Of Late I've Been, Reflecting Once Again

Now that it's the end of the semester, it's time to take a look back over what I've done and what I've learned. I'm not a big fan of public self-reflection. Oh, well.

All of my posts are fairly self-reflective. Recently I've reflected on how much I have not posted, and about my digital exploration habits.

Self-directed learning/Personal Blog Posts

• Most of my blog posts reflect on what I know about myself and digital culture, rather than exploring brand new ideas. But simply putting that knowledge into words is something. My post on fanfiction is my most thorough discussion of my knowledge.
•  I spent some small amount of time reporting on the nonfiction book I read for this class. The most immediately interesting idea was the passage of time. I wasn't interested enough in that particular subject to look any deeper though. I planned to discuss some of the assumptions about religion made in Age of Distraction and the fiction book I read, To Say Nothing of the Dog, but my plans don't always come to fruition. It's true that there has been an overall trend of decline in the public's outward religiousness since somewhere around the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment Era. As people grow more accustomed to trusting science and their own intellect they put less stock in knowledge gained in faith. But I'd like to point out that the Church of Jesus Christ is not fading in this highly digital world. No, it's thriving. Some of the digitally related parts of this are the digital missionaries, the I'm a Mormon videos, and the level that they reach for in being a presence online (tech stuff, twitter, various YouTube channels, and other online resources). The leaders of our Church know what's going on in the world. They're digitally literate (despite how old they are).
• I read a lot of posts, all the recommended read/watch before coming to class stuff that I can think of, and I commented on a goodly number of posts and discussions. I also read several fiction books that people have related to digital culture such as the Hunger Games trilogy and the Ender's Game books.

Collaboration

• I was part of the Chaotic Connections book project, the collaborative novel. Heather Anderson, Jason Hamilton, Christina Holt, Hilary Ulmer, and Ashley Barnes also worked on this project. I helped develop the original ideas, and developed the character Micro. I created a Twitter account for him (and a Facebook account too, though I took that down fairly soon afterward, there was something unsettling about having more than one Facebook account). I also looked for people to contribute and recruited some people from Professor Horrock's class.
• I presented a summary about what I know about fan culture to the class. I also commented on people's posts on the Google+ stream.

Contribution from Others

• I found Sarah Talley's blog very interesting (when she posted), largely because I'm also an introverted person.
•  I also enjoyed Jalena's blog, since she talked about a lot of topics that interest me, and she said it in interesting ways (copyright, remix, family, etc.).
•  In my group, I found Heather's drive to get things done quite helpful, and it was fun to talk to Hilary and Christina (and talking to them almost made up for the fact that I hate working in groups and knowing that I have to talk about groupwork in class every day made me constantly dread coming to class).

Digital Literacy

I'd always considered myself pretty digitally literate. I already spent most of my life online. But, I did realize during this semester that I tend to assume that I know everything I need to know about a site just at first glance, or that I have all of the online tools I need. As it turns out, there are quite a few tools left for me to finish learning.

•  I got a diigo account, though I'd never thought I needed more than a vague memory of a site to help me find my way back. It proved useful in researching for a term paper, and finding (at least one) blog post I wanted to get back to, and as a fun nice place to put intriguing information and favourite quotes.
• I learned how to use Prezi, which I had previously thought was just a more complicated powerpoint tool and therefore probably not worth learning to use. But it just seemed like the appropriate way to show a presentation on fan culture. Since it changed since I finished making that, I've yet to fully figure out how to use it all over again.
• I'm still learning aspects of how to best consume, connect, and create well. I'm pretty good at consuming stuff online, I read a lot, and I'm on YouTube a lot.  I just need to learn to manage that time better, and to consume a higher proportion of useful and intelligent articles. I have some connections (usually through Facebook or Skype, and mostly just with close friends and family). I also have made some loose connections to other fans online. I create creative things online just fine. I still need to practice contributing to the serious discussions of stuff.

Finally, Some Questions

Straight-forward Questions

1. According to Herbert Simon, what does information "consume"?

• answer

2. On fanfiction.net alone there are over 600,000 Harry Potter fanfiction stories, and Harry Potter is only one of many original works which has inspired fanfiction. True or False?

• answer

3. On the Prezi about Fan Culture that Sarah and I made, Sarah talked about fan charities. One of these charities has collected well over $1,000,000. True or False?

• answer

Essay Questions

1. Fanfiction is one aspect of the creative fan and remix culture found online. This sort of recreation can be a productive creative outlet and an abundant source of entertainment, despite its problematic aspects.

