responsible for the conversation that he inspires—conversations that can, perhaps, mimic a “group-authored series of books” (Stone, 105).
...

» login to post comments