pseudomodernity and "hyperliteracy."

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
... Life is very long [Eliot]

a response to Gavin at servant of chaos. a long theoretical friday-candy post.

i do have to agree that while both modernism and postmodernism had a "burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance," that what Kirby calls pseudomodernism, i would argue, has this same sense of inheritance--in a different way. postmodernism worked to break up the linear. to think in circles. understands cycles, and also to step away from them. to know that A can link to F without any letters in between; that logic jumps are products of inflicted learning methods. which is also why i agree that the internet is the pinnacle of postmodern thought.

and yet, it is this internet-style pomo thought process which we have inherited, which produced the thought patterns necessary for this pseudomodernity. it is this which enabled classroom computers in which teachers are assigning Facebook profiles as homework to express Holden Caulfield. what Kirby, who feels that his "pseudo modernists are spookily devoid of agency, caught in the neverland between the capacity to effect change and the overwhelming minutiae digital interactions," did not anticipate is our capacity to navigate that space because of our inherited postmodern thought.

i agree with Gavin when he says that "production fails (and always will) in its effort to capture the live moment" because i have that postmodern schema. that is, with Magritte-like wonder, the video of the event will never be the event (for example): it is a representation of an event purchased and reproduced through angles, moments elongated or not long enough--editing, for lack of a better word, regardless of quality of craft. even if it is live-fed, those watching will not have the same experience as those experiencing firsthand. but the temptation to get it to that space has prompted movies like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield as well as a rise in mundane youtube videos, etc.

but because of my place as a gen-y "pseudomodernist" i cannot say this will always be the case, that we will never be able to access that. i think we have a genuine skepticism in these productions even as we participate in them. we know they consume our time and that it places a distance between ourselves and the experience, even if we are the ones experiencing. which is to say, if i'm having a friend video my morning routine, my morning routine will be different simply because of the presence of the video camera. and we know this, moreso than our parents' generation who believe youtube videos as true (generalization, but i've noticed a certain naiveté there).

Gavin points out social media as a possibility for the beginning of navigation between those spaces of experience and production because they result in real-life experiences (eg, tweetups). while i think this is an excellent start, i think it's only part of the picture. i think just as before us came oral tradition, we are hyperliterate; we are writing a hyperliteral tradition. this is not the same as books, which had too much 'production value' with editors and publishers. this is your point of view and my point of view on the same thing, both available, both time-transcendent and hyper-recorded on 18 different search engines.

it is this connectivity, like microblogging from a mobile device, which moves real-time information from people to the internet to records to the future. what youtube videos lack are the personalized element. and "me" in the youtube video is superseded by the "me" watching it. what film editors try to artfully capture: the thoughts, emotions, and feelings of an experience, expressed through only audio and visual. eventually, someone will sort out how to merge the recording with the experience seamlessly. you won't have to disrupt your experience to record it. there will be no "postmodern gap," the anxiety between the interactive and the action.

it will feel like freedom. and it will be scary. as this emerges, so too will those who search out total experiences, who reject the idea of this recording, i'm sure. i hope to be one of them. but maybe that's the postmodern, rather than the pseudomodern, in me.

lines of intrigue. things to think about.

1] Facebook helps raise a revolt, inadvertently of course. "Egyptians are using the online social networking tool Facebook to defy the government's attempt to muzzle the media and hush recent incidents of police brutality during a strike by workers in a town in the Nile Delta." rock on. one more positive aspect, right up there with the kid who used Twitter to get out of a foreign jail by tweeting "arrested"--and, more personally, when a kid went missing at my alma mater last weekend and the cops wouldn't do anything about it for 72 hours, the kids organized search parties and raised awareness via Facebook.

2] in other news, New York doesn't need any more bloody taxes, give me a break. i hope the bill goes down in flames.

3] also, i can't decide, at all. what book would you save? if you could reinvent the canon, decide that for the future THESE were the books that would matter, what would your canon look like?

some of my choices:
- to kill a mockingbird
- fight club
- house of leaves
- written on the body
- the great gatsby
- lord of the flies
- brave new world
- alice's adventures in wonderland

will revisit this when i get home and look at my bookshelf. i am not including works of poetry, plays, or anthologies. because then it would be even longer, as i love poetry and drama. like copenhagen and arcadia.

4] i love this. i love it i love it i love it. i love it so much that i can't even readily articulate why exactly i love it so much. i'm sure i will analyze and get back to you. must sit and ponder and draw connections and relate and commiserate. yes.

full circle, 2 of 2: 2.0 literacy & literature

i forget how, exactly, or rather who, first tweeted me about @smallplaces, but i figured it was worth a look. "small places" is to my knowledge the first Twitter-book. it's a novel(la?) written via continuous tweets, and the followers can read at their leisure.

this is not for interacting. it's a 'bestseller' straight to your phone (or browser, as the case may be). in this way, just as the book was revolutionary for its time, and now internet has revolutionized communication, the two have met in realtime.

as a student of the history of the book, and as a 'digital native,' i figure it's my duty to give my two cents on the matter.

