Site Discussion

From Writing Machines

Site Planning

This is the page we'll use for site planning. What do you want to make, and why?

Inspired by Armstrong's work, I was thinking it could be interesting to focus on definitions of the individual. Perhaps we could focus on one person, such as Freud (which would provide a lot of interesting material) or we could have a collection of different perspectives. It may be a little ambitious, but we could also relate it back to blogging and online literature. In a different vein, I think it would be interesting to track the progress of medical information online. Sites such as WebMD have gained increasing popularity and importance as they redefine people's approach to medicine and health.

I like your idea of exploring Armstrong's individualism futher. I feel like there's a lot of places we could go with all of the theory that we've been reading. I was particulalry excited about all of the ideas that Ong was throwing about with respect to literacy and orality. A lot of his comments seemed to work in synchrony with a lot of stuff I've read by/about Freud--for instance, Freud was interested in aphasia, slips of the tongue, and the power of pre-linguistic visual images and signals. Maybe that's an aspect we could explore?

It seems pretty ironic to me that, given the opportunity to build something totally collaborative and communal--an opportunity that doesn't come along often in the acheivement-oriented academic setting--we would use it to amass definitions of the individual. That said, given the (collective) nature of the medium we're working with here, there's a lot of potential for complicating that project and the notion of individuated consciousness in the very act of defining it. Maybe McLuhan got to me, but instead of thinking about what we might do with the content of our class wiki, I keep coming back to the possibilities latent in the medium: a series of web-based pages that are separate but interlinked, started individually but expanded collaboratively, and with the capacity, if we want them to, to compose an intricately unified structure. An encyclopedic approach doesn't quite accomplish this, but I'm not sure what does. I know it's late and I'm crazy, but a phrase from the Burnett reading keeps running through my head: "millions of intersecting concentric circles built in pyramidal style". Whether on this page or in class, I'd love to hear everyone else's thoughts on the different ways we might experiment with all this connectivity.

I have contributed to a class wiki before (the marx wiki that we talked about in class last week), so I was hoping that this wiki would be different in that we move away from trying to create an encyclopedia. I like the last idea about the "concentric circles" and connectivity that the last post discussed. Though, I'm also unsure what that would look like. Perhaps this could be a place where we try to make sense of all the blogs that interest us? I know we have been doing that on the blog, but this would be a more organized format. Or maybe we could have a theme (like in the marx wiki) but do something different then just define and link.

Perhaps we can use the wiki to make sense of blogs that interest us and explore the theme and definitions of individualism at the same time. In other words, we could see how different blogs and types of blogs define the individual and how these individuals fit in/shape society outside the web community. I feel like this theme could work well with the idea of “concentric circles”, though I’m still a little unclear exactly how to do it.

There are some good ideas here, and I'm particularly taken by the idea of working with the particularities of the wiki as an interconnected medium. Echoing what has been said, I think that one way to necessitate that kind of interaction is to bite off something that looks a little too big and depend on linking to other pages. To throw out one HUGE bite we could take, I noticed that "media" doesn't have an article yet and that "mediate" is a song by INXS. This could be too big even if we're thinking of our project as providing continuity within a large base of existing knowledge, but this kind of vector could be productive.

To carry on the previous point (the one above mine), it seems like what is being suggested here is that we not attempt to make this a self-contained project, which I have to admit is an idea that appeals to me. If there's one thing that I've noticed since starting this class, it's that the online community does not lend itself to self-contatined "islands" of expression, so if, rather than attempting to craft something with defined borders, we attempt instead to foster input from other sources, then we might be onto something. I don't quite know what method this will involve, but admitting that we do not have all the answers, and not setting ourselves up as the only sources of input for this project seems like a good place to start.

Nice. I really like the implications of a connection between an article (text) on the one hand and its expansion into another medium (music) on the other. This fits with Bolter and Grusin's ideas on the nature of media, i.e, that it is hypermediate, and also with the sort of interdisciplinarity Burnett discusses, which has resulted from modern imageing technologies. Something like the language of images might be a good model for this multimedia/discipline approach, and, on a related tangent, Magoo's comment on distributed narrative ([1]) might provide a fantastic model for how discrete pages, sources, and types of media can be linked to form a strange, non-traditional, and yet cohesive narrative.

I'm sort of boxed in to the idea of a wiki as repository of information/encyclopedia, I think, because I'm having a hard time coming up with other uses of the format, but the idea above sounds cool (if vague, obviously). The idea of doing something more creative is appealing--making a blogcyclopedia would be interesting and probably useful to other people, but it would also be interesting/useful to expand the idea of what a wiki is or can be...AC

I have been avoiding this page, largely because I haven't the foggiest idea as to what this should be. One thing I do think we need to keep in mind, however, is the medium. While I can certainly appreciate not wanting to have something entirely encyclopedic, there is something about this form, at least to my understanding, that is objective-information-driven.AP

I think part of what I'm finding so difficult for coming up for concrete ideas for this project is that the scope of this course seems so massive, and we've barely scratched the surface of the different forms and uses of media that we're going to cover. Ooo, lightbulb just popped up, totally unthought-out idea, but, might it make sense to use this to...explicate the class? Kind of like creating a semi-interactive online version of the class, where we take the readings, find related text, give some sort of a less bloggy analysis? In other words, deciding to not decide on what we want the project to be, and letting everyone focus on whatever little tidbits they find intriguing, just link the oodles of articles back to the original class pieces that inspired them.AP

The structure of the wiki really lends itself to distinct yet interconnected ideas. I find the suggestion of interactive subject material very exciting, although I think it'll take a lot more thought and planning that is currently going on here.--pseudoanonymity 16:22, 20 September 2006 (EDT)

I think that collaborative narrative is a very interesting idea.--pseudoanonymity 16:34, 20 September 2006 (ED

Now that we've decided on and embarked upon a story, do we want it to be so self-referential? With the Sakai, complaints about handouts, and all? Again I think this comes down to whether we are trying to simply engage and entertain one another or a larger audience.ML 00:16, 25 September 2006 (EDT)

Also, we need to come to a consensus on perspective and setting. I assume we want a third-person limited perspective for the general thread story (which is why I changed PR's "I" to PR)since we are writing it collectively, but for the individual stories do we want them to be first person, or third person omniscent, or to each their own? Too much variety in perspective will make the story very difficult to read.ML 00:32, 25 September 2006 (EDT)

I'm really wondering if we do need a concensus on perspective. Setting seems develop out of our own need for placement, but the wiki really does not encourage one perspective. It might be hard to read, or something totally different might happen. Why can't we have multiple first person perspectives in a story? BTW, 'I' is significantly different than 'PR' in many ways. Just because it's linked to PR's profile doesn't make it a perspective synonym for PR.--pseudoanonymity 02:54, 25 September 2006 (EDT)

I didn't mean one perspective, I meant one type of perspective. I was concerned over how the main thread of the story was switching between third and first person. Since it is the most collaborative part of the wiki I thought it would be much easier to do it in third person so that we are not all trying to adopt and maintain a first person perspective, a difficult thing for a single writer to do, let alone 20something. I absolutely think the format encourages mutiple first person perspectives. In fact I think that's probably the best way to work the individual stories that branch out of the main thread. Also, I changed it to PR as a temporary measure. Since the "I" was spoken by PR I assumed it represented his character and that he would want to name him. I certainly did not intend for it to remain PR in the final wiki or be a "perspective synonym."ML 00:56, 27 September 2006 (EDT)