- I'm Paul Bills
- I See Why English Professors Love This
- The Democratization of Information Case Study: Reddit
- Give Us Ahab: An Open Letter to Ubisoft
- Crowdsourcing Games: The Fun Way to Change the World
- Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish
- Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish 2: Digital Fish Edition
- Moby Addicted: Is it All Ahab's Fault?
- Spinning Into Control
- The Internet: The End of "The End"?
One theme I see running through all my posts and that I've found some interest in is how digital culture changes the way we make meaning in our lives, and how digital meaning can best create meaning, specifically video games. We talked a lot in class about the "extra" chapters in Moby Dick, and how they add to the meaning of the overall work. Greg talked about how Moby Dick builds both the whale and Ahab into symbols of God and Satan, respectively, exploring another aspect of how meaning is created. I'm interested in the ways digital media--and especially a variety of digital media together--can create new kinds of meaning and more intense, emotionally connected meaning. This idea gets especially interesting as digital media is often in flux--not entirely finished and often iterated and revised, as Dr. Burton talks about in his post on the spiral. Digital media, then, is an interesting blend of authorial intent and influence and a larger relationship between the author(s) and their initial audience, thus blurring that traditional binary as well. Thus, the future of digital media criticism and studies will have to draw not only on traditional literary criticism, but sociology and organizational behavior theories to truly understand the meaning created by a single digital experience. This makes digital media potentially much more powerful, but at the same time much more difficult to manage and control, such that it makes authorial touches fade in the background or lose their footing in the mass of iteration and outside input. Thus, my research question is how can authorial control be exercised over the new digital media--and even across several media simultaneously--to harness the potential of digital media forms to create more powerful meaning both inside the work and outside the work in the reader and world at large?
I kind of wonder whether authorial intent really plays much of a role at all after something has been published. Does it still belong to the author, or has it become property of the internet public to interpret and rehash? I feel like part of the problem is simply that we have to shrink our thoughts and emotions to words and then our words to text, and in the end, a lot of the original meaning (and by extension, the human component which makes it interesting to other people) is simply 'lost in translation.' What direction are you thinking you'll take in terms of actually researching this? What kinds of topics will you be looking into?
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