A Root Movement to a ‘Green’ Interweb

For years now we have been actively using the Internet, steadily learning to incorporate emerging technologies to ascertain levels of multimodality in our daily lives. In many ways, the Internet has redefined our landscape as writers... but it's important not to forget from where we draw our inspiration-- our real, tangible landscape, our environment. The organic world is a source of wonder, a space of natural phenomena, and almost always cognitively separate from the seeming sterility of the technological world. But with the evolution of our resources, technology has grown and is impacting the environment. As writers, we are faced now with more than the world, with cyberspace and multimodality. If the Internet is a space of intertextuallity, then why is the environment not yet a text? Our knowledge base has potential to become infinte and as our modern western society grows increasingly more digital, there are decisions that need to be made about the way in which we utilize these new tools in direct inter-relation to the living world around us.

Kevin Slavin said quite eloquently in his TED talk on 'How Algorithms Shape Our World' that "there's an uneasy collaboration between nature and man, and now, there's this third corroboratory force". Slavin claims it's algorithms, but in a way it very much can be seen as technology as a whole. The Internet, multimodal education, new tools, and technologies are constantly shaping the way we view the space we live in. Not only do they shape how we see and interact with the world,but often silently, they change it.

Since the digital economy is already using a tenth of the world's energy, to avoid industrial scale damage to the environment we must ask questions now that will set media use on a sustainable path. How can we expect to see the Internet, and the companies that work within it, grow more renewable? We must ask what we are doing to head down a path of environmental consciousness, and what we will continue to do in the future as our world becomes more dependent on technology? 

Like any growing industry, profit will weigh in significantly for businesses and the scale will be tipped toward more development, leaving the environment to assume a heavy debt in the name of progress. That is, unless we become informed consumers, users and most of all, writers so we can use this connectivity to find voices to speak for marginalized entities. The use of multimedia is now an undeniable part of our lives, with the Americans not only watching an average of 5 hours of television per night, but 50 percent of them using another form of media while they watch (Marketing Land). 

Figure 1: Graph of multimedia use, 2014

With all of this multi-tasking (figure 1), consumption of media is at an all-time high. We, as a people, have more access to online tools and resources, and we, as writers, are not doing enough to use these resources to advocate for more environmental practices. The click of a mouse is no longer needed- phones have become just as powerful sources for information. But, what's in an iPhone? Apple released an environmental mission statement saying on their site, "We have a big responsibility to leave a smaller footprint". So far, the company has made (relative) good on this, and looking to figure 2 we can see that the amount of energy needed to run a mac today is 97 percent less than their first release in 1998-- a step in the right direction. On their website they go on to claim that they understand the scale of which their global product emits greenhouse gases contributing to climate change-- but as consumers, are we willing to let this be enough? At what point do we stop holding companies responsible for their products? And what about the mass amount of energy it takes to run something like the Internet in the first place?

Figure 2, Apple energy consumption 1998-today (apple.com)

Internet and media use is growing at such an exponential rate-- unlike any other industry we have seen-- that it is now critical that we demand companies and consumers to be actively liable for the unseen degradation,before action becomes virally overdue. We cannot separate our ability to be multimodal and the environmental consequences. 

To understand this paradigm, we first must ask what, exactly, is multimodality? How did this term come to be used, and why was there a vernacular need? According to the glossary of multimedia terms, it can be defined as:

Look very literally here at the use of the phrase 'spatial aspects of interaction and environments, and the relationship between these'. The glossary opens up multimodality broadly, including elements like environment that are often forgotten when considering implications of new ideas or methodologies. This is key to understanding the whole picture-- like any cultural shift, certain aspects become marginalized and in human history this has meant that the environment becomes nothing more than a commodity. Though there are recent efforts to reconcile this type of thinking on a small level, not enough is being done to prevent it from perpetuating. One of the largest contributors is a hidden one-- the Internet. No one 'owns' it, so who can we hold accountable? How about the networks?

The Internet, despite the way it often feels, is still ‘new’ in broad considerations. As Anil Dash explains in his talk at the Good Experience Live (GEL) conference, the Internet is a 'new' tool, and it connects us to widely better networks than we could ever manage without the World Wide Web. Dash is compelling, almost pleading with the audience, in an attempt to open the eyes of a world that has opportunity hooked, yet seems uninterested in reeling it in. It's with these new tools that we have the absolute privilege and opportunity to be informed, to know what is happening in the world around us. But what's really important here is that these tools also give us the chance and the platform as writers to demand more accountability, more responsibility for actions that may contribute to the destruction of the environment. To do this though, it is imperative that we fully understand the level of gross proliferation that our tools, namely the Internet as a whole, have already experienced, so we can prepare ourselves for the level of growth that is still on the horizon. If we can trace the roots of its past and fully grasp how much has changed at such a rapid pace we will be able to situate ourselves more accurately in the future, and partake in fundamental changes for the use and creation of multimedia. If we look to Figure 1, a timeline of notable contributors to the rise of the Internet, we can see how quickly multimodality emerged and locate the places where this technology has shifted shape over the infinitely small span of its existence. 

Figure 3: The Internet- A Timeline. 
Be sure to roll your mouse over each event, click individually and to scroll completely through the interactive features. Utilize hyperlinks by opening them in a new window or tab. 

(You can access this timeline externally here-- check out the list option on the bottom right to see the timeline displayed as an indexed record) 

Image sources actively linked. Stat. sources: Infoplease, UNCP
WC: 1081, created by  LBrayton

All these changes, all this growth, what does it mean for the environment? The unfortunate reality is expressed in the video below from Greenpeace, "How Dirty is Your Data?", and it's a shocking truth. Right now, as we participate in media culture, we are degrading our environment. As we write and post and blog and tweet, we are a part of the problem. Watch the video to hear to what extent.

On the timeline, take note of the entry in December of 1996, a mere 18 years ago was the now mega-mogul Google's inception. We see this same sort of 'boom' with popular sites like Facebook or YouTube in the timeline. But in less than 20 years, Google has expanded from a base of 10,000 queries per day to almost 47,000 searches a second today. The changes in the company have been immense, and the shifts in energy consumption had no choice but to grow with the brand. Within the last ten years, Google has made it a clear initiative (and business venture) to run their data centers off of sustainable energy. They claim "data centers are designed to use as little energy as possible" using temperature controls, recycling water for cooling, and renewable energy to help power their facilities (google.com/green/efficiency). In fact, the company has invested over $1.5 billion in renewable projects, like wind and solar energies. One of the most impacting projects that Google has taken on is their SunPower energy investment which helps install solar panels in residential homes so that the average American is more apt to act on green energy by making cost is less of a factor in decision making. Despite a long list on Google's website of their green efforts, only 35% of Google's total electricity is renewable (google.com).

