further projection

after sleeping on it several nights
dreaming about it
etc

this is the stand i would like to take with a remix project:

Without remixed projects of literary classics, our digital society, that is growing away from the time old tradition of reading, faces the chance of losing the value and worth of literary classics in our new culture of computer based interactions and technology. However, by the creation and lasting impression of remixed literary classics, the second life and existence of masterpieces in these new remixes will bring further importance and renewed interest to the great works of our time and society. 

with that stand,
i hope to create, as stated before,
interesting remixes of classic work(s)

my thought process is that if one
reads or sees one of our remixes

this will harbor more interest in the original work
furthering the reader to want to explore the original classic
to better understand the remix project

i also found a great article about using remix in the classroom
which i think we can draw off of
for the further importance of remix
in understanding literary work

Remixing Old and New Literacies = Motivated Students by Jesse S. Gainer and Diane Lapp 
(you will have to authenticate through BYU)

there has been some discussion of using Romeo and Juliet

if we take the Shakespeare route
there are a few advantages

1) Shakespeare is highly globally known and respected
2) there is a lot of traffic from students studying shakespeare
3) there is already a lot of initiative and others interested in remixing shakespeare
4) we could possibly make the argument that shakespeare was never meant to be read anyways

or we could possibly remix several classics in several ways

drawing from the Center for Social Media nine common types of re-appropriation practices
types of remixes we could do:

• minecraft/ machinima as proposed by Gwen
• comics
• some sort of diary
• products based off of the classic (how cool would it be to make a product line based on classics)
• poetry
• songs
• recreation with the text (black out poetry, cut and pasting)
• art
• memes
• songs
• "fan fiction" meaning recreation of the plot

I think you get the idea. 

but i was really unsure for a while of what direction i wanted to take

but now i feel confident

and excited!!

digital badge of courage

i should have posted my expanded thoughts on
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephan Crane sooner

because my relation of it to digital culture keeps growing.

and now i feel like i want to move on past this onto other things

to begin the expansion. or explanation. (more cause i am ready to move past this unfortunately)

in The Red Badge of Courage (to be referred as RBOC here out)
there is this theme of war being glorified
Henry wants to go to war because he has this romantic ideal
of the war being  this great glorified thing

i think we have much of this same thing with video games
i know my husband wants to be a sniper.
and would probably enroll if i would agree
video games give their players this false sense of how war actually is
which cause people to enroll without realizing what they are going into

As a RBOC can be seen as a naturalist text
there is a theme of man being at conflict with nature

It has been a couple weeks since i read this
so i refreshed on sparknotes.
they explained this theme of man vs nature best i think:

"Henry’s realization that the natural world spins on regardless of the manner in which men live and die is perhaps the most difficult lesson that Henry learns as a soldier. It disabuses him of his naïve, inexperienced beliefs regarding courage and manhood. Shortly after his encounter with the squirrel in the woods, Henry stumbles upon a dead soldier, whose rotting body serves as a powerful reminder of the universe’s indifference to human life. As the drama of the war rages on around him, Henry continues to occupy his mind with questions concerning the nature of courage and honor and the possibilities of gaining glory. Death, he assumes, would stop this drama cold. Yet, when he encounters the corpse, he finds that death is nothing more than an integral and unremarkable part of nature. As he reflects at the end of the novel: “He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death.” Together, Henry’s encounters with the squirrel and the corpse form one of the most important passages in the novel, for it is here that Crane establishes the formidable opposing forces in Henry’s mind: the vain belief that human life deserves such distinctions as courage and honor, and the stark realization that, regardless of such distinctions, all human life meets the same end."

I think we often feel this way about internet, computers, etc
in the sense that we dont want the "bad," or the privacy crossing or any other negative thing
to continue and be the truth
we expect and hope for technology to change for us
when all reality it doesnt stop, it doesnt change, it keeps on keepin on
it all ends up the same in the end

depending on how you look at the novel,
Henry has a huge transformation of understanding war
he goes from this romantic ideal of wanting to go to war to be "cool"
to the stark realization of death no matter what and more understanding of war

with this I think a transition in the thought about our digital culture is coming
there are a lot of people who see this integrated technology as something "bad"
when in all reality it really is a great thing (kinda the inverse of Henry's experience)

this connection between RBOC and digital culture is kinda a hopeful one
in the sense that i hope people come to a good realization
and understanding of technology and such

with this same idea of Henry's thoughts and ideals transforming
there is a huge focus of his lack of understanding
which draws in the idea of man vs nature above

he has this lack of understanding about death, war, etc
which is a focus in the novel and one that we see change

this reminded me of beta publishing.
this idea of a focus on perhaps a lack of understanding per se
or more a lack of perfection

RBOC is also seen as a hugely influential war novel and transitory piece

i think this can just be tied to the idea
that what we have going on now is a transition
we are in a weird spot of not knowing how digital culture is going to play out
and ultimately replace the traditional
and everything that is happening now is going to influential to the future.

lastly, there is a interesting fact about RBOC
that Stephen Crane never actually went to war
yet he wrote this great and hugely influential novel
that has been accurately described as the most realistic

this brings up an interesting topic in digital culture
of not having to actually experience an event
yet still being able to experience it
are we really actually being able to experience it?

it is strange because we have Stephen Crane who becomes
a sort of expert and veteran of war yet he never went

and we can do the same thing through the internet

yet now i feel that there is more importance of actually experiencing things
because everyone can find out about it on the internet

which makes you wonder if had Crane published now
would the novel hold the same merit?

just some thoughts

ethan frome. youre dirtier than 4chan.

i think it is funny how

when you start to pursue one of your passions
or when something becomes a big focus to you

everything relating to that subject jumps out at you

we discussed this today in class
some coined a good phrase for it
but that phrase escapes me now.

and on a side note,
last year i took a shakespeare class
and everything shakespeare still jumps out at me

onward.

i am reading ethan frome
or more listening to it

i have gotten in a good groove of listening
while i drive to and from school
and it is working for me

this paragraph jumped out at me
from chapter 5

"He knew that most
young men made nothing at all of giving a pretty girl a
kiss, and he remembered that the night before, when
he had put his arm about Mattie, she had not resisted.
But that had been out-of-doors, under the open
irresponsible night. Now, in the warm lamplit room,
with all its ancient implications of conformity and
order, she seemed infinitely farther away from him and
more unapproachable."

