Tavi Gevinson at Melbourne Writers’ Festival

Once upon a time I read through Tavi Gevinson’s Blog, Style Rookie from start to finish in about two days. That seems to be my consumption habits when it comes to blogs, once I’ve done that I rarely return to them to see what’s been contributed since. (Come to think of it it seems to be my consumption habit with chocolate bars too – the all in one go approach)

Anyway, I admire Gevinson, yes because as an 11 year old girl she became one of the most influential fashion blogs on the internet, but also because she can transform the generic traits that young women/girls view as flaws, into strengths. She also manages to express her ideas in valid and interesting ways while embracing her teenage traits. (who else could simultaneously talk about One Direction and her creative process and still manage to inspire)

Yesterday my facebook feed directed me to her keynote speech from the 2013 Melbourne Writers’ Festival and I watched it out of mild curiosity. I’m sure it’s not for everyone but I really enjoyed her exploration of creativity and navigating having a voice on the internet.

If you’re interested take a look. Tavi speaks well enough for herself so I won’t try to.

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Unsymopsium Wk 7 – General

When we were discussing hypertext today, I found Elliot’s comments really helpful. It seems like I am not alone at comprehending the magnitude of hypertext and how one even approaches creating one. Elliot was discussing causality and how we as human’s are prone to looking for links and a causal relationship.

All narratives have some diegetic environment – even if you can’t control the structure, you can control the world – so first create the world.

This made it all much more comprehensible to me. A valid starting point for hypertext was provided. I’m sure it’s not the only way but for those of us who are defeated by the thought of even knowing how to start, it’s a no doubt helpful approach.

Adrian, conversely said the key was just to start, and i think that’s the case for any work really. If you are unwilling to give it a go without any clear direction, chances are you’ll never find the direction. Hypertext seems to facilitate this method more than standard linear constructs. It’s very nature allows you to form links as you go; to identify which elements are linked to frequently versus which elements will roam on the edges only just affiliated with the content.

Adrian also spoke about Plot and Story, that the plot is the timeline of the story. We can accept flashbacks and nonlinear representations of story via the plot, so it is helpful to view hypertext as a heightened version of this.

Brian brought it back to ideas I connected with, and was reassured by. He spoke about codes authors can use to try and help illustrate their meaning to their audience. Communication’s very purpose is to share ideas and connect with people and there are tools we can use to maximise our meaning.

When the discussion was focused around Documentary and hypertextual documentary fitting into genre I think the important things that came from that was:

– To be a documentary there must be a truth claim about the world.

– documentary can make a truth claim that can be disputed

– genre is not just about textual form

– Our media literacies are what limits our understanding of work within a genre, not the work itself. i.e. Brian’s anecdote on Rap music.

 

Unsymposium Week 7 – Author’s mind

This week’s symposium left me with conflicting responses. Sometimes I feel like questions are being asked because they can generate lively discussion rather than that the answer is actually unknown to us. But then that leads me to wonder if I’m missing something and have oversimplified the material so much for myself, that I’m not venturing far enough into my thinking process over the material to discover the mysteries others see. So I can get frustrated by the things we’re discussing. I don’t dispute that they’re important to be discussed and we wouldn’t know the answers if the ideas were never explored though – so there’s my internal conflict right there and I come to the symposiums to give the format a chance and sometimes I do learn a new perspective and other times I hear the perspective I expect to hear, articulated in a more succinct way than I would be able to.

Yesterday I arched up at Adrian’s comment that writing is never an insight into an Author’s mind. Probably because I’m prone to protesting any absolute terms, or universal “truths”, but also because I do disagree. I don’t claim that author’s have any control over how their material is interpreted once they put it into the world, but I definitely believe there’s plenty of opportunity to convey vital aspects of one’s sense of self through writing, and that some of the readers will correctly interpret that, particularly if the author has a facility with language.