Figure 4: Google Energy Distribution (Google.com)

With all the money and resources that Google is investing in other companies, why do they not operate at 100% renewable energy? They note that they offset or "neutralize" the remainder of their carbon footprint through some of the projects they fund, but is this trade-off fair to the environment? Can we shrug off responsibility through displacement?

It's easy to assume that technology is a relatively 'clean', after all there's no direct environmental harm, right? No, we're just using the Internet. We're just sending a text message, just googling images of David Beckham (Google even has a chart of global interest him over time...). But when four billion users are simultaneously browsing the web, the energy consumption is multiplied by that same 4 billion. If the video above didn't put it in perspective, the difference in energy globally between something as small as those who use Yahoo email and those who use Gmail is equivalent to the entire annual electricity consumption of the country Barbados (inhabitat.com)-- no small feat.

The type of scale we are considering here is so large, it's virtually unfathomable. Though these companies are keeping sustainability in the back of their codes of conduct, the truth of the matter is, as we can see from the recent past, the Internet and media as a whole is growing too rapidly for this to be sufficient; for these efforts to be enough. In order to be truly sustainable, leading companies like Apple, who supply the technology we use to connect, and Google, which dominates the form through which we share and receive information, have to be held accountable at the same pace that their field is expanding. This means no carbon footprint, 100% renewable operating systems, effort and innovation. And, as much as we don't want to realize it, we have to be accountable, too as consumers and participants. That means writers need to produce text that ask the kinds of questions we have been asking, and compose projects like Greenpeace's video that will get people, and companies, thinking. We need an environmental call to action. If we fail, and it's arguable that we already are, the environment yet again will suffer the consequences of human oversight. Surely, since we have the knowledge and the tools, and now thanks to the vast Internet, the networks, this will not remain an unresolved problem.

Ted Nelson once said "The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions - everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others". If are rooted in conventional thinking and boxed in by paper prisons, we have been handed the tools that can sever these restraints and immerse us in a wider world than we could have possibly imaged 20 years ago. But in this revelation and progression, we mustn't  forget our role as writers to speak for those who cannot- to give voice to environmental concerns and to rise up to ask for change when it is undoubtedly needed. Everything is connected: this Earth, this virtual space, this text: they are the words, they are 'the thing itself' (Woolf).  

Infographic Reflection

   As you can tell, the infographic assignment was close to my heart. I had jokingly responded to Cicily's comment about making hers on her English Bull dog with a quip about  my pitbull... but in the end I couldn't get the idea out of my head and the more I thought about it the more perfect it seemed. I incuded a pre-infrographic collage of my puppy, Badger, just to show that the ad was true! I really love the breed of dog so I felt compelled to speak for them in this case. 

   I was conflicted at first on whether or not to make it an Adopt-a-Pit spiel or something that just proved wrong the many myths surrounding the breed, or something simply educational. In the end, I tried to make a mix of all three, which I think sort of convoluted the graphic in a small way. I made a list of some of the things I really wanted people to know-- like the different kinds of pitbulls that make up the breed, but I also wanted people to be able to relate to the ad if they still didn't care for pits. The most common anti-pitbull argument is that pitbulls are violent and aggressive animals, which could not be more false (they are the most cuddly breed too but no one bothers to acknowledge that. They have up to thirteen different dogs categorized as a Pits which make them statistically easy to blame), so I wanted to go about proving this 'wrong' and that's why I included the sidebar on ridiculous things that would kill you first before a Pitbull became a threat to your life. I thought the formatting on this section was understandable, but Doug mentioned that it seemed broken up for the readers eye and after this was pointed out I can understand how that would be the case. 

  I'd never made an infographic before, and there are so many online resources that really made it a breeze, though formatting the actual aesthetics and making decisions on where to put text and how much, when to choose between image and text, how to balance the overall result, were all decisions that are very similar to those made in the writing process-- or even more complex! I really enjoyed this assignment and am happy overall with the work I did. 

Anderson, McGonigal, Priebatsch, and Dash- Video Networking

I've grown up to be technologically challenged, for this generation at least. My boyfriend frequently plays Grand Theft Auto (GTA) where you literally run around with an armory of weapons, killing civilians and stealing their wheels to outrun the police. I've been 'game' enough to attempt a few rounds, and just recently I was able to use my left and right hands independently from one another to successfully choose an grenade launcher, blow up and murder a woman on the sidewalk, step over her bloody body and steal her Ubermacht Oracle. What an accomplishment. I am NOT by any means 'a gamer' or someone who is drawn to spending my time in that manner-- but I don't attribute this to the concept of video games, instead, to the genre they've constructed.

It seemed to me that video games tended to fall into a few categories-- violent 'war' games like World of Warcraft and League of Legends, 'Epic Quest' games like the popular Skyrim and time-passers like Nintendo's Mario Brothers. But, before you jump down my throat, I'll admit games are evolving, and apparently evolving us right along with them. While I was constructing this blog post, I came across a wikipedia article that you can read HERE  that took me on an enlightening journey through all the incredibly detailed genres of video games (seriously, from Beat 'em-Up-Hack-and-Slash to Christian games). This got me thinking, what is it that I missed about the video game craze? Where does my aversion to gaming come from? Have I been conditioned to view it as a time waster? Is it because I'm a female? Is it because of the kind of learner I am? Because I just wasn't exposed to them in my childhood? Because I'm not good at them now and feel discouraged?

