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.