It is impossible to know someone completely because like Adrian said, we all have our unconscious minds that no one has access too. As human beings though, we crave connection and I do believe writing and reading can offer the opportunity to gain insights into the mind of the author as much as knowing your family or partner and understanding who they are is possible. Yes there’s a limit and I don’t claim that the insight possible is achieved 100% of the time or even 20% of the time.

I adore Stephen Fry. I watch QI religiously, I pour over his blogs, nothing delights me more than discovering a new youtube clip where I can listen to this man with this incredible mind. Recently he announced to the world that he’d tried to take his own life as recently as last year. He has been public about his mental health for many years but it’s easy to forget this brilliant man is undergoing a constant battle with his illness. He wrote this blog post to address both his illness, the experience and the reaction of the public. This piece is written to give his audience access into his mind and illness. No, it does not encompass him completely, but it does offer an insight.

The other thing that struck me about insights into the mind of the author is that writing is also a way to understand our own self and maybe the author offers an insight into his mind as much to himself as to his audience. Because it was subconsciously done does that make it less of an insight?

I remember studying Girl with a Pearl Earring in year 11 and hating every second of it because the text felt so contrived, metaphors so laboriously constructed and the feminist undertones so thoroughly explored in my all girls class. The year before we’d studied Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and that experience was life changing; I suddenly worried that I’d missed so much reading other books because I’d never read between the lines. I became consumed with wondering how many of the lessons To Kill a Mockingbird subtly provides were carefully constructed by Lee versus how many were arrived at by her subconscious mind. I digress. My point here is probably that there’s a spectrum and I will never know if the things I connect with in my favourite texts are an accurate reading of the author’s intent or if they’re reflecting my own state of mind and thought processes at the time, or, if both have fortuitously aligned.

So after all this rambling in response to Adrian’s comment I was left asking:

Really? It’s never an insight?

Does it have to be an absolute insight to be valid?

Can the Author not also gain insight into their mind in conjunction with the reader?

I did like Adrian’s discussion about treating texts as an object, that we are interpreting texts not authors and I think that is a valid distinction to make, but perhaps not mutually exclusive.

I also appreciated that context cannot survive with the text. What a succinct and valuable perspective to have gained! Leads me to another frustration of the constant debate over whether the “N word” should be removed from Mart Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The reason this debate continues to thrive is because the context we read this book in has changed. I wont get into my opinions/frustrations about it.

I guess I have to concede that you cannot use someone’s work as a complete insight into their mind. I don’t know that many of us would ever claim you could if confronted with the question though.

Maybe all this is just an insight into how unwilling my mind is to accept absolute statements. Probably I’ve become a perpetrator of my initial complaint of discussing things we already know the answer to, and ok… sometimes maybe it’s necessary.

Reconfiguring Narrative

I’m still playing catch up a bit with the readings on hypertext after a very hectic week last week. Elliot asked us to consider what we would think of a story that changed every time we read it (I’m recalling here and could be wrong so apologies if I go down an entirely divergent track – but that’s kinda the point of this class no?)

Anyway my immediate reaction to this question was “But they do change every time we read them, or at least the good ones do” Because as we get older, and we go back to favourite novels and each time bring with us a year’s more life experience and different priorities we notice completely different things or empathise with a character in a completely new way or suddenly “get” what that character was doing etc.

The reason I bring this into the hypertext discussion is because it’s all about variables, and in the unlecture Brian spoke about how everything has a precedent and I think there’s some link between how much of a variable we can be in the experience of a story that’s the traditional beginning/middle/end structure, and that maybe that’s part why our curiosity has drawn us into hypertext… I’m not quite sure how to draw it all together but there’s something there for me.

The Reconfiguring Narrative lay these variables out quite clearly:

1. Reader choice, intervention, and empowerment

2. Inclusion of extralinguistic texts (images, motion, sound)

3. Complexity of network structure

4. degrees of mulitplicity and variation in literacy elements such as plot, characterization, setting and so forth.

And I guess what I got from this is that there’s a spectrum of stories and narrative structure and hypertext and depending how much each variable presents itself, how many of the variables are present and how they interact dictates where in this spectrum they fit in.