I really don't have the answers, but when thinking more critically about it I think the popularity has something to do with the same reason we love movies and books, the stories they tell-- only in the online game, you have the ability to manipulate those stories and essentially, create them. Huffington Post has an interesting article on the benefits of gaming, which has been popping up more and more in all social contexts lately. This article  is really, really worth the time reading through: there are some shocking benefits that line up very closely with what McGonigal had to say in her TEDx talk. She mentioned that gaming could be the "future survival of humankind" and sited a really interesting mythology of Herotitus and what games were potentially able to do for his community so long ago. McGonigal was engaging and worked well with the other talks we were to watch and learn from. I particularly liked Anderson, who claimed the opportunities we have gained from Dash's 'better tools, and better networks' have allowed for massive spread of ideas through the flexibility of medium on the web. He says, "that primal medium that your brain is exquisitely wired for has gone global", imagine that! From the 'evolution of dance' via the internet, to scientists on Jove spreading experimental details, to the other thousands of people spreading data and responding online, that internet has opened (and that's his key word) a full cycle of learning framed by the presence of our ever growing population.

In an attempt to better understand the potential for gaming and the influence gamers could have on our global community, I thought I should prode a gamer myself and see what I could discover and learn from their experience. I talked to Montana State University student Dillon Bauernfeind, a junion in Sustainable Bioenergy systems, and a 'former' gamer.

An Interview With a Gamer: Dillon Bauernfeind, MSU student

1. What do you like best about gaming? What's your favorite game?
D: It [gaming] helps me to pass the time and it's amusing. It can be really interactive, too. I really like the motion games like 'Connect' on Xbox360 that lets your body be the controller. It lets you be active and gets you up and burning calories. I like both types equally, but Call of Duty is my favorite. Shooting and killing is fun in the game because it's sort of outside the normal realm-- that sounds sociopathic- but it let's you do things in another reality.

2. At what age did you begin playing video games or online games?
D: I got a original Nintendo when I was 8, that had fun games that required movement like Duck Hunter where you shoot ducks that fly across the screen with a plastic gun. It was pretty cool but I didn't play it a lot, I was outside a lot as a kid skiing and what not. I wasn't huge on gaming then but then I got a PS2 for Christmas when I was 11 or 12, which had racing games like car racing and dirt bike racing and a James Bond series of shooter games. Those were my fucking favorite. It was first person shooter so you got to pretend to be 007.
L: What is 'first person shooter'? 
D: First person is the perception of you being the person, the character, the guy with the gun. Third person shooter games like Halo are third person shooter where you control the character but you watch from a removed aspect.
L: When did you get more into gaming? Did you collaborate?
D: When I was 15 or 16 in high school I used some money I made over the summer to get an Xbox360 console with Call of Duty 1-6. I played with friends that I would see at school and we'd set something up after [school] to play together. Most of the time we would be problem solving because we would have to come up with solutions to tactical scenarios like if the enemy is coming one way, we needed to decide if it was worth it to walk around and flank them from a different side. It's pretty social. I was less into it after high school though, played a little in college but not as frequently because I didn't have a lot of money to buy new games and there was a sort of fading of interest too.

3. How do you feel when playing your favorite game? When you are winning? Losing?
D: Games for me are pretty mindless, I don't really get emotional. There's a small bit of gratitude and disappointment when I'm playing but I don't notice it too much.  I actually think I'm emotional watching movies. I'm not super invested in the game, but enough invested that I think it's worthwhile to play. Like, if you're going to watch TV anyway you might as well play a video game and be more engaged than just observing.

4. Do you ever think about other things you could be doing while gaming? Does it help you relieve stress, organize your thoughts, ect.? Do you ever experience the opposite (more stressed, more chaotic)?
D: I can definitely see how some people are but I'm not invested enough in the game to feel that emotional pull. It does chill me out sometimes though. Some people take it really seriously, probably because they really like it and it's a good escape, an alternate reality.

5. Is the plot of the game an important aspect to you? Does the story-line matter to you as a gamer?
D: Call of Duty has a really complex story. It helps give me reason to be playing, keeps it addictive because you're working toward a goal and you want to reach it. Only trouble is, like with Skyrim, that game is too long, too complex maybe, and I get burnt out and it's not really fun anymore.

6. Have you ever been in a situation where gaming has helped your everyday life? 
D: Games are nice because you can be isolated in your room but still sort of be socializing. The ultimate laziness- you can be kicking it with your friends in your boxers without having them see. I haven't ever really felt like games have really helped me, but I've never thought about it before. I think they do help you socialize though because you're interacting with people in an intimately removed way... talking and using a simulated character to portray your actions. Kinda cool.

7. Will you encourage your children to play the kinds of video games you play?
D: Ehh, no. They games I play are violent. I won't encourage it but I won't restrict it. I'll definitely stick to the guidelines, the rating system of ages on the games. I didn't start playing "kill games" until I was 12 or 13 which are rated T for thirteen and up. I would let my kids play those when they're old enough.

8. The company Leap Frog makes "educational" video games for kids ages 3+. Do you think there is an age where it's 'too early' for a child to play a video game? -->  ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pov3VnPk_BY )
D: No, I think they are really an educational tool. The educational games I've played like the school sponsored ones we would play in class were pretty entertaining and helped me focus with my ADHD. I think the games that are meant for these kids are great, but they need to be intermixed. Like if you're helping teach your kid to read, it shouldn't be all of one or the other.

9. If you could give one reason to encourage others to play video games, what would it be? Any negative reason you can think of? 
D: Video games can be addicting. Play in moderation. Too much is too much, and just right is optimal- when you're not thinking about the game outside of playing it.



Notes on the videos:

McGonigal-

3 billion hours a week of gameplay for the future survival of humankind
Idea of constant feedback- collaborative online environments (satisfaction of virtual world)
Evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species (10,000 hours 'theory of success' virtuoso)
What exactly are gamer's getting good at? -- McGonigal argues Urgent Optimism (desire to act immediately combined with the hope that you can be sucessful)
Social relationships (playing games with others makes us like them better)
Blistful Productivity (happier working hard, optimized as human beings)
Epic Meaning (awe-inspiring missions)
Trying to make the real world work more like a game -- Herotitus (famine in the kingdom of Lydia)-- trying to escape real world
gamer's as a real world resource

Priebatsch-
"This world is social, the next world is gaming"

Thompson 6-10

There's so much to talk about in these chapters from Clive Thompson's book, Smarter Than You Think. Thompson moves sequentially from examples of progressive collaboration to the benefits of incorporating multimedia and technology in schools, an effect called 'ambient awareness', to the collective unification of the world via the internet. Thompson very clearly is advocating heavily for the incorporation of multi-media and cites many examples of positive change due to technological interaction. Though I agree, mostly, with his points I can't help but desire a concession to the 'other side'. Plenty of groups advocate heavily against advancements in technology and there is a particularly large movement to dissuade the incorporation of technology in school environments. Not to mention the significant implications that technology as a whole has for the environment and both human social and physical health. ( check some opinions on that out here: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/26295-is-modern-technology-killing-us ) I think by choosing to not encompass the entirety of the situation, I think Thompson weakened his argument. How would he dispute these arguments? Since technology is fairly 'new' and ever-changing, is it safe/fair to say the benefits out way the negative effects when we aren't fully sure of what those may be, 100%, yet?

