It's just SO Media!

I’m about halfway through Super Sad True Love Story, and I think there are a lot of interesting things going on in this “bound, printed, nonstreaming Media artifact” (90).  I really like the way Shteyngart changes POV/Form.  By switching between Lenny’s diary and Eunice’s globalteens emails/instant message conversations, Shteyngart offers both characters’ perspectives on the events that unfold.  Instead of moving along from event to event with a single perspective, we’re given Lenny’s painfully optimistic take on the story, which is followed/undercut by Eunice’s conversations with friends and family.  Getting both perspectives shows what these particular events mean to each character, reveals a lot about each character, and explains the current political/economic situation through their observations and reactions.

There are some interesting moments where technology and media are addressed as well.  Having Lenny maintain a dated appreciation for books is one way to set him against the technological society he inhabits.  Upon returning to his apartment, Lenny talks to his “Wall of Books” (52), telling them “you’re my sacred ones …no one but me still cares about you.  But I’m going to keep you with me forever.  And one day I’ll make you important again” (52).  This says volumes (heh!) about Lenny’s unique appreciation for the printed word.  This really isn’t very far from the borderline-irrelevant status of books today.  When Lenny speaks with his boss, this love for books is described as a problem.  Joshie tells Lenny that “those thoughts, these books, they are the problem …you have to stop thinking and start selling.  That’s why all those young whizzes in the Eternity Lounge want to shove a carb-filled macaroon up your ass …you remind them of death.  You remind them of a different, earlier version of our species” (66-7).  In spite of his expressed desire for immortality, Lenny’s early allegiance to books pegs him as mortal and obsolete.  Lenny lets the desire for immortality win out, and starts to distance himself from his books.  Later on, he writes in his diary.  In one entry, he notes that “I’ve spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly.  I’m learning to worship my new äppärät’s screen, the colorful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors” (78).  By accepting the limitations of the book, and embracing the newer media form, Lenny appears to be taking the right steps toward the indefinite extension of his life.  I like the treatment of the whole “if you have enough money you don’t have to die” angle of this story.  This desire to attain immortality sounds almost pathological.  Considering the things Lenny has to give up to chase this dream made me think about extension of life in the classic/cliché “quality over quantity” terms.

Since I started the blog for this class with a reference to a musical act/reference I felt would be appropriate, I’ll end my last post with some more music. It would be a nice bookend (hah!) for the posts.  As tangential as it may seem, I kept thinking about a few songs whenever Lenny would talk about immortality.  The band Listener describes themselves as “Talk Music” (think a blend of alt-country and spoken word poetry). The songs “I don’t want to live forever” and “you have never lived because you have never died” just seem appropriate, so:

Johanna Drucker Expertise

Johanna Drucker focuses her argument on the ways that the often overlooked graphic components of a text guide a reader through the work and influence narrative meaning.  For Drucker, “the term graphic includes all aspects of layout and composition by which elements are organized on a surface” (121).  Drucker adds that “navigation, the other term in play here, refers to the active manipulation of features on the level of discourse and presentation” (121).  She argues that these “play an active role in all instances of textual representation, not only those in which images or pictorial elements are present” (121).  These non-linguistic components can have a major impact on both visual and print narrative.  Drucker’s stated goal is “to demonstrate that these graphic devices can be read as an integral part of narrative texts” (121), partially because showing the way that the graphic devices work, as well as exploring their limitations, “will tend to shift my argument towards a transactional, reader-based production of narrative and away from a more strictly structuralist or formal analysis of story texts” (122).  Drucker wants to examine the visual element of narrative texts because “these navigational elements are historically and culturally specific, and thus learning to read them provides another way to understand the foundational assumptions and ideological values that form and inform a text” (122).  Far from being merely accidental or the only way to organize text, he visual features that are often taken for granted can reveal much about the cultural/historical/ideological assumptions they embody.