•  My discussion of fanfiction.

2. We go to religious school, so it's unsurprising that many of us had something to say about how our beliefs affect our view of the digital culture. Learning doesn't have to be just secular. Through the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ can teach us about both spiritual things and secular things.

• A post by Ellis

(There were numerous other posts that discuss similar ideas, but this post does a good job of briefly discussing the subject while still being personal and interesting. I also remember where to find this particular post at the moment.)

Internet Exploration

Interestingly enough, most of my explorations online relate somehow to fan culture. One of the first sites I remember spending time on was Mugglenet.com. I could see stills from the Harry Potter movies, and read fan theories on how the remaining books would turn out. I also scoured sites for images of my favourite characters, then printed out these pictures and made collages with them.

In the years since then I've spent a large amount of my time online reading fanfiction on fanfiction.net, or watching Youtube remixes. A few years ago I got a Twitter account in order to follow the tweets of my favourite South Indian actor. One of my most recent favourite sites is tvtropes.org, where I can see what patterns (I love patterns) other fans have found in various books and shows and so forth.

This semester I branched out to more online sites and services than usual, but my first uses of these online tools was once again related to stories and actors that I admire or am interested in. My first use of the bookmarking tool Diigo was to highlight a passage from one of my favourite Bleach fanfiction stories. I learned how to use Prezi in order to present on fanfiction. My brand new Tumblr and Pinterest accounts are full of images from Doctor Who, Sherlock, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings.

I have found uses for some of these tools outside of manifesting my fanhood. Diigo was useful in helping me research for a paper I did on for my Myth, Legends, and Folklore class (on Angels, and it was a really interesting subject to research and I could have happily spent more time on it, if I had left more time to do that research and still write my paper and deal with my other responsibilities). I tried to use Prezi again, but they were in the process of changing things around and I wasn't able to get on and figure out the new system in time for me to make a Prezi better than my PowerPoint. I haven't yet figured out useful ways of using Pinterest and Tumblr, but it's fun to log on and see lots of pretty pictures every once in a while.

None of my blogs was created with the intent of being a part of fan culture, but all of them have included multiple references to either specific shows, movies, and books that I'm fond of, and frequently to fanfiction or fan culture itself.

The Fear of Looking Foolish

or, Why I Haven't Posted More This Semester, and Why That Was a Bad Idea.

This semester has marked the most recent chapter of the adventure of growing up (technically that would make this a coming-of-age story). One of the challenges to face this semester was getting my blogging done. As you can see, I haven't overcome this challenge quite as well as we all could have hoped.

There are, of course, some reasons for this. The first was described on Annette Lyon's blog as, "Resistance, which can show up in any form to keep me from getting my work done, whether it's puttering around online or getting caught up in the daily drama of life or whatever else (that "other else" often being, at its core, "I'm actually scared to work on that")." I have this problem too. Actually, I have a very severe case of this. I've wasted several entire days searching for something to read in order to avoid doing my homework. (By the way, Annette Lyon's the author who attended that one class I went to in order to recruit people to work on our collaborative novel.)

Here's the Plan

If everything goes according to plan, I will be posting a lot this week. Some of the upcoming subjects:

• The Fear of Looking Foolish; or, Why I Haven't Posted More This Semester and Why That Was a Bad Idea
• The permanence of words
• Reputation and the public sphere
• Unhelpful fear

My Progress Until Now

Well, it’s that time of the semester. Yup. It’s time to talk about my progress in the class. Unfortunately. I’m not all that fond of classifying and analyzing what I have and haven’t done. It is, however, useful to take a closer look at what I’ve done and what I should be striving to do. 

I read the book Age of Distraction earlier this semester, partly because it was one of the few books on the list I was both interested in and able to find. It had some interesting theories and speculations, but I largely did not agree with them, and so I didn’t bother to do much applying of those theories to other aspects of Digital Culture that interest me. I was a little surprised to look back and realize that I’d only posted about one of the topics in the book that I’d been interested in. I’m sure I have notes on some of the other topics and my reactions to them. I think I wanted to talk a bit more about the author’s assumptions about religion in the digital age.

•   When I do write that discussion about the author of Age of Distraction’s assumptions about religion in the Digital Age, I’d like to make an additional section or post about how religion was portrayed in To Say Nothing of the Dog (by Connie Willis). I also have another blog post in the draft stage on being genre savvy in real life. 

