Blogging
Well, its been interesting. I can’t say that blogging is my most favorite activity, but I can see how it could be for some. It is definitely hard to put yourself out there, and I think it is probably a good thing that we have this reluctance. Writing in general should be something carefully considered. It should be something which is approached as if it could have positive and negative consequences – because it does. There is a reason Heidegger said, “Language is the house of being.” He meant language has the possibility for either wonderful or dire consequences, and therefore, we must be very careful about how we use it. We all know these possibilities, or at least we have a sense of them. And That is why we are so reluctant to “put ourselves out there,” especially on the internet where our words may end up lasting forever.
On a more appropriate-to-this-class note, I chose to blog about topics suitable to this course for the majority of my posts this semester. I did give some feedback about some of the critical theory topics in the Landow book, but I mostly wrote about the process of creating my website. I found that every time I sat down to write a new post, perhaps with the exception of the first two or three, I had no problem with completing the post within a matter of minutes. There was always a fresh supply of material to write about, provided I had spent some time working on my website. I think the website theme was an appropriate topic to blog about for this course.
Being Creative
Now that we have talked about the Section 2 project in class, I thought I would share a few of my thoughts. My own project does what I want it to do now, as far as the behaviors and effects of showing the pictures and so forth. As was suggested in class, I would like to make it a more collaborative text; however, I am not sure if I will keep the same pictures. It would be much more “my style,” so to speak, if I were to use a more artistic approach to the use of images within my text. In other words, rather than going out and finding random pictures which fit my text better, I think it would be more interesting if I linked Hughes’ poem to an artistic representation of nature through one or two artists.
Besides this modification of images, I also plan to use recordings of my voice, which will correspond to each line. I believe the trick here will be not to make the reader so passive that there is no effort required other than for them to move the mouse. I would still like the reader to explore the text from their own view point, adding a style of their own to the reading experience, but still transforming their experience of interaction. For instance, if I link an audio file of a reading for one line, and the reader moves the mouse over that line and hears the reading, but then moves too fast onto the next line, the audio will overlap, it will confuse the reader, and the text will disappear from view. This type of effect would aid the reader’s experience of the text, but also force them to slow down while reading it, otherwise they will be bombarded with too much data.
Perhaps I could also create the same text with a completely different set of experiences, and then let the user choose which poem to reader before they even enter the hypertext. I do see a number of possibilities with this project. I am having fun, and looking forward to doing more.
Hypertexting
I spent about 20 minutes in Jason Nelson’s world, and I can’t handle much more than that for now. I did get some ideas though, and I am sure the audacity program and tutorial will come in handy. I haven’t had much time to work on the site itself yet, but I do have some pretty good ideas about what I want to do. My biggest concern with hypertext in general is that it doesn’t really have an entry or exit point. Even when I clicked directly onto a link from Google, I was not sure if the page I ended up with was where I should start or not. I am aware there is no right or wrong answer to this, but it concerns me for a number of different reasons.
I am a pro-technology person who does not believe we are somehow separate from it, but what I was experiencing when I went to these hypertext sites was an extreme lack of patience. Perhaps that is exactly what one needs to commit themselves to learning something from the hypertext literature itself, but I really did not feel like journeying through all the possible paths a certain link or rollover took me on. T.S. Eliot once said that modern poetry should be difficult, and I understand what he meant, and perhaps it is the same case with hypertext; however, at times it was even hard to read the blurb before it disappeared forever (at least I couldn’t get it back).
Now that I have given my concerns, I do think there are some great opportunities to be had here. I am sure most of the modernist writers would have loved this as well as existential and phenomenological philosophers. So it is difficult and it takes a little patience…I guess I can deal with that. A professor once told me there are one-read books and then there are multiple-read books. Well, hypertext literature seems like a multiple read/visit type of text. I think it will be useful, and I am sure we can learn something from it. Furthermore, I look forward to contributing my piece.
The Nelson Blog 