I pulled out a lot of quotes while reading, but I wanted to share a few and the questions that they sparked me to ask: 

"When you gaze with wild surmise upon the Pacific of strangeness online, you confront the astonishing diversity of human passion"(153). 

- Thompson talks here about how the online community allows us to foster "strangeness" in the sense that we have more freedom to express obscurity and find acceptance. In a way, the internet allows us to have a world without boarders and an environment that is malleable. With increased connectivity and collaboration, our sense of place is infinitely larger. What sort of environmental implications does this disconnection with our tangible place create?

"But a strongly worded opinion-- the core of an op-ed-- is not subject to consensus. This is why collective thinking online also tends to fail when it attempts an aesthetic creation"(159). 

- How interesting to think that creativity tends to be opinion-based and therefore nearly impossible to collaborate for efficiency.   

"They assign videos to be watched at home, then have the students do the homework in class, flipping their instruction inside out"(177). 

- I'm struck by how much sense this system makes. Though, I see the same sort of loop holes that we see with our current system: kids would still go home, and blow off the videos, then come to class unprepared and need to play catch-up. I see the connection to multi-media here with the flexibility of the video assignments, but I'm not sure this holds enough weight-- what if the children don't have computer access? Some of these solutions seem to really play into a certain demographic... rich, anglo-saxon suburban families... 

"How much should you credit someone else if you use a bit of their code? Or a 'sprite' from their game? What constitutes a contribution so creative that you can put your name on a remix" (194)?

- Brings me back to the conversation in class about plagiarism, and Johnson-Eilola's astonishment at the editors request that he cite even a single word used. The lines are finite, and becoming more and more blurred as we continue into untouched territory and collaborative words. I don't even know how to begin thinking about code and how the citation or ownership would work for something that appears systematic in my mind. 

"His hypothesis is that language, one of our signal intellectual gifts, evolved precisely to allow us to socially 'groom' one another, in the way that primates groom one another physically"(222). 

"Actually, one of the best ways to grasp how political change happens is to study how it doesn't"(251). 

Johnson-Eilola and Kohl et. al.

Johnson-Eilola in the text The Database and The Essay; Understanding Composition as Articulation ( a misleading and rather dry title, if you ask me) lay out what, I think, is the very purpose of our course in digital rhetoric: "I'm not arguing that this postmodern shift erases traditional texts or narratives. Instead, I'm trying to make clear that our traditional texts are changing, whether we like this our [or?] not. We must work to understand the transformations and fragmentations taking place so that we can work within them"(207). This change that J-Eilola is attempting to make clear is not a new one, nor one that shocks me as a reader. I'm less interested in the aspect of the essay where he segments and differentiates between kinds of writing, which to me, seemed to function as a weak attempt to strengthen his argument, and more interested in the implications of these shifts.

As a class, we've been able to look at various forms of 'text', and have gravitated around a similar conceptual pondering of "originality" in both creative idea and writing that J-E's Intellectual Property questions. He looks at this further, prodding into WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization)  , a new type of organized legislation that would "permit firms to 'own' facts they gather, and to restrict and control the re-dissemination of those facts. The new property right would lie outside (and on top) of the copyright laws, and create an entirely new and untested form of regulation that would radically change the public's current rights to use and disseminate facts and statistics (n. pag.)"(210). As an aspiring author, I see the implications of such law reaching far beyond 'facts and statistics'. One day, if WIPO were to come into effect, anything published online-- like the work on these blogs, or essays published in an online composition, even Facebook walls-- could, essentially, need to be patented. And this process is a business of profit like any other. There is a cost (of 1,330 swiss francs plus the filling fee of up to 2,300 francs- a sum equivalent to almost 4000 U.S dollars), naturally, to patent an IP with WIPO. Though, for now, Intelectual Property seems to be relatively restricted to larger scale, corporate business but that is by now means a guarantee.

While browsing to better understand the work of IP, I read from the Journal of Advanced Pharmaceutical Technology and Research that "IPR (rights) is a strong tool, to protect investments, time, money, effort invested by the inventor/creator of an IP, since it grants the inventor/creator an exclusive right for a certain period of time for use of his invention/creation"(Saha: Introduction). I wonder, what happens at the end of this period of time? Will we end up seeing Owell's 1984 republished under another name? Will all of language need to be locked down to a single 'owner'? Now that this claim game has begun, like everything else wrapped up under our umbrella of modernity, it will not stop. 

You can actually visit Johndon Johnson- Eilola's 'workspace' here where I found this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU to John Oliver discussing some further implications of the HyperWorld we are now undeniably immersed in. This video is so worth the time, and really, a quite witty compliment to his text.

I've sort of ignored Kohl et. al.'s History Now; Media Development and Textual Genesis of Wikipedia and their commentary on collective, or collaborative, writing. The collaborative element of, to borrow Kohl's example, Wikipedia is interesting when thought of in terms of IP. Wikipedia functions as a site with no true ownership since the authorship is anonymous and constantly shifting (though the form and media PPR is attributed to Ward Cunningham) so it offers a unique opposition to the very core of IP. Reading History Now and discovering a bit of the foundations of Wikipedia made me smile. Key elements are 'openness' and essentially, simplicity of use. How often in a day do I "wikipedia" something (yes it's a verb-- much like 'googling') and thank my stars that in the first paragraph I can extract a meaningful understanding of a concept. In essence, what Kohl et. al. seem to be wanting us to understand, is that Wikipedia, and maybe even all collaborative texts, are the ultimate Hypertext. There are some kinks-- like contribution and scientific authority-- but those will work themselves out eventually.

Sometimes it scares me to remember we've only been at this for 14 years. What will happen in another 14? The post-modernity that Eilola talks of really needs to be redefined as we slip and slid through the Hypermodern world.
It's here. It's now.

