Bryan Alexander raises some really interesting questions in his latest post, “Web 2.0 Network Ecology Stories“, a post extended by Alan Levine this morning.
Bryan comments on how –in his example– digital photos posted to his blog become “microcontent connecting people along lines of shared interest, based on what Ton Zylstra calls ‘social objects.’ Very easy, fluid, direct.” And then at the end of his post he asks:
These questions, looked at from a slightly different perspective (that of a teacher designing a new first-year seminar for the fall about reading and writing contemporary creative nonfiction), open all kinds of promising avenues for my teaching. I want to think about how my students might examine and experiment with these new, truly dispersed yet interconnected narratives assembled bit by bit, one creator not necessarily even aware of the movement of his/her expression as it is connected to asynchronously, digested, reworked, and remixed.
Are Bryan’s and Alan’s stories pointing to emerging forms I can use, a new kind of renga, perhaps, Exquisite Corpseor Web 2.0 freestyling? Or do we take what we find and create new stories simply by isolating them within a new context, like Spencer’s “Found Fridays,” one of my favorite weekly blog-stops. The potential problems of “found” are raised by the recent article in Slate (Thanks, Hector) by David Segal: “Can photographers be plagiarists?” And this morning’s NPR’s Scott Simon piece about presidential hopefuls brings up tensions arising from stories popping up when least expected–politician stories have shifted due to cellphones and real-time citizen reporting (the two senators interviewed remarked on the disappearance of humor in speeches, the lack of substance as hopefuls grow ever more wary of how their words might come back to bite them). Incredibly interesting and important things for our undergraduates to be considering as they get ready to leave school.
I can see the class thinking about what someone like Sophie Calle might do with these new kinds of overheard and found stories. Or they might try out an Oliver Luker-esque use of ” the socialised internet for the development and presentation of contemporary art and literature” aiming “to establish a new curatorial discourse based on artistic working practices.”
Indeed, I’d like students to explore the role of what Jean Burgess calls vernacular creativity in their own lives and locales, and in their own creations. Why do spend so much time worrying about the evils of wikipedia et al and so little time thinking about the rich potential of discoveries online, of unanticipated learning that is as likely to be postiive as negative?
Perhaps, in mulling over Bryan’s questions and the creative possibilities offered us by our transparent connectedness to the world, we’ll try out some community collaborative storytelling such as compiled by a group in Northern Ireland, including my favorite, murmur.
Little did Bryan know that his post would help me in this work of considering the broad outlines of a learning experience for new undergraduates. Lovely.
Filed under: creativity, Discoveries in the Blogging World, Emergence, Image Work, Students online, Teaching and Learning | 4 Comments »
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