•  As far as self-directed learning goes, well, there should have been a bit more of that. Procrastination is a very real and detrimental part of everyday life. I wonder if that’s more common in this day and age or if people have had issues with procrastination always. I’m guessing always, since Alma the Younger cautioned against “procrastinating the day of your repentance” and all. My favourite post I’ve made relating to self-directed learning was my post on fanfiction. It wasn’t a definitive discussion on the topic, but it hit a fair number of the points I’d been thinking about. Fanfiction/fan culture and religion are some of the more interesting topics that I’ve thought about relating to Digital Culture. 

•  I’m not really the most social of people, but I’ve enjoyed reading Sarah’s posts (partly because I’ve known her a long time and partly because we have certain similarities in personalities and interests), and I’ve enjoyed working with my group on a collaborative novel/novella. That’s actually a pretty big deal, since I usually hate group work. We have a lot of people who are obviously deeply interested in Digital Culture (or at least certain aspects of it), and it’s interesting to see what they have to say. It’s also always nice when people give positive feedback.

So basically, I have a lot I still need to write.

On the Subject of Fanfiction

I have found over the years, that most people I interact with are not as familiar with fanfiction as I am. This is not really a bad thing, but I am somehow always thrown for a loop when someone asks "What's fanfiction?"

Fanfiction is creative writing relating to a popular story (books, movies, TV shows, manga, anime, etc.) written by fans of that work for other fans. Occasionally someone who is not a fan will make a parody, and that is also a kind of fanfiction, but most fanfiction is written by genuine fans.

Fanfiction comes in many different genres and with different relations to canon (that is, the official original book, movie, etc.), but a few of the most important are the missing moments, the alternate ending, the alternate universe, different point of view, and crossover fics.

One of my favourite websites, tvtropes.org, has an in-depth explanation, analysis, and exploration into the nature of fanfiction and also a list of the tropes ("are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations"-tvtropes homepage) associated with it.

There are both positive and negative sides to fanfiction, both reading it and writing it.

Fan art of fanfiction

Positive points for reading fanfiction:

•  Fanfiction can make you love the originals even more. It can be fascinating to see how other people view your favourite stories and characters. Sometimes when I read Narnia fanfiction, I'll come across a great portrayal of Edmund. I've liked Edmund for years, but you can find some lovely portrayals of his character and possible interactions with his siblings, subjects, Aslan, and fellow students at school. The fandom has made me love Edmund even more. My favourite Narnia fanfictions--Black Dwarves, Blue River by Elecktrum, and Finding Narnia: Aftermath by FyreFlyte (even though it's not finished)

A Media Fast Sunday

My media fast was actually pretty successful, as far as it went. I didn't even try to limit my communication via cellphones (I had a lot of visiting teaching coordinating to do) or forgo watching the broadcast of the dedication of the Brigham City Temple (che, like that was gonna happen). I also did take a look at something my roommate was working on online. But I didn't get on my own computer at all on Sunday, nor did I watch any television, or movies, or listen to any music outside of the broadcast.

I spent much of the day catching up on some readings for my religion class.

What did I learn from all of this? Well firstly, I seriously need to keep up better in my readings. It took a long time to catch up. Secondly, I spend far too much time online goofing off. There are a lot of great and legitimate reasons to get online, and if my parents had called and wanted to webchat I would have been online within minutes, but a lot what I do online is not the really the best use of time. I had a great day yesterday, and I was probably more in tune with the Spirit than I've been for many Sundays. So I guess I just have to remember moderation in all things and that it's important to spend my time wisely doing the best and most important thing for that moment.

I can't think of any better way to sum up my thoughts on the experiment, than to link to President Uchtdorf's talk What Matters Most. In fact, I think that talk is crucial in understanding the frenzied pace of life in our digital world, and our place  in it as Latter-Day Saints.

Psalm 46:10 Be still and know that I am God.

Dimensions of Sarah: Creative writing idea for collab

I've been wanting to work on a multiple dimension story for a while now. This idea has some similarities to Jason's, and also to the sci-fi book I've been re-reading, To Say Nothing of the Dog, but hopefully it could seem cool and a bit original. Here's the idea:

Dimensions of Sarah

Sometime in the distant future a fellow named Justal gets a job at a high security government sponsored research facility, perhaps editing for them. Despite the security around the center, his work seems pretty standard. He thinks some of the documents he’s edited have been written in double-speak. Anyways, after a while he notices some strange things are happening, things that just don’t make sense, even things that ought to be impossible.

