I found the readings to be much more interesting to me this week over the past few weeks, simply due to their more interactive nature. Both Bronze and Queerskins have an air of culpability to them and they attach the reader or viewer to this feeling as well. While I personally do not fully immerse myself to these feelings and emotions brought on to this project, I think this is due to my background of playing a large number of online videogames; I have, over the past several years, learned to disconnect myself from reality via online interaction and gaming, and as such the personal touch of the projects is somewhat familiar to me. I am not new to VR technology, so the medium of these projects is not as fresh or new to me. That said, for someone who is not as used to the online world, I can see these projects as having a special quality to them that traditional literature does not achieve. To a newer individual, the level of immersion would certainly add to the spectacle. However, as I mentioned, I am slightly more practiced at online interaction and “gaming”, so I feel the immersion break at some points. Bronze in particular feels somewhat restrictive; yes, I am free to choose my own path, but my choices are restricted. The options that I would want to utilize are not available; my personal responses are not an option within the context of this work. While this level of restriction is to be expected (it is virtually impossible to pre-program options for every single different personality that would interact with these works), I am spoiled with my previous experiences. To this extent, I find these works lacking; they are not quite a proper game or VR experience, as I am not fully free to act, and they are not a truly immersive literary work as they are limited to shorter descriptions and snippets of story. They are, however, and interesting starting point for a vaster array of online literature.
Cody Peters
Eng. 335-01 Reflection #2
This week’s readings did not really jump out at me. There were some very original concepts that were attempted, such as Deena Larsen’s “Carving in Possibilities” and Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar’s “Cruising”, but I did not find their narrative to be particularly interesting. For concepts on writing, Stephanie Strickland’s “Born Digital” was far more enriching, but even to that extent I did not find it to be particularly mind-altering. Her definitions of E-poetry come across as fairly basic concepts, and some of which is contradictory. Her concept that “if it could possibly be printed out, it isn’t e-lit” (Strickland, 1) makes any form of electronic literature an impossibility. Even works that utilize different mediums such as film, flash or music can still be printed and re-created in a non-digital sense, making them not E-literature. Additionally, I disagree on principal on her concept that “E-lit is a result of feedback processes between humans and machines, between human intelligence and machine intelligence” (Strickland, 9). All forms of literature, in my personal way of thinking, is an interaction between one person to another. While yes, there is the technological aspect and medium of E-literature, the original work was still written, programmed, or coded by a person. Unless the work is born from a machine itself, with no human origin, then Strickland’s concept is flawed. The idea that the author “cannot, even in principle, control the execution or processing of those lines of code. That job is done by the processor of the original machine, by an unpredictable series of computations” (Strickland, 9) is inherently incorrect. Computers, by design, are logical and predictable. If one was to write a line of code, the program one writes it for would execute that line of code as you wrote it, following a set line of rules. If computers and programs are as unpredictable as she is claiming that they are, they would have no practical function in our day to day life.
Eng. 335-01 Reflection #1
For the majority of these works, it felt that the medium of electronic literature was fairly irrelevant. These pieces could have been published through pretty much any medium, and their message would still be relevant. That said, their subject matter is very connected to the concepts of electronic literature; this in and of itself has a potential for importance of the medium, but again the main points that they reference is unaffected. The one piece that stood out to me in particular was “Dakota”. The combination of fast text and sound really emphasized the inflection that the author wanted to impart to the sections that they obviously felt the most connected to. I really liked the speeding up and slowing down of the text on screen, as it emphasized our ability to read at different speeds when presented the text on a moving screen rather than a stationary book. This creates an interconnected relevance to its relationship to electronic literature. It also evokes the speed at which the human mind is capable of understanding text when presented at high speeds. This is actually a technique utilized by speed-readers, the relevance of which I have yet to understand in relation to this work. Perhaps it is a commentary on the speed at which we as readers, viewers and consumers go through online works and consume the pieces of digital work that we encounter on a day to day scale; weather they are Facebook posts, twitter messages, or simply texts, we consume and regurgitate these shorter digital messages at a much quicker rate than that or a literary work or piece of poetry.
LBST 200 Final Reflection
LBST 200 Research Assignment
Myself
My name is Cody Peters, and I am a fourth year student, currently at Capilano University. I was born in, and have always lived in, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. While I have traveled quite a bit for someone who is 25 years old, I always end up back on the 49th parallel; Vancouver is my city, and I hope to live here for the majority of my life. I love everything about my home town, including its problems and unfortunate history. I feel that I can say this with a level of confidence because of my academic history within the study of anthropology, especially surrounding the issues and history surrounding Vancouver’s involvement in First Nations affairs throughout its history. I accept these problems as my own, as I am as much a part of them as I am a part of this city. Its history is my history, and its problems are also my problems. I have a responsibility to learn about our collective past, and make an effort to address and work through them as a part of our future.
I consider myself to be somewhat of a social outlier, as I associate myself with both Punk and Metal-Head subcultures, and therefore am somewhat out of the mainstream. That said, I do not consider myself to be at odds with the rest of society that surrounds me, and consider myself to be very much a part of Canadian and Vancouverite culture. I do believe that this association with somewhat counter-culture ideologies does affect my academic and social lives, and I find that it can lend me an interesting perspective into both academic and social interactions. My social circle is by no means restricted by this either, and I happily associate with anyone that shows an interest in having me around and interacting with myself and others. I value most people’s ideas and opinions, even if they are contrary to my own, because I realize that their worldviews and beliefs differ from my own, and that mine are in no way superior to theirs.
I am increasingly interested in the fields of Anthropology and English Literature and Literary Analysis, and am endeavoring to pursue a career as a university English professor. In this regard, I enjoy academia and look forward to academic challenges and new modes of thought.