I think the idea of people, alone or in small groups, doing a creative presentation this final week was a great idea.  We've all had such different, interpretive responses to what we've gone over in class (it's a topic that people have very passionate and disparate responses to), so it's interesting to see how people have responded with their presentations. 

All this talk about gaming led me to remember the term 'identity tourism' coined by Lisa Nakamura. Identity tourism is the process by which people assume an identity in the virtual world that is entirely different than their own. However, I want to challenge this notion, like I have before, of having this very distinct virtual world where the rules of 'real life' do no apply and where everything is fantasy. Though it is easy for people to assume online identities that are different from their identities in meatspace, identities created online still take their roots and affect the 'real' world. My point is that it is impossible to isolate online identities completely.

Jane Doe: (10:38:29 PM) 6!

Leena Sethe: (10:38:42 PM) is this the right group?

Jane Doe: (10:38:42 PM) andddd 5

Jane Doe: (10:38:46 PM) yup

Jane Doe: (10:38:49 PM) this is the one

MaxThorner: (10:38:50 PM) thank. god.

topgleek32: (10:38:55 PM) so who wants to help me make a sex robot?

Jane Doe: (10:39:04 PM) I hate you

topgleek32: (10:39:39 PM) ok from here on out character

MaxThorner: (10:39:50 PM) honestly i don't really know much about sex bots...

topgleek32: (10:40:01 PM) I know what they should do

MaxThorner: (10:40:05 PM) but they might be my only option

My final project was a collaborative one with cr88, in which we created word clouds of the full texts of The Plague and The Origin of Species to look at 1) the differences and commonalities between scientific and literary texts, as embodied by this bizarre representational form, and 2) different forms of literary analysis outside of the ones we are used to and how they can be useful. These were the images we produced:

The Origin of Species

      For our presentation, my group conducted a barometer exercise similar to those that may be seen at the Posse retreat or in education classes on campus.

 One of the things this class has really made me think about is what it means to be human. That is to say, what it means to have agency as a human, and how our actions affect the world around us. We've discussed how we as human beings are slowly but surely destroying the world we live in, how we're becoming our own evolutionary forces by developing technologies, how we have agency, how we don't have agency, how it doesn't matter whether we do, how we shape the world around us and how we force our interpretations onto the world. Through these discussions, I've come to realize that I am very much a humanist. I believe strongly in our own agency, and I recognize our enormous capacity both for good and for ill.

For our presentation, we organised the class into groups of roughly twelve and asked them to write the sentence "Once upon a time, Jamie was walking down the street when..." . We gave them 30 seconds to continue the story before asking them to pass it to the person on their left, who then had 30 seconds to continue the story and so on and so forth. We then read out two of the stories to demonstrate the ways in which they had diverged from identical beginnings.

Below are four of the 30-40 stories which resulted from the same sentence: