Hello all,
Here’s the link to the hypertext creative writing exercise that we did in class last Friday. I know some people were looking for the link, so here you go: http://wiki.ubc.ca/Sandbox:Hypertextliterature
Cheers,
Allison
Author: allisond
I must confess it felt a bit surreal to read a journal article detailing the life and times of a blog about Project Runway, especially since I had printed the article out and was reading it in traditional paper form. That said, I’ve set aside my paper, and it seems rather apt that I’m now about to post my thoughts about “Blogging as Participation” on our class blog.
Thought 1: disproportionately burning bright
Lankshear and Knobel state that “a tiny proportion of the vast number of blogs that exist account for a large proportion of the inbound links.”(4). There is no denying this, and there is no denying that the more popular something on the internet gets, the faster its popularity rises. When it comes to memes, we tend to burn them out rather than let them fade away. In other words, this disproportionate distribution of views towards a small amount of very popular websites is an obvious reality, but it is also a reality that what’s popular on the Internet changes very quickly. Honestly, does anybody even use MySpace anymore? And is Friendster still a thing?
Thought 2: from yolo to actually just living
Shifting gears a bit, I’d like to touch on the nature of participation in the digital realm and how it translates into real life applications. After reading a couple of other blog posts on this article by classmates, I found myself thinking about the examples of blogging participation given in the article. When I ran a literature circles unit during my practicum, I included a blogging component in which students posted reviews of their books online and commented on each other’s posts. Part of my focus in these online literature circles was to make a more explicit connection between the social and academic skills students were using in their face-to-face discussions versus their digital ones. I wanted students to participate in their discussions online in the same manner in which they would participate in them in a physical classroom setting. While it turned out that respectful communication wasn’t an issue online, meaningful communication was. Students needed extra prodding to move beyond “yolo” and “nice post” to actually engaging in one another’s thoughts and having a back-and-forth digital discourse.
Thought 3: Particip-Action
Oftentimes, social media movements for change are criticized for being lazy and ineffective (i.e. “like this picture to end poverty!!!”). However, social and digital media are actually very valuable and effective tools for enacting social change – the most commonly cited recent example being the use of social media during the Arab Spring in spreading news about current events and plans for protests. There’s also the example of Kony 2012… but we won’t wade into that mire this far into a blog post. A more successful example would be the growing popularity of microfinancing non-profits like Kiva, which uses digital and social media to crowd-source a very large number of very small loans in order to help people maintain or start a business. At the core of these organizations is the idea that a little bit of help by a lot of different people can, ultimately, help to make lasting and sustainable social and economic change. And social media can be a powerful tool for doing just that.
Works Cited
Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. ”Blogging as Participation: The Active Sociality of a New Literacy.” American Educational Research Association. San Francisco, CA. April 11, 2006. Web.
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– Allison
Blog post #3
Before I start, can I just say that I’m amazed that I didn’t know Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme”? My life is forever changed.
I’ve chosen to post a blog about “On the origin of adaptations” because I’m really interested in film adaptations and movies in general. I was a Film Studies minor during my undergrad (the one where you study movies, not the one where you make them). This minor wasn’t due to any special talent or deep knowledge of film; mostly I just wanted to sit around watching and talking about movies. So. I am now going to proceed to sit in front of my laptop and type about movies.
While I was initially a bit baffled by the idea of “homology” between biological and film adaptation, after reading through the article I find value in the comparison. I like that the article points out that “biology does not judge adaptations in terms of fidelity to the ‘original’; indeed, that is not the point at all” (445). While film adaptations are often panned for going “off the script” of the source material, biological adaptation necessitates this kind of change. Perhaps, like biological adaptations, film adaptations should attempt to improve upon the originating material and adapt to changing social and cultural environments. This is summed up quite nicely in the article’s simple formula: “narrative idea + cultural environment = adaptation” (448). Math!
The article touches on an issue that I fondly call the Shakespeare Exception, in that Shakespeare is celebrated as high culture despite containing certain elements of style and subject matter which, when they appear in any work not written by Shakespeare, are disdainfully labeled low culture. In the article, the Shakespearean Exception is that we don’t criticize Shakespeare for straying from the source material he used to write Romeo and Juliet, whereas we so often critical of more modern adaptations that do the same thing. (To learn more about the source material for Romeo and Juliet, you can watch this awesome video by Young Adult fiction author John Green.) Another example of the Shakespearean Exception that I rather obsessively must mention is that of the pun. Shakespeare’s plays are packed with line after line of shameless and wonderful puns, yet when I make an especially punny joke involving the words duty and doody, I am not celebrated for my brilliant Shakespearean wit (as I rightfully should be).
Before I sign off, I feel the need to bring up an issue not dealt with much in the article that complicates the idea of adaptation, and that is the fact that adaptation is not always a strictly book-to-film process. In these mad times of ours, we have board games, action figures, and TV series being made into films. We also have films being adapted into books, comics, and other media. Indeed, adaptation is a messy and unpredictable thing: just as Twelfth Night became She’s the Man, the dinosaur became the chicken.
Work Cited
Bortolotti, G. and Hutcheon, L. (2007). On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success” — Biologically. New Literary History, 38(3), pp. 443-458.
– Allison
Blog post #1