Drucker also makes distinctions between graphic devices and navigation.  She explains that “graphic devices are elements of layout and composition that organize and structure the presentation of narrative elements—in that sense they appear to be elements of discourse” (123).  These devices don’t necessarily need to be illustrations or pictures.  The basic organization of text and organizational markers qualify as graphic components.  According to Drucker, “the graphic devices include headers, page numbers, spacing, and margins in print materials; framing and diagrammatic elements in print and electronic media; and any other visual element that serves a navigational purpose” (123).  These elements enable a reader to navigate the text.  Drucker ties this navigation to narrative meaning. She notes that these “devices provide the means for moving through or manipulating the sequence of the elements that constitute the narrative” (123).  By facilitating the reader’s organization/recognition/understanding of the narrative, the graphic devices can have a serious impact on the meaning of that narrative.  The organizational features of the text influence its meaning.  The navigational and the graphic by features are connected because they “are all graphic.  They are elements that often pass unnoticed, rendered invisible by their familiarity or by the inconsequential role they are usually assigned” (123).  Noticing the graphic nature of these organizational markers and admitting to the importance of the graphic features of a narrative is important to Drucker, because “calling these features back into visibility is preliminary to addressing the way they engineer narrative experience and encode ideological values” (123).  This understanding is vital, because once we see the graphic and navigational devices for what they are, “we start to see [them] as conventions, historically shaped, culturally specific, value-laden, and assumption-driven” (136).  An understanding of what these features are and how they work could foster an understanding of the effects they produce and the reasons behind their use.   

But Drucker doesn’t stop there.  “My argument is not just for recognition of the semantic role played by graphic devices as integral to narration,” she summarizes, “that is foundational” (138).  Drucker’s main aim is “to show that within the larger task of interpretation …we can read ideological, cultural, and historical matters in these graphic dimensions and the way they structure subject positions from which telling unfolds and within narrative is constrained and structured. I would go farther and say that certain assumptions, values, and beliefs can only be accessed through critical reading of these devices (138, italics mine). An understanding of how the visual arrangement/visual elements influence narrative meaning could provide a fuller understanding of the text, and the narrative presented within.  For Drucker, an examination of these graphic and navigational devices is the key to understanding the cultural, historical, and ideological values hidden beneath the surface. 

Considering the way the graphic/navigational elements function can also help us understand how we’ve been trained as readers.  Reading a book, we read the pages sequentially, left-to-right/top-to-bottom.  Chapter headings, the author’s name, the running title header, and page numbers are obviously meant to be skipped at the top/bottom of each page.  As writers familiar with MLA formatting, we know that reading “last name page number” at the top of every page isn’t vital.  We’re guided away from reading the external content (blogroll, links, advertisements, etc) when reading the entries/content of blogs, twitter feeds, and various other social media platforms. We’re kept aware of the reverse chronology.  Drucker provides examples of graphic devices existing simultaneously as navigational features and narrative content.  She shows them at work in flow charts, web content, Chris Ware comics, and “The Golden Circlet”, as well as simulations like Second Life and Flight Simulator. 

Drucker also outlines the graphic/navigational characteristics of comics.  Even when the boxes are outside the standard rectangular form, it still contributes to the navigational element of the story.  Swamp Thing is one example.  When the Swamp Thing character is the main focus/perspective, the panels are twisted and branchlike.  When the comic presents the perspective of an orderly character, they are rectangular, and when they focus on a character dealing with The Rot (evil), the panels are clouded and malignant looking.  The panels emphasize the perspective given to the action within the comic.  Here, the organization and graphic presentation reinforce the narrative content.

Another text that employs these navigational features as a part of its content is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.  The story is created through a series of fictional pasted together articles and has no fewer than 3 narrators (The original compiler, the one who found it, and the publishing editor).  The content of the book constantly refers back to its own fiction appendix or works which don't appear in the book that either can be found, and have little to do with the novel, or are completely fictionalized.  This makes that navigational element of the novel very apparent.  You do not read that book cover to cover; instead, it is read in parts as the reader is forced to navigate through the different narrators, subplots, and completely missing information.  In a work like this, not only do the graphic navigational devices make themselves clear to the reader, the entire basis of the narrative depends on how the reader navigates the work.  This renders the navigational and graphic elements visible, while also requiring an understanding of the use of the navigational/graphic to understand the narrative.

Knock-knock. Who's there?