The reading also spoke about linearity and the readers need for closure. That if each lexia provides some form of closure the reader’s needs can be satisfied while still facilitating the hypertext experience. It was really interesting to consider author’s like Dickens as the precursor to this with the serial and the necessity to provide some form of conclusion while still leaving the broader story open to continue. In the world of hypertext though,

Linearity, however, now becomes a quality of the individual reader’s experience within a single lexia and his or her experience following a path, even if that path curves back on itself or heads in strange directions.

It is mind boggling to me to think of tackling so many variables whilst being able to provide for some kind of linearity at the same time.

This also leads me onto a though from the unlecture where Adrian was speaking about music and how we accept repetition within music but not through text. That was really interesting to me and trying to conceive of how coming across the same text via various contexts within the one “world” would feel… and maybe that brings me back to what I was discussing at the start of the post about re-reading books and bringing new experiences which lead to new discoveries through the text.

Reconfiguring Narrative also discusses how in informational hypertext there is the necessity to employ rhetorics of orientation, navigation, and departure to orient the reader. Conversely the reading argues that successful hypertext and poetry does not always facilitate the navigation in this way which results in the readers being unable to make particularly informed or empowered choices.

I am going to come back to this, fatigue is getting the best of me.

 

A Timely New York Post Article

There was a lot of talk at yesterday’s symposium about books and the future of literature that I think always strikes a chord with us book lovers because we fear we, and future generations will be robbed of that irreplaceable experience of connecting with a good book.

Then today I came across this article in the New York Post, and it very much tied in with the discussions yesterday. It seems to me that really what the problem is, is that we are living in a world that is obsessed with an aversion to risk. That if we can’t see the direct value of any undertaking then we’d probably better not pursue it and instead do something sensible. This overriding attitude then competes with my generation who is perhaps the first (or amongst the first) that’s grown up being told to “do what you love?”, “love you’re job” etc and has dared to believe that’s possible. As a mature aged student undertaking a second bachelor in a field that’s (tried and tested) pathways to career success are disappearing, with a brother rapidly approaching 30 who’s dared to try and make it as an artist, and another brother slogging away at a 9-5 job while quietly writing a novel in his spare time, I suspect my parents wouldn’t retract their advice but would really have liked it if we’d happened to love accounting or teaching or engineering or something with a little more stability. (To be fare my parents are very supportive and proud of all our ventures)

Anyway I digress. Some things that stood out to me from the article…

We do not always know the future benefits of what we study and therefore should not rush to reject some forms of research as less deserving than others.

I think this is particularly valuable to keep in mind for the study of humanities, but also that it is true of everything. How many major scientific discoveries have been a happy accident – a bi product of another venture? Ian Flemming discovered Penicillin because he accidentally left a Petri dish open over night… In no aspect of life can we simply decide something’s value because the benefits are not immediately visible.

Gopnik recounts an anecdote from Bill James in his article where James argues that in talking about whether baseball is really a business, and not a sport at all, that if the sporting interest in baseball died, baseball would die; but if the business of baseball died – but the sporting interest persisted, baseball would be altered, but it wouldn’t die. This is the crux of the future of Literature and books as a physical form, as more and more texts become available only in digital form, literature and our value of it may change and it may become more niche to read books in print, while a love of literature remains the book will power ahead.

If we abolished English majors tomorrow, Stephen Greenblatt and Stanley Fish and Helen Vendler would not suddenly be freed to use their smarts to start making quantum protonnuclear reactor cargo transporters, or whatever

The opportunity cost of these great minds dedicated to literature and literary pursuits is not often looked at rationally. What would these people be contributing to the world if not studying what they loved? It’s unlikely their skills would be transferable to the production of knowledge seemingly more “valuable” to society instead and in turn, we’d miss out on everything they’ve contributed to culture and discussion.

I can feel myself getting less and less coherent here but bare with me…

English departments democratize the practice of reading. When they do, they make the books of the past available to all. It’s a simple but potent act.