Infographic

This is Badger! He's a great snuggler, a blanket theif, and an avid hiker. He loves his ball, napping on the front porch and playing with his buddy Tukka. He always greets you with a smile- literally- to show you how much he loves you. He's my best friend, the inspiration for this Infographic and he's a Pit Bull.

Critical Essay- Proposal

For the Critical 'photo' essay assignment, I'm interested in understanding more clearly the history of hypertext. I'm curious to develop how hypertext came to exist. Where did its roots emerge in literary history? And, how do we see those roots shift to create the kind of hypertext we mingle with today?

I've been studying eco-criticism for several years now and have come to better understand the paradigm of modernity that we are operating within, and I'd like to extend the deconstruction to hypertext. Though I don't necessarily see multi-modal use of language as a bad thing, I'm interested to know why and how this 'new frontier' developed. I think if we can better trace the path of emergence, then we, ideally, will be able to more effectively utilize this tool.

There's a sort of inevitability that surrounds technological evolution in our modern world now.
Kevin Slavin said in his TED talk on 'How Algorithms Shape Our World' that "there's an uneasy collaboration between nature and man and now there's this third corroboratory force" he claims it's algorithms, but in a way I think it's just technology as a whole. I'd like to explore this idea, and look at some of the implications (both negative and positive) of interacting so frequently with hypertext.

The sort of reseach I will need to conduct for a project of this sort is vast. Ironically, I think a lot of the 'historical' information will need to come from more recent sources, so I imagine I'll utilize textual research. I'd like to uncover the foundation of this shift, see if I can pinpoint when and why we made the move towards hypertextualization. I'll start by looking into Ted Nelson's life, the man who coined this phrase in the first place. We will see where this goes!

Process Reflection- A.V. Short

I suppose I started with content for this assignment. Around my room I have a clothesline strung, and clipped to it are pictures of art from around the world. It all started in Greece, when I was traveling and was struck by all the 'unconventional' beauty I found there. I was well versed on Greece's recent economy crash when I visited in 2012 and where I had expected rubble, there emerged this incredibly evocative street scene of artists speaking, or painting rather, their emotions all over the remnants of their country. Growing up in Chicago, I was more than familiar with graffiti and murals but this was a whole new genre. The art in Athens was filled with political commentary; it was a way for broken people to feel in control in a small way, but that said something in a larger-than-life way. One artist repetitiously drew a black and white woman with spaghetti hair that gazed dreamily out at the passerby's. I began to hunt down his work, checking around every corner hoping I could find her again in the next alleyway. Searching for her became more important than anything other aspect of the city, and I felt myself take on her mystified gaze as I walked through those ancient ruins. Something about that trip felt so surreal. Whether it was her influence or just the idea of Greece itself, I can't say, but she moved a part of me and I found her again everywhere I went.
On to Rome, Peru, Chile... I continued to note the dramatic work of street artists, and in each place I went the purpose seemed to shift. In Chile, particularly in the seaport of Valparaiso, I noticed a huge political movement in their art. As you climb the hills over the bohemian city and look out at the Pacific crashing into the city, you can see colorful houses lined up like 'little boxes on the hillside', each one flecked with something unique, just like the people of this city. And if you were to make your way down to the ocean, as you walk you'd run into a mural of Presidente Allende, who was assassinated by the military dictator Pinochet whose iron fist ruled Chile for over 20 years. Almost 25 years later, this mural still brings much controversy to the divided country. But the incredible thing is not the controversy that surround these politics, but the very fact that the mural is there at all. In a country that was so heavily repressed for such an immense period of time, freedom of anything is a right that the Chileans have earned. Their art loves to celebrate vida- life, las reizes- roots, and la cultura- their joyous culture.
After spending what seemed like a lifetime immersed in this art and these cultures, coming back to Bozeman, Montana where our only art is limited to power boxes and galleries was more than disappointing. A part of me missed what's labeled here as 'deviant' culture, and so in my project I wanted to bring these photos back to life somehow.
They meant so much to me that it was difficult to decide on a form. I didn't want it to be purely a slide show (even though this may have been the best service to the art I could have done) for fear of it being 'boring'. I didn't want a lot of words because in some ways I felt the photos should speak for themselves, and because of this I sort of backed myself into a corner. I chose to balance the weight of the pictures with a more upbeat and fun audio track so that the viewer felt like the pictures were moving somewhere, and I paced the pictures at different intervals to help distinguish the really great, more meaningful ones from some that I personally just tended to like the visual of. I think in a sense this was the writing process for this assignment, This was a change for me, since I'm more of a creative writer and tend to love the sound of words on a page. If I had to do it again, I'm sure I would go about the presentation differently, and I'm not entirely happy with some of the choices I did make in hindsight (I would change my audio to something less annoying and the font to something more serious, also wtf is up with the horrible quality?).
Overall, though, I'm just happy to have had the chance to share these photos with a group of people. I think it's important to share art from around the world because other cultures often have a really different definition of beautiful than the one we find ourselves trapped in the great U.S. of A.
As far as what I know now... I know how to make a video!  

Bernhart, Wysocki, Kress, and Solomon

Anne Wysocki, again, She seems interested this time in a looking at visual texts and determining not what it says, but how it says it. I  love this concept, but since it seems everyone this week chose to gravitate around Bernhardt and Wysocki, I'll look further into what Kress (ugh) and Solomon have to say.
Martin Solomon's 'The Power of Punctuation' causes me to think twice as I write this. On my blog, the options for text variation (outside of the initial setting) consist of 'normal' which without question, I always use for posts, and three others: heading, subheading and minor heading. To indicate these, the creator of this blog site uses size changes and boldface text, declining slightly as we move from heading down to normal. Is it not somewhat strange that we innately know these characteristics to define, or categorize, thoughts?

You Should Naturally Think Now That This Is A Heading- Something New And Important Happens Here 

Solomon's focus is less of size and appearance, but more on the physicality of  punctuation of the page. He explains: "Most punctuation marks are designed to be seen, not heard. These subtle, often understated, devices are quite important, however, for they are the meter that determines the measure within the silent voice of typography" (282). He goes on to assimilate punctuation to music, in that it helps direct pitch, volume, and separation of words. 