I’ll come out and admit that I wasn’t successful in getting Trip and Grace to work things out on any of my trips through Façade.  I originally saw that as the “goal” of the game, even though it’s never explicitly stated.  The lack of a clearly defined goal and method of reaching that goal were some of the things I really liked about playing Façade.  Instead of being tasked with saving this marriage, we’re simply dropped into this situation and set free.  I realized that trying to get the two to work things out, or understand the nature of their problems said much more about me as a player than it did about Façade itself.  I was surprised at how different each play through was, and how little the ‘inside information’ I picked up from earlier attempts.  After a few failed attempts at helping Trip and Grace stay together, I started to see what other options were available.  I tried deliberately taking a side and noticed that there were ways to put each character on the defensive.  Hugging/kissing Grace immediately after walking in, picking up the phone, and sitting with Grace when Trip wants to talk about his picture went a long way in changing the more assertive tone Trip had in early plays.  I got Grace to admit to painting the picture above the couch a few times. I also got thrown out of this apartment more often than any other result.  I must admit to having an unhealthy amount of fun reading through my stage plays and some of the stage plays on the InteractiveStory Forums as well as watching  YouTube videos after they popped up in the class Twitter feed.

I think Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s explanations of Façade made sense in terms of my reactions to/interactions with the game.  I thought about my frustrations with Emily Short’s Galatea hen he explained how interactivity worked in Façade.  Wardrip-Fruin notes that in Façade, “players are invited to perform more richly than in many digital fictions, which often limit interaction to the selection between a set of discrete choices (with everything else producing an error message)” (339).  I remember that when we talked about Galatea in class, asking a question or saying something that the game would recognize as a valid move were some of the hangups in moving the story forward. Galatea’s response “you cannot form your question into words” was a pretty frustrating way of saying “the question or statement you just made is not recognized by the programming as valid input,” especially considering that this game is text-based, and you were actually using words.  If you couldn’t ask/look at/say/think about something that would move the story forward, you were stuck. Wardrup-Fruin notices this shortcoming in interactive fiction, admitting that “no computer can actually ‘understand’ arbitrary human language—or even, less ambitiously consistently map human language statements to a logical model” (337).  If we’re going to use language as the main interface for interactive narrative, it’s important to recognize the fundamental difference between how human beings approach language as a medium for communication and how a given interactive piece (be it fiction, drama, etc.) recognizes language as input.

Façade manages to overcome these barriers.  Wardrip-Fruin explains that within Façade, “each beat has a default way it will play out in the absence of interaction, but Mateas and Stern are hoping for another outcome—given that the point of Façade is to pursue interactive drama” (335).  Even if I walked into the apartment, and do nothing more than sit on the couch, the drama between Trip and Grace would still play out.  Even though they allow the story to unfold without/with minimal user input, the makers of the game hoped for players to take the opportunity to participate in the storytelling.  The open-ended nature allows players to take these pieces of story and make it into just about anything.  I got thrown out of the apartment for trying to seduce Grace.  In one stage play, a player suggested a threesome.  Wardrip-Fruin notes that “there are also many transcripts featuring player characters somewhat closer to Façade’s expectations, but those that push the system are especially revealing” (339).  By taking the opportunity to explore alternatives to taking sides, playing the diplomat, or pretending to be a marriage counselor, the player can make an interesting/unexpected story using the tools provided by Mateas and Sterne. Wardrip-Fruin concedes that these other approaches to Façade “reveal something of the shape of the underlying system.  In this case, one sees the way Façade’s drama continues executing its beat goals, for the most part, even in the absence of intelligible player behavior” (339).  Instead of sticking players with the “I don’t understand your response” messages and freezing the narrative, Façade allows for creativity and freedom in the participatory narrative.

I didn't have enough money to "get" The Matrix.

Reading Henry Jenkins’ “Searching for the Origami Unicorn” reminded me how long it’s been since I watched the Matrix, and reminded me why I tried to avoid the sequels.  I understand that Jenkins is interested in looking at the transmedia franchise as a whole, composed of various incarnations in different media.  I thought Jenkins’ approach to The Matrix trilogy was an interesting take, but I had some problems with this method of resolving issues with complicated story telling.  Illustrating the approach made by the various collaborations involved in The Matrix, Jenkins notes that “the filmmakers plant clues that won’t make sense until we play the computer game.  They draw on the back story revealed through a series of animated shorts, which need to be downloaded off the web or watched off a separate DVD.  Fans raced, dazed and confused, from the theaters to plug into Internet discussion lists, where every detail would be dissected and every possible interpretation debated” (94).  I have no issue with a film franchise inspiring an active and engaging fan culture.  I think that opening those possibilities for audience participation are more or less a good thing. 