There are a lot of ways we can relate to this idea
simply alone

in relation to our lives in a digital world

one take is a nod to what i touched upon in my last post 
this idea that when people get deep into the internet
a whole nother (woah infix anyone) side and personality comes out

"'Likewise the Internet allows us to indulge in conduct that we would ordinarily not feel comfortable in. We traverse and /or indulge and express our innermost unconscious desires.'"

being outside allows ethan to feel irresponsible enough
to be making moves on the young hired help
while his wife is sick inside

much like people tend to do ballsier things
when they are on the internet and feel unaccounted for
or even texting and feel the same

the second nod. has slipped my mind.

brief thoughts on the red badge of courage

i just finished reading
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
for my 363 class.

it has a lot of things i can see in relation to digital culture

here is a brief list with themes in RBC on the left and relation to technology on the right:

war be glorified --through video games
man's conflict with nature --internet instead of nature
transformation in thought about war - transformation in through about digital culture
influential war novel -- internet is influential
Stephen Crane had never been to war -- internet shows us how things are with out being there, very detailed

expansion soon to come

what do you think?

The Breakup 2.0

I read The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media by Ilana Gershon
I was very interested in this idea of how
technology is affecting our personal lives.

This is my review posted in Goodreads:

"While this book was funny and entertaining, Gershon's conclusion limits the further exploration that the subject could provide if there were more hard and fast facts to look into. Gershon explores how social media has come to effect our lives and relationships and, in particular, our breakups. However, she simply concludes that so many new medias are changing so quickly that their impact cannot be determined because everyone uses the media in their own way. Simplified - how relationships are affected can't be summarized because this is just all too new and just too evolving and varying. However, she did bring out an important and interesting idea that there is no standardization in new media. There is no consensus in how it should be used, what is appropriate, or even how it is perceived. Thus, what method you use to break up through is defined on your feelings of the media. We then all interpret things differently as our own social analyst, so a break up over text may seem bad to one and okay to another. Despite the limitation of Gershon's book, she provides a fun sociological look at new age media that is still interesting and though provoking."

While I was disappointed by the lack
of exploration into the idea of relationships
I still found interesting insight
into this idea of the internet and new media
being unable to be regulated and standardized

there really is no way to say
this is the hard fast way things are done
because there are so many varying uses to the internet
and everyone uses it in their own way

and then interprets things in their own way too

in short, the internet is just a beast that cannot be tamed
and that no one has the answers for

scar cissue

this summer i was interested in reading
a particular memoir that i had heard was good
by the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers

I dont remember how it all happened
but i ended up looking around online for
"Scar Tissue" by Anthony Keidis
when i ran across a free ebook.

now this wasnt just any ebook...
it was more a scanned in copy
of all the pages of the book
and then made into a PDF.

i knew that the copy was rather sketch
but it wasnt until half way through
that i realized what was going on.

because it was a scanned in copy
not all of the letters came across correctly
as you can see here:

funny thing is that
the entire book i though that he
was calling drugs "elope"
and it wasnt until i was actually done
that i realized "dope" was transcribed into "elope"

despite all of these other factors
i had been given an opportunity to borrow
a tablet from my work as a demo
and thought this would be a great way
for me to read my "ebook"
and not have to tote around my laptop.

what i am getting at here is that,
while i had read ebooks in the past on a computer,
the difference in actually having a tablet to read on
made all the difference

in fact when i finished "Scar Tissue" i was disappointed
that i could not find another free book that i wanted
to actually read and was interested in

this brings me to my personal thoughts
about ebooks vs print books

first,
i dont think that ebooks will be a "big"
thing until everyone owns an ereader

however, i was surprised at how many of
the local youth that live around me own
kindles and got them for christmas

but second
even if everyone does buy ereaders,
i think there needs to be some sort of
"netflix" for ebooks. or better pricing
on individual books.

because in my mind, i would rather buy
the actual book for $10 than have a digital copy

which brings me to this article posted in the
Denver Post entitled "The New Way We Read"

he makes several points of how ereaders
have completely replaced that of the hard copy book
and how they do a good and better job

but the last point made is one that makes me so sad:

"PRINT BOOKS:Collecting rare books, including first editions and antiquarian books.
DIGITAL BOOKS:There's no equivalent so far. Hermitage owner Bob Topp says he sees quite a few new customers who've become fans of an author after reading several digital books.
"It's a whole new group of people discovering a new world of older books, a dimension they never knew about," he says.
"They come into our store, and the look in their eyes is 'Book! I just gotta touch a book!' They've read the e-book on the plane, but now they want a book they can hold in their hand."

This makes me so sad! but it raises
a very interesting point which he states in the opening paragraph:
"E-books have increased the purchase of print books"

which is interesting and i think proves 

that ebooks and technology can never 

completely replace the actual product

because we depend so much upon the human experience

this makes me want to go out an buy all of my 

favorite books in hard copy

because i also have a feeling that 

print books are going to go up 

in price more and more as the ebook 

becomes more popular.

and print books become

more and more rare

just something to think about. 

but perhaps i am wrong?