Gunther Kress, though he focuses more closely on genre in his article ' Multinodality, Multimedia, and Genre', still can reinforce Solomon's idea of how punctuation can in a sense 'manipulate' the reader's interpretation of a text. Kress explains the relationship between 'participants' and 'the act of communication' as an "objective" one (42). "The viewer is presented with the text-element "front-on." It is objectively there, with maximal "involvement" of the viewer, that is, the viewer is positioned as confronting the image straight on..." (Kress 42-3). He seems to be getting at here the idea that the way we present a text can help determine the reader's level of involvement or inclusion in it's interpretation. And just look at all the punctuation Kress used to contribute to the reader's understanding! It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that there is always a right and wrong, a black and white, with writing and grammar, when in reality (or Solomon's reality, at least) we do have a relative freedom to help express our own style as authors and to guide our reader to see the text the way we want them to. 

Wysocki and Jaimeson

The Sticky Embrace of Beauty- what a wonderful title! And what better way to open an essay that with a epigraph that contemplates the values of our society. I love that I am armed as a reader from the moment I lay eyes on the text: the floral framed introduction, multiple epigraphs that really do work immediately in the essay, and a title that pushes the boundaries of the standard academic essay-- it is embellished and flagrant and all together interesting. I find it even more interesting after reading the subheading, and noting that she even chooses to use the word 'formal', something I would have expected to see in an essay composed more closely to the likes of Jaimeson's.

Right away I love Wysocki's humorous entry into the article, but I begin to ask questions immediately too. She mentions beauty as an inherent quality... and I wonder, is that even fundamentally possible? She also throws around phrases like 'consistency' and 'content' without defining them for her own purposes. She does note that form's current function, is to 'take what is messy and particular and to abstract it and generalize it and universalize it'. She says:

"We have learned to think that form should do this, and we have learned to expect that form should do this, whether we are working with visual representations such as photographs or with the visualities of type on a page" (22). And then the magic happens. Wysocki pushes hard on tradition, using "contemporary" modes to make use of some of our tools-- like inserting images, bolding important passages, underlining key and emphasized words, and playing with in-text examples of her point-- that are nearly shunned in academic essays.


http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/01/07/this-is-what-happens-when-a-kid-leaves-traditional-education/

You can skip to 4:00 minutes, and get a better feel for what boundaries are being pushed here, 7:00 for the implications on writing, but I recommend you watch it all. 

This kid has some serious thoughts, -- let's hack writing (something that should be creative already) and take a new twist on our prose. Wysocki, is essentially, a hacker. Love it! 

Something the past two weeks of class have made me aware of is how arbitrarily narrow my frame of my own writing has been. Since I tend to identify more as a creative writer, I am all for breaking out of traditional formatting and playing around with unlikely word choice and sentence structure. It dawned on me, first last week with color and now this week with the freedom associated with image and form, that I do not use nearly enough variation and pizaz as I should in the age of technology. Even here, on this blog, I have virtually any image at my fingertips, as all of the internet awaits. I have tools that would have spun Plato's head back into his cave and roiled the entirety of Galileo's galaxy.




You have these powers too-- but why aren't we using them?
Is it because it's too 'easy' to just write the way we know how?
Or is it because we feel our work might flee from the norm, that we may not be a widely accepted because of it?
Is is more of economic issue? (though magazines seems to defeat this one)

After reading Wysocki, I opened up the PDF for Jaimeson's essay... how dissapointing. No arrows, no pictures, no differentiation of one paragraph to another. No 'unncessary' indentation... just words, and boring words, on a stream of white pages.

I think Wysocki
made her
point.

Audio Video Short

In the time I've spent around the world, I've developed a small obsession with street art, and have constantly been amazed by the sheer lack of it here in the United States. Though there is plenty on the streets of New York, it is not as much an open part of our culture as it seems to be in other countries. Particularly notable in Chilean and Greek artists, street art fills a space of silence in a modernized world. Whether it serves to help rally against a dictator, to reclaim a 'homeland' or merely express an artistic craving... art is an evolutionary act. 

Check out the Global Street Art movement's blog to learn more. 

Enjoy!

McCloud 7-9, Wolf, Mishra

It seems the theme of the week seems to lay here:  instead of here, in the words... Though from the McCloud reading last week, I'm not so sure the two are drastically different. Wolf brought to the conversation the idea of computer simulation, and the effect of images (and their validity) on human interpretation. She surmises: "Computer simulation's speculative nature blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction a complicates the question of how far an indexical link can be stretched and displaced and still be considered valid in society, as facts get skewed, left out, misinterpreted, or filled in by theory and speculation" (Wolf 429). In particular, she mentioned that in court, often black and white images could be references but color images were thought to sway the audience. If this theory is accurate, then does color make a difference here too? Immediately our eyes are drawn to color, and naturally we are more apt to remember something that is distinct like the above phrase. But why is it then that we don't see more freedom of 'manipulation' in the ethos of traditional writers? Think of almost every book you've ever read- can you think of one that was not printed on ivory paper with black or greyed ink? Why as writers, are we not able (or not willing) to play into the tools we are given?

**When I google searched this, I found absolutely nothing- no discussion, no forum, no other contemplation of why this happens to be the case. Though I feel it may have originated as an economic decision, and of course has its historical contexts (because printing is expensive) but I can't help but ask- haven't we evolved past that yet?

Color in photographs is one of their main attractions, and artists avidly use this to distinguish their work from other artists. McCloud talks about the flagrant use of color in comics, and from his chapter 8, it is easy to see the moves that color can make for that industry. I think back now to hyperreading, and wonder if the use of color and the heightened sense of freedom in format has anything to do with this generations tendency to prefer online media versus book in hand. Would this pattern change if we incorporated more technique associated with these mediums? 

McCloud 1-4

Who knew comics were an art? Not this girl. As 'graphic novel virgin', the first time I'd ever read anything besides the Sunday Funnies was in Amy Thomas' class, Literature Unbound, where we critically looked at The Walking Dead- in both it's television and (original) graphic novel forms. Talk about inter-texuality... For her class, we also read from McCloud to help us gain a general sense of, really, what's behind the art of comics and graphic novels.