Jenkins addresses the bias of both critics and the audience towards traditional storytelling, noting that “stories are basic to all human cultures, the primary means by which we structure, share, and make sense of our common experiences …we are seeing the emergence of new story structures, which create complexity by expanding the range of narrative possibility rather than pursuing a single path with a beginning, middle, and end” (118-9).  I like the potential opening up of narrative possibility through a transmedia approach.  My problem is with the ultra-consumerist approach to delivering a story and handling this fundamental human desire to "get" what that story means.  Jenkins writes that “reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption” (96) like it was a good thing.  The making of sequels is enough of a problematic attempt at cashing in on the success of a film/franchise (*cough* Star Wars prequels *cough*).  I think the opportunities for branching out into other media are interesting, but creating a series of products to capitalize on a devoted fan culture/niche market, or explain the off-beat/complicated/non-traditional film to the general public sounds exploitative.  In order to “get” a popular film like The Matrix, one would have to buy their movie tickets, the trilogy DVD’s, the animated shorts on DVD, the officially licensed comic books, the novelizations, the VHS Christmas Special, etc.  This goes beyond an expectation of a little extra work from the audience.  It takes a complicated narrative, and turns it into a a mere part of a narrative that's more traditional, and turns commerce into the solution of narrative complexity.   

“You didn’t get The Matrix?” this approach asks. 

It responds that “you’re just not spending enough money.”

...and I thought "complicated television" sounded like an oxymoron.

I think one of the best points Mittell makes in outlining the possibility/importance/work of narratively complex television is that it tends to be the exception and not the rule.  Mittell is wise to note that “complexity has not overtaken conventional forms within the majority of television programming today—there are still many more conventional sitcoms and dramas on-air than complex narratives” (29).  Nontraditional television programming exists, but there isn’t enough of a presence to say that it’s become the new dominant mode of television storytelling.  For Mittell, “even though this mode represents neither the majority of television nor its most popular programs …a sufficiently widespread number of programs work against conventional narrative practices using an innovated cluster of narrational techniques to justify such analysis” (29-30).  Although this type of programming has yet to replace the reality show or the formulaic sitcom narrative, there is enough of it out there to warrant further investigation.  Mittel also makes the important concession that “complexity and value are not mutually guaranteed” (30).  This means that an increased level of narrative complexity does not necessarily make a better television show.  Mittell avoids a simplistic praise of complex television, admitting that it takes more than a complicated mode of storytelling to make a ‘good’ TV show.

Mittell also makes it a point to explore the incentives discovered by networks to offer complex/nontraditional programming.  Although this kind of programming could potentially alienate some viewers and go against the imperative to aim for mass appeal, Mittell observes that “networks and channels have grown to recognize that that a consistent cult following of a small but dedicated audience can suffice to make a show economically viable” (31).  Freed from the demands to satisfy the majority of the general television audience and reach, capture, and maintain the largest possible audience, networks have an avenue/incentive to provide shows that break from the established norms of TV narrative.  The smaller audiences drawn in by complex programs can even be beneficial.  Mittel acknowledges that “many complex programs expressly appeal to a boutique audience of more upscale educated viewers who typically avoid television …needless to say, an audience comprised of viewers who watch little other television is particularly valued by advertisers” (31).  Although complex TV programming offers something more to a potentially more sophisticated viewer, the motivation is the same.  Smaller audiences are acceptable if they are composed of the kinds of viewers that advertisers aim to reach.

When Mittell cites Steven Johnson, I was reminded of Elsaesser’s take on complex film narratives.  Johnson “claims that this form of complexity offered viewers a ‘cognitive workout’ that increases problem-solving and observational skills—whether or not this argument can be empirically substantiated, there is no doubt that this brand of television storytelling encourages audiences to become more actively engaged and offers a broader range of rewards and pleasures than most conventional programming” (32).  This active engagement basically hopes to create and cater to slightly better/more adaptable/more sophisticated consumers and employees.  It doesn’t seem like complex TV ever really has much of an interest in challenging the TV medium beyond its embrace of traditional narrative techniques.  It appears to be a move to legitimize the medium.