What’s going on? Research into Alternate Dimensions. The other dimensions are beginning to noticeably affect and apparently be affected by Justal’s dimension. At the core of the Research project is Sarah. Now, she could be the head honcho scientist, or be an accidental traveler across the dimensions, or have somehow have an understanding of the dimensions downloaded into her head. But Sarah and Justal start interacting, romantic tension and dramatic tension build as the dimensions interact more and more. Eventually Justal has to decide what to do about it. Does he simply try and alleviate the negative affects of the dimension crossings, or does he try and put a stop to it altogether? 

This is not the first dimension to have access to the inter-dimension research and technology. Some of the information and perhaps some of the tech came from one of those other dimensions, which was likely not the starting place of the research either. We are all connected.

I’d prefer a somewhat ambiguous ending. Perhaps implying that Justal will be able to help Sarah manage the dimension connections so that there are more positive affects than negative affects; impying that Justal and Sarah will live happily until the end of their days; implying that even the scary new things can have great worth. No guarantees.

To Say Nothing

I love books. I do. I think they are awesome. This one is a favourite of mine:

To Say Nothing of the Dog: How we found the Bishop’s bird stump at last is the story of a fellow named Ned, who is spending far too much time hopping from the 21^st century to various points in history to do research. All of the researchers on the project are exhausted, and one of them makes a mistake. Ned has to go back to the Victorian era to help her fix it. It’s a very funny book.

A few things in the book that I think can relate well to digital culture:

•        Time and space being compressed—it’s a time travel story, what do you expect?—relates well to the book Age of Distraction which was the scholarly book on digital culture that I recently read.
• Confusion of Information—Ned has a really difficult time understanding things at first because he’s been jumping through time so much that he’s “time lagged” and is still being asked to take in and act on a huge amount of information—related to the fact that there’s so much information on the web that it can all get jumbled together in our minds. 
•  Fan culture and being genre savvy—Ned and Verity and the author, Connie Willis, all make references to Victorian era books.
• Searching for information—Ned and Verity both have information-gathering jobs—the internet is one of the best ways of searching for information now.

What is Time?

Due to some difficulties last week finding the nonfiction book I intended to read, I ended up reading Age of Distraction by Robert Hassan. It's one of those books which gets more interesting as you get further into it. Perhaps that was because I was better able to focus on what he was saying after a while. But even though it got easier to understand, I started to get rather irritated with some of the implied ideologies.

His most interesting theme is the nature of time. According to him, time is a socially constructed phenomena to help us make sense of the world around us. "Clock and script were developed as immediate expressions of immediate bodily capacities and immediate material surroundings" (34). If you accept time as being a social construct, then you can accept the idea that the new media is compressing time and space. "If time is the number of movement, as Aristotle argued, then through the mobile phone we take the measure of the distance and reduce it to the fantastical in terms of natural human capacities" (24).
  
Other definitions of time--Time was early in history found in the rhythms of the seasons. Newtonian time is time measured by the clock. The traditional Christian teachings say time is eternal. Skeptics prefer to look at "lived time" which is how much time people have to live and do things. In a capitalistic society, time is money.


There were some other interesting points that I might come back and talk about later, but I think I'll end this post with a quote that he borrowed from Herbert Simon:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. (Simon 1971, 40– 41)

Good Morning. Welcome to my mind.

Hello, everyone. This is my new blog. I set it up as a place to discuss what I find and think about Digital Culture this semester. I'm not sure what exactly I'll be saying, but there's a chance it might be interesting and it may even prove useful to someone.

I've been thinking these past few days about some of the summaries for the books Prof. Burton recommended for our class this semester. Several of the summaries mention how the machine is part of so many of our metaphors to understanding ourselves and our society. It was an interesting idea, and the more I think about it, the more I've come to the conclusion that a personal webpage, like a blog, or the process of browsing a one is actually a pretty good metaphor for how my thought process works.

I might be thinking along in a fairly straight-forward way, one word following the next like this and then suddenly I come across one of those interesting words or images that I almost unthinkingly "click" on and then suddenly I'm on an entirely different page. The connection between the two things might not be obvious, might not make sense to someone who isn't me, and almost always is not the sort of progression of ideas that is easily transformed into a coherent argument. It is also always a work in progress. There is no conclusion to my thoughts, even if I have made a decision on what I believe and then go onto some other subject, my thoughts keep on going.

But for now, I've reached a stopping place. This is the end of my post for today, but you'll be hearing more from me later.