One of McCloud's biggest points of focus lies in the differences between Eastern and Western comic design and the shifts in the artistry and design, and how that changes the way the reader perceives the finished work. He makes a point that Japanese comics are heir to a tradition where "they emphasize being there over getting there"(McCloud 81). I try to translate this into my work as a creative-minded writer, and think about ways in which I may tend to focus on the 'getting there' of a story, over, perhaps, the element of 'being there'. Something that comes to mind (since we always go back to what we know) is Virginia Woolf and her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. As many of you are familiar with her work, I'll skip the summary (you can find it here if you find yourself ignorant), but the book tells a story that takes place in a single day- a very narrow time frame (much like we see in Joyce's work, and other stream of consciousness-esk writers). Within this tiny time frame, I imagine that Woolf was forced quite often to ask herself this same question of where her text takes the reader- and in this instance, I see a crossing over of both the East and the Western ways of thinking (or so they call Modernism). 

Going back to Porter's essay where he mentioned that "writing is non-linear", I think comics really lend us a sense of that. Not a 'classical' form of literature, where we may read left to right and focus on only the prose on the page, comics ask more of us as an audience as well as a writer. Just look at their versatility! From graphic novels to political statements, humorous or tragic, they build relationships in very tangible ways, making the reader, arguable more loyal, to the source. Just think about Garfield, Charlie Brown, or X-men... comics are able to fill a gap that prose alone cannot. 

 They are a great medium through which we can further our understanding of 'texts' outside of the traditional sense. I'm not sure before my experience with McCloud, and his expression of the craft that goes into this form of literature, I would have been tempted to pick up a graphic novel. Knowing what I know now, about the level of interaction between author and audience, and the inevitable vulnerability of a comic writer, I am much more interested in the genre as a whole. I think it is incredibly important, now more than ever, to keep looking across genres and asking ourselves (especially as writers) 'what can this do for my work?' How can lessons in comics translate into lessons in literature? And in what ways can I pull on the things McCloud is saying, like the blood in the gutters (or the formatting, ie. breaks in between chapters, paragraphs) to further my view of writing as a whole?  

Sosnoski, Jakobs, and Hayles

Hypertext.
As I sit and type, I am thinking about how this very action can (if it does) differ from constructing prose, pen and paper in hand, in the 'traditional' manner of writing.  Do we see the same cross over from Hyper-writing, if you will, impacting traditional writing skills? Is this a natural correlation to make if reading skills are in a (supposed, according to Hayles) decline due to Hypertext/reading?

Sosnoski talks about computer-assisted reading, and renders it somehow different from reading that same text in a printed version. Putting his essay in conversation with Hayles, we begin to understand why these two mediums differ. Hayles claims that Hyperreading actually require changes in brain architecture (67), in addition to adaptation to new reading strategies that Sosnoski points out; filtering, skimming, pecking, imposing, filming, trespassing, de-authorizing, and fragmenting (163).

It is arguable whether or not these new skills required for Hyperreading are in direct opposition to close reading. I find myself often in the position in a college semester, where I simply do not have to time allotment for the reading I need to do. In these instances, perhaps due to my experience with Hypertexts, I can use my adapted reading abilities to skim and peck the texts and still come away with a general understand of a text- still able to put it in conversation and learn or benefit from the discussion. I think the contingent issue at hand is not the use of these new skills, but the perpetual use of them.

Students in generation X are resourceful, as well as lazy. I have friends who 'hate to read books'- perhaps because they struggle with the restricted and academic format, and perhaps they take more easily to the flexibility that can be found in Hyperreading. But take caution, the internet has opened up a world of quick-fixes and easy solutions, like websites that will actually write your essay for you  (http://www.essaywritingsoft.com/essay-generator.html ) or translators that make it possible to read a novel in Spanish while not comprehending the language. In our world today, there is no offline. We are constantly connected, perpetually plugged-in, and watching our trends of modernization, we won't be slowing down anytime soon. Not all hope is lost, though. The Atlantic found an interesting trend between number of books read and level of education, showing that on average, Americans in college read 9 books per year. What their study fails to differentiate is if these books were read with the aid of a Nook or Kindle (Hyperreading?) or were traditional novels in print. Check it out, and think about what Sosnoski or Hayles would have to say-- Jakobs would probably spiel about the webpage's setup.

So as Hayles proposed, we need to stop haranguing Hypertext and asserting that deep reading Joyce's 'Portrait' is the only way to identify well constructed prose, and begin to look for ways to combine and better navigate a combination of Hypertext and close-reading, so future generations can remain balanced and evenly skilled. Hayles surmises: "The larger point is that close, hyper and machine reading each have distinctive advantages and limitations; nevertheless, they also overlap and can be made to interact synergistically with one another" ( 75).

I'd like to state that I found Jakobs essay dry and virtually useless, focusing too much on teched-out language and forms that are not easily relatable or even understandable to the average reader.
Not a fan- I'd argue we could drop this from the readings the next go around and be no worse off, though I'd like to see how others react to this work, since we all have our preferences...

Wysocki-Eilola, Fisher

(Imagine more creative title here)

    I enjoy very much that Fisher grapples with the idea that technical reason renders the public unreasonable (392) and that knowing 'rational discourse' could potentially shift ones position in society- or the unfortunate contrast of constantly segmenting people into distinct classes (those who 'know' in terms of specialized discourse, like a community's understanding of politics, and those who 'do not know').
    This in particular I found this to communicate well, in limited ways, with Wysocki et al.- though I think we better converse with Wysocki to understand literacy's shift in priority in American culture. The authors dare to provoke the reader to ask: why is literacy so important? To which they go forth boldly and claim:
       "In the United States, we live the mythology of a classless society... In a society bound by such a mythology, our views about literacy are our views about political economy and social opportunity..... Far from engineering freedom, our current approaches to literacy corroborate other social practices that prevent freedom and limit opportunity" (Stuckey vii) (Wysocki et al 354).
Perhaps this importance that has held on to the coattails of the word 'literacy' for so long should be re-purposed, or rather the constitutes in which we understand this discourse needs to be radically shifted. The authors here argue that the paradigm in which we operate as post-modern and technologized (yes, I've made up a word- I'm a writer- I can) human beings has skewed our sense of priority or importance in a world that is now based on progress. As we move with the ever-changing times, I feel the need to ask- is a separation like this, where one class is privileged and one marginalized, anything but sequential?