It happens...

After watching Elephant, I thought about the multiple explanations of narrative as the human way of making sense of lived experience.  When Marie-Laure Ryan summarizes the various approaches to the phenomenon of narrative in the introduction to Narrative Across Media, she writes that “the existential type (represented by Paul Ricoeur and Peter Brooks) …tells us that the act of narrating enables humans to deal with time, destiny, and mortality; to create and project identities; and to situate ourselves as embodied individuals in a world populated by similarly embodied subjects.  It is in short a way, perhaps the only one, to give meaning to life” (2).  In “Narrative Mechanics”, Caroline Bassett also mentions Ricoeur.  Bassett writes that “reading narrative as a central act of configuration, the way in which human experience is made meaningful, Ricoeur connects narrative with the event and experience” (10). For both Ryan and Bassett, this view considers narrative as the fundamental device by which people can take the chaotic mess that makes up every day lived experience and (re)order it into a logical/understandable cause-and-effect sequence.  Traditional narrative may be the tool for organizing experience into something coherent, but presenting the events in Elephant in a traditional, logical way would undermine the senseless nature of the Columbine-esque tragedy.  Forcing a logical narrative out of these events would oversimplify and overdramatize the senseless nature of the school killing.

In ‘Just because’ stories: on Elephant”, Bassett explores the nontraditional approach used by the film to tell the story of the fictional school shooting.  After posing the many questions left unanswered by the Columbine shooting, as well as the fictional one in Elephant, Bassett explains that “while many possible motivations or triggers are presented in the film, none of them is presented as commensurate with the events they might have provoked, and none of them is presented as likely to be determining” (165).  In other words, the film offers some possible explanations, but does not attempt to provide a specific reason or set of reasons for the shooting.  Bassett continues, “rather, multiple motivations, reasons, and causal factors pile up as so much useless information, or as so much significant information—the point is that we don’t know and are given no clue.  The killings happen …apparently randomly or ‘just because” (165).  Although this may appear to be the lazy man’s way around living up to narrative expectations, this move in Elephant illuminates the inadequacy of the traditional narrative structure and its inability to make sense out of something terrible that “just happened”.  It draws attention to the fact that some times, if not most of the time, things just happen without what we would see as a logical cause.  If the film wanted to present logical motivations for revenge, we would have seen much more bullying of Alex and Eric, and the students/faculty who participated would have been deliberately targeted.  Instead, we see harmless—even sympathetic characters like Michelle and Elias included in the slaughter, simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  They die even though they’ve done nothing wrong to Alex or Eric, and in spite of appearing as relative outcasts themselves.

This internet stuff is serious business...

Considering the ways that social media opened communication/expression/information, it's not much of a surprise that it has gained a real-world presence. It isn't (and hasn't been for a while) news that online behavior can have real life repercussions. We're constantly reminded that an incriminating picture/video/status update/post can haunt you pretty much for the rest of your life. I remember fights between friends over passive-aggressive blog entries or away messages which have led to real-life confrontations.
It could have been teenaged ignorance. It could have been a naive hope. I just always thought the two worlds would/could/should remain separate, especially considering how easily you can get carried away. I mean, you're just sitting alone at the computer, right? There's no way this time spent in isolation can come back to haunt you. Online life and offline life are completely different things.
But that's never the case, and we now have a digital realm of expression to take too seriously. Like it wasn't enough to have to worry about what you do and say when you're actually in front of people. I think that there are plenty of positive things that social media has done for expression and the dissemination of information and ideas, but the way it's been handled by older media outlets is pretty depressing.
On the other hand, I think that this bleed over onto the real world has been pretty interesting--particularly, the cases in Mexico.
I was relieved to hear that the charges against the Mexican Twitterrorists have been dropped. I was also pretty impressed by the way people were using social media as a survival mechanism, in spite of the efforts to silence users.
Maybe it's just my concerns about the difficulty in establishing credibility, detecting sarcasm, and providing context that continue to fuel this mistrust of social media. Although it's great that just about everyone has a voice, it's still disconcerting that we haven't settled on what to do with it, or what it means.