We live in an age where technology is progressing at an exponential rate. I have grown up to see music go from vinyl to mp3 in the space of my short lifetime. From having a dial phone to a touch screen and landlines becoming almost obsolete. Technology has brought us amazing things at such a rapid rate I think we are all a little prone to panic about what we’re losing because of it. However, as Gopnik says, books allow us to transport into worlds so far gone or so far imagined we could never experience those lives in reality. There’s nothing that can compete with that private experience of learning and connecting with humanity through literature through the quiet pass-time of reading. I think what we fail to remember through all this panic is that the things that matter and that we love will survive. For instance, I have had the privilege of living overseas at a few different times in my life, and you build friendships which are destined to exist in different timezones and cultures and across seas and as each experience comes to an end that familiar feeling of panic and fear that these people who have come to mean so much to you will suddenly be abolished from your life – however as each experience has taught me, the people who are really important will always make the effort and be worth the effort of keeping in touch, and the less important friends will make contact every now and then but in the end you naturally drift apart and that’s ok. So- i try to keep that little anecdote of life in mind when I find myself stressing about living in a world progressing too fast.

Gopnik talks about fellow English professors and their tireless pursuits and the best answer he’s ever heard to justify studying literature:

Why was he a professor of literature? “Because I have an obsessive relationship with texts.” You choose a major, or a life, not because you see its purpose, which tends to shimmer out of sight like an oasis, but because you like its objects

Again, back to my comment of “do what you love”, sometimes its as hard to justify our careers and obsessions as it is to put into words why you love someone. You can’t always identify the moving parts. Literature offers so much to the world, often different things unique to the individual; it’s a place for connection for the lonely, an porthole into another world for the inquisitive, an invitation into the mind of the brilliant, but we can’t see every event of added value that a piece of literature offers the world, just a cumulative love.

I will finish as Gopnik finished:

We need the humanities not because they will produce shrewder entrepreneurs or kinder C.E.Os but because, as that first professor said, they help us enjoy life more and edure it better. The reason we need the humanities is because we’re human. That’s enough

 

 

 

Unlecture Week 6

It was good to be back in symposium mode this week. A lot of discussion on Hypertext and where the future is leading us. The discussion left me thinking that the whole Networked Media course is operating like hypertext, where we have to feed the beast to help it grow and if we’re not making our own links and explorations the course will be stagnant. – that we get to define where to next and which parts of the course we link together and build on.

I also really liked that Adrian pointed out literature is a key part of our nostalgia and attachment to print. I’d never made that link in my mind but while I LOVE books and the memories I can get from picking up a book I read on a certain holiday or the comfort from the well worn pages of my favourites, I have absolutely no issue with text books and essays etc becoming strictly digital media.

Readings Wk4 – As We May Think

Vannevar’s article was enjoyable for me for two reasons. 1. I loved in high school when my Physics teacher would go off on tangents and start telling us stories about Newton and Einstein and the history of science – it was always so fascinating to me and pretty reliably more interesting than studying friction or kinetics or radio waves. So I enjoyed his brief discussion of the glory days of science when the giants came together to work. 2. We got to see speculative thinking in action as he pondered about the future of the camera.

Vannevar’s thoughts on the camera reminded me of reading Orwell’s 1984 for the first time and seeing how Orwell’s creations had slipped into the modern world. Newspeak felt like abbreviations for text messaging and unfortunately, while not as horrifying as Orwell’s, Big Brother had penetrated society. I guess my point here was more that we can see the effects of design fiction. That letting our imaginations run wild can provide inspiration for future designers with better technology – as much as a terrible idea can prompt a good one. It also brings into the question of was this person great at predicting a future event/product or did the event/product only see the light of day because the prediction inspired it.

It also inspired some divergent thoughts for me of whether we’d reach a day when a lifetime wasn’t enough time to allow for progress because of all the information one would have to learn/grasp first. Unlikely… but i’ll admit I pondered it.

 

 

 

 

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic July 1945. The Atlantic. Web. 19 July 2013.

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