    As we look back through our history, we can continually see a gap expand between those who are educated- literate- and those who are not. It is not shocking to hear that the literacy levels trend alongside of elevated wealth, which then naturally coordinates with higher social standing. I can only assume, as Wysocki suggests, that our priorities began to shift with the erasure of the first maps and Colonization gave birth to Progress and Modernity.
How quickly we forget our roots. Throughout time, humanity has proven to be interested in engaging with history, fiction, depiction, art..."Man is both in his actions and practice... essentially a story-telling animal"(201)(Fisher 375). Through these stories, we have an opportunity (for those fortunate enough to be literate) to share our lives. We are able to have an immortal voice, and create even a world that is better than our own. I cannot help but be reminded of the incredible story one woman has to offer us, speaking out in a courageous voice that, before her, had been silenced by the thousands.

   The book and autobiographical memoir I, Rigoberta Menchu: an Indian Woman in Guatemala is a retelling of the lifetime of an indigenous Quiche Mayan woman and her family in Guatemala during the military regime. Menchu grew up working her family's antiplano in the mountains, but when their land was disputed by the military, she and her family were forced into working on the coffee plantations where the indigenous were exploited for labor, abused and underpaid- if paid at all. Her father, an advocate against the government, was burned to death by an opposing political party and her brother was publicly tortured and killed by a military firing squad. Her mother- kidnapped, raped, mutilated and then murdered- suffered an equally unjust fate.
    After spending time in hiding (and eventual exile) in Guatemala, Rigoberta, when she was 23 years old, taught herself Spanish so she had a means, a voice at last, to communicate her story and her family and tribe's suffering to the rest of the world. She found a translations expert and dictated her story in her limited Spanish, which was then translated to English and published worldwide. Though she was not literate in the modern sense of the word, it was, and is still language that gives her the freedom she and her people deserve.
In 1992, she was awarded a Nobel Prize "in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples" (nobelprize.org) 
To learn more, please watch: (Keep in mind the difficulty of translation and that even Spanish here is not her native language) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Irvq1CHPAvo

*Though you can skip to Rigoberta at 3:30 (or 7:10 to get past the thank-you's), the introduction is a nice word on the importance of language as a voice for the silenced and marginalized. 

Welcome to my bedroom

 I had this great aspiration to film my video from the back of my horse, or on a mountaintop, or underwater... but then I decided why not in my bedroom? If this is truly to serve as a "get to know you" video, then where better to know me than in my most intimate space? We surround ourselves in our homes with little things that help define who we are and what we value- in my room there are my maps, photos of horses, rivers and friends, and small objects that help me remember where I've been and what experiences have made me who I am. Whether it's a mortar and pestal gifted to me from mi familia in Chile, or a framed photo of my boyfriend and I on horseback in the Crazies- it's all a part of my internal makeup and contributes to who I am in some way or another. So here you are, as simple, raw and real as can be. 

Fish, Porter, Grant-Davies and Whitacre- Week 1

I'm fascinated by Porter's claims- his bold, uninhibited separation of writers and readers, and the inversion of this relationship on which we are so reliant as authors. Grant-Davie was less... entertaining, though he backs up Porter's claim (intertexuality, anyone?).

Grant-Davie asks "What is the discourse about?", or more effectively, "what values are at stake"? By asking this, we are introduced to Porter's hypothesis of inter-textuality, and the constrains of the audience, or Text, limiting the writing. As Porter states, " genius is possible, but it may be constrained" (Porter 40). We examine the place of the writer within his community, and now the community's manipulation of the writer's product.
I particularly enjoyed his claim that we should revisit the very idea of plagiarism, and possibly redefine it's parameters to include "borrowing" from our chosen discourses.

Why is this applicable? Why should I care?

Porter might argue that our nation was founded on a plagiarized document. Jefferson's accredited Declaration of Independence was indeed drafted from legislative inspiration of the mid 1700's, and Porter even argues that 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' was a common cliche of the times. I can't help but think, are turns of phrase all intended to be coined? Can an author claim stake to every series of words he produces? Does this mean we cannot ever truly create anything new? How are we to understand proverbs in this light?
Despite some initial skepticism, Porter's point asks us to reevaluate our own position in the relation between author and audience, rhetor and discourse community (or Fish's interpretive community, Grant-Davies inter-textual social community) and see that intertext in fact 'constrains writing' and therefore the author as well. He argues that students should learn from none 'heroic' role models who borrow from their discourse communities to better learn how to become a contributing writer in whatever field, or discourse community, that they choose. He wants us to understand that as writers, we are operating in a paradigm that "cultivate(s) the romantic image of the writer as free, uninhibited, as independent creative genius" (Porter 34), and that instead, it is the very community in which we work that should be our focus.
In essence, we, as writers/readers/consumers of literature and writing in its more interpretive forms, are entering an ever changing paradigm- a world in which boundaries and previous notions can no longer be set in stone. This brings me to several curiosities: What is our purpose, now in the height of modernity, to be taking this class?  What discourse should we understand ourselves in, and are they different for each of us?

Porter also mentions that 'writing is non linear' which I couldn't help but understand in terms of the TED talk in class, and Erik Whitacre's virtual choir, and the mediums through which he used prose- in the most nonlinear ways. Attempting to redefine our more classical (or limited, linear) understandings of relationships, (i.e: prose/audience, rhetor/rhetorical situation, plagarism/inter-textuality) can cause us to stretch past what we have always understood to be 'true' (or existent as Lizzie pointed out in her blog post) and create something new, something genius, something that may even end up becoming the unaccredited 'Once Upon a Time' of our time.

Hello 371

Yes, I've reduced you all to a number. Class number 371, to be more specific. By senior year, any 'first day' jitters have far been done away with, and I'm left more with a general curiosity about who hides behind the screens of our classroom.

I generally sit in the front row, next to Sicily and another classmate, who, by his browsing trends I assume to have a relatively short attention span. I don't know your name yet, but give me time : )
Isn't it odd how almost all of us revert to the same seating patterns after that initial day of class? If I sat in the back row would it throw off Kelsey's chi? Or would anyone even notice a simple brunettes' shift of space?

I suppose I'm ahead of myself.

 I'm Lea, a double major in Environmental Study and English Writing, though those are just words that will roll over you. I spent a large portion of my time in South America, studying a river system in Patagonia facing severe environmental degradation due to Goliath, HidroAysen, an international mega-corporation pushing to construct five hydroelectric dams on the most