1] it's a really cool idea, otherwise i wouldn't have followed.
2] it is an essentially flawed idea, as i'm discovering.

POSITIVES
> it seems to at once take on what the internet can do for literacy and novel expression, and,
> it also seems to pick up where Palahniuk left off, with the desire to tell a story through slips of scenes, the heart of the matter; to try to express through minimalism but still move the reader.
[don't know what i mean? read the Afterword in a post-95 copy of Fight Club. thank me later.]

NEGATIVES
> unless i'm hooked up 24/7, i lose part of the story.
> the story moves slowly due to the 140 char limit.
..."i tie my shoes." "i shut the door and walk." etc.
[this does not belittle the story itself; i think it could be an interesting plot.]
> if i don't wish to be hooked up 24/7, it's difficult to read on the smallplaces twitterfeed because it moves in reverse (ie, i have to go "back" however many pages until i found where i last left off).

so, in summary, it's certainly an experiment worth watching. however, the medium may make me unable to follow the story in a cohesive sense. it would be, perhaps, worthwhile to do a chapter a week, and let everyone catch up during the next week, and continuing writing another chapter the week after. or, take a total leaf from Palahniuk by tying in a refrain to ground me in understanding as it moves along. or, craft it in such a way, like House of Leaves, where i don't necessarily have to follow along (well) to appreciate it.

Break in transmission...@smallplaces is a twitter-form novel experiment by @nlbelardes: ABC newsroom twitterer, novelist, human coffeedroid.

full circle, 1 of 2: 2.0 literacy "IRL"

study 1: students say "e-text" isn't writing (CNetNews)

study 2: students use "text speak" in school work (TimesOnline)

funny thing? they're talking about the same study: Pew Internet and American Life Project. so how can, in the same study, it be found that 1) students differentiate between txting and writing, and that differentiation makes them understand the time and place for each, and, 2) that in fact that differentiation means nothing and txting is used within scholarly writing.

"What's at stake here is just the ability to express oneself in more than one register," she said. "As long as children are taught to use the standard spelling and to appreciate the difference between registers, this could even be positive."
(excerpt from Times)

yes yes, i agree. there is no trouble with being "multiliterate"--able to txt-speak and write essays also. the problem here is, why, oh why, would you ever need 'LOL' in your essay? or a smiley face? why would there be a need for this expression in academic writing which a teacher must assess and decipher??

i enjoyed this comment response: "I hope those students who do use abbreviations in their essays receive an unhappy face sticker for their incorrect use of the English language." (Farore, Melbourne, Australia)

hahaha, could you imagine? i'd have been livid to get back a frowny face sticker. what does it MEAN? B-? F? it's almost as ambiguous as "A-/B+" (i hated those with a passion). pick one! oh, the teachers' revenge.

in essence, i think the CNet article about the study got it better; it seems that students believe correct spelling/grammar is vital in the academic sphere as well as central to future success in their careers. however, that doesn't stop the error, every so often, of slipping into "native tongue" (txt speak).
[though i'd still love to know when its usage is called for... "and then atticus finch defended tom robinson at trial, showing the ewells for the liars that they are--LOL!" ?]

hook, line: oh no! make it stop! (pls! x_x)

not that i expected any better.

i'm taking flower donations to rest on the grave of the american english language. i know i'm supposed to shift with all this, but it makes me twitch to look at.

more thoughts (kthanxbi?)

tangerinetoad: Funny that texting abbreviations almost non-existent on Twitter. More reason to it than we're not in high school?

i'm not sure why this is. generally, i would argue that twitter has (currently) a different audience than the bff4evs of facebook--or at least that the ratio is in our favour. i am a text message fiend, however, even when i text i don't use abbreviations (unless i'm being sarcastic and referencing l33t-speak for ironic or other purposes).

i don't think it's a high school grad mentality... i think it's the mentality of bloggers. people who are communicating on a more public level than texting, and therefore secure better understanding by not using abbreviations.

even twitter pitches tweets as microblog updates. it's not like mass text messaging (even though it is!)--it's supposed to be like quick mini-blogs. i think that mentality is what encourages well thought out, generally well-spelled, and generally unabbreviated tweets.

i'm not sure though; do you use twitter? what do you think?
(ps i need friends. i feel like i have nothing to tweet about.)