Remember when I admitted to stealing my usernames from a song sub/titled “Failing the Turing Test”?

I’ll pause briefly to marvel at the coincidence. 

While working toward the end of Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, I kept thinking about/combining/connecting the initialed characters/locations (A., B., C., U., etc.) to the various implementations (A through Helen).  When I was trying to wrap my mind around why Powers was selectively leaving certain details out—giving only an abbreviation for names of people and places while using full names for others—I was reminded of John Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse”. 
In Barth’s story, the narrative of a family vacation is interrupted by the commentary on writing fiction.  In the opening, after naming characters and locations with a first initial with a long dash (the town of D—, Maryland, a character named Magda G— …sound somewhat familiar?), Barth comments on this naming convention.  He writes that “initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality.  It is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the names for reasons of tact or legal liability.  Interestingly, as with other aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means” (Barth 82).  By calling out this move, Barth shows that it only appears to make the characters, places, or time described in a story seem any more real. 
I don’t think Powers was withholding some of the full names because he wanted to take a 19^th century shortcut to an illusion of reality, or to avoid litigation (although making the first person narrator novelist Richard Powers bears an implication of autobiographictionality).  Instead of depersonalizing the characters, simplifying the story/making it less specific, the selective initial-ing of people, places, and versions of the ‘implementations’ made things a little more complicated within the novel. Sure it’s not too difficult to keep track of which capital letter is a person, which is a version of the machine, and which is a place, but you have to work a little to keep these letters organized.  I think the one that sent me on what I’ll try to dismiss as just my crazy-person take on this novel, was the choice to have implementation H be the one that fictional Rick Powers works with.

Before imp. H acquires a name, the line “H was a revision of the trainer” (171) appears to scream implications for the nature of the experiment.  I wasn’t really thrown by the quasi-twist—the machine is really training the narrator!?—but the re-framing of the experiment as “it was about teaching a human to tell” (318) was pretty interesting.  Lentz asks “Well, powers.  How far were we, again?  Imp H? You realize what we have to call the next one, don’t you?”  Lentz’s question only confirmed the first-person pronoun suspicions I had after H was introduced. We’d already met with implementation I on the first page, and had been listening to them the whole way through.

Blame the Media

I liked Ryan’s description of Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “remediation as ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms” (31).  For Bolter and Grusin, “Every medium …is developed as an attempt to remediate the deficiencies of another medium.  Remediation is this ‘the mediation of mediation:  Each act of mediation depends on other acts of mediation.  Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media.  Media need each other to function as media at all” (31).  Looking at mediation this way shows the succession of media forms as a natural process in the development of media as well as a key feature of media itself.  Instead of newer media crushing older forms, these different forms of media co-exist, influence, and can possibly enrich each other.  The written word did not completely abolish the spoken word.  The written word wasn’t eradicated by the printed word.  The printed word survived its electronic/telegraphic transmission.  The radio star was not killed by video.  The internet has yet to destroy television, and I’m sure whatever is supposed to come next will fail to completely render the internet obsolete.

Digital media actually provides a new way of looking at its predecessors. According to Ryan, newer media forms provided “not only brand-new artistic media and modes of communications to investigate …but also old media to revisit.  These old media did not live in a digital environment, but, as they began to use the computer as a mode of production, they were able to achieve entirely new effects …virtually every ‘old medium’ has a new, digital twin” (30).  The digital incarnation of older media types allowed different approaches to these media, and brought the potential to breathe new life into them.  This sounds much more reasonable than “media form 1 is going to completely destroy media form 2! I am excited/upset because I didn’t really care for/really liked/based my career on/went to graduate school to study media form 2!”

Although this alleviates the doom-and-gloom view of emerging media forms, I still have to admit my bias towards print media’s style of narrativity.  I can’t help but think of cable news/online news outlets and new media when Ryan notes “the coverage of a time-consuming crisis must begin before the crisis is resolved, and the daily reports lack the completeness and retrospective perspective of other types of narrative.  All these characteristics suggest that newpapers indeed support a distinct type of narrativity” (18).  Newspapers and other forms of print media lag behind the newer forms of electronic media because they are not as instantaneous, up-to-the-current-second bursts of information.  The slowed pace/delayed delivery allows print media to give context to and perspective on new information.  Print media also demands solitary/isolated reading and attention.  It’s hard to multitask when reading a book.  Sure, you can stop reading and do something else, but the activities remain separate.  Who hasn’t changed channels (to see what else may be on) while watching a TV show, opened a new tab or browser window while something was loading, or checked their email/facebook/twitter in the middle of composing a blog post?

My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.

It looks like I have a Twitter account and a new blog.
My name is Tony.  This is my third (and hopefully last) year in the English Graduate program at Saint Rose. 

I more or less grew up alongside the evolution of social media.  In high school, a friend on my "buddy list" had a livejournal link in their AOL Instant Messenger profile.  I found out about Friendster through another friend's livejournal post.  Shortly after starting college, someone on Friendster mentioned Myspace in a "shout out."  I hopped from platform to platform until Facebook started to become the cool new thing.  I didn't have an .edu email address, and I was okay with missing out.  By the time I transferred to a school with student email, Facebook was opened to the public anyway, and it was starting to become the preferred method of communication.  I drew the line when I first heard about Twitter.  I'm probably not the best/most active Facebook user as it is.  I've decided to avoid taking the "cool guy" route of dragging my feet when presented with a course Twitter requirement.  I have doubts that I'm going to become a devoted twitterer, but there's no reason to act ling I'm tweeting begrudgingly/under duress.

The username "If I Were A Luddite" combines my love for stealing things from lyrics to songs I like, my quasi skepticism of technology, and the grammatical anxiety I feel both being an English Major and writing to other English Majors.  The line is from a song by Robot Goes Here, which was a music project of Harvard Post-Doctoral Fellow David Rand.  I've seen Robot Goes Here a few times, and I'm pretty sure that this video of a live performance can explain Robot Goes Here better than I ever could. 

The song that inspired my usernames is "01001010 Failing the Turing Test" and you can listen to it here.

The lyrics have been changed a little from the version I'm transcribing:
Robot Goes Here: 01001010 (Failing the Turing Test)
"I can no longer think the things that I want to think.
The things that I want to think have been replaced by moving images.
I can no longer think, the moving images have replaced the things that I want to think.
I can no longer think the things that I want to think.
My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.
I can no longer think.  I can no longer think." (Alexander Duhamel, 1930)
We've seen half this country, but it's all been air-conditioned, rolling by through tinted glass.
Those clouds look so crisp they must be computer generated.  That music is played so well/sounds so good it must be synthed.

Ever am I realizing how thick the byte is in my blood, crawling under my skin and digging like a chigger (can you feel it?)
If I was a Luddite, I'd have to learn to live without myself.  If I was a Luddite, I'd try to destroy myself.
Where will people like me fit in, in the world of "small is beautiful"?
Where will I fit in? Where will I fit in?

Just another place in my thought-space where the idea goes down much better than the instantiation.
I can talk the talk, yeah, I can get excited.  But if I am really honest with myself I'll see that the times when I am truly happy, when my excitement is bubbling and overflowing, these times are few and far between.  And happen almost exclusively alone with my computer in the middle of the night.

Ever am I realizing how thick the byte is in my blood, crawling under my skin and digging like a chigger (can you feel it?)
If I was a luddite, I'd have to learn to live without myself.  If I was a luddite, I'd try to destroy myself.
Where will people like me fit in, in the world of "small is beautiful"?
Where will I fit in? Where will I fit in?

I ask myself "What makes me truly happy?" and the half-answers I get are suspect.
I can't tell how much is "I could make a convincing argument for why this should make me happy,"
and how much is "this really makes me happy." What really makes me happy?
I've been working on a computer program to tell us what is beautiful.
I think it's time to pull the plug. 

I'll avoid a lengthy exposition of the meaning of this song and say that I like the line as well as the idea of using Ludditism to inspire an online username.  When I gave the song a few extra listens to make sure I was borrowing the right words, I started to panic about subjunctive/conditional verb tenses (if I was vs. if I were).  
I just hope this doesn't lead to any future problems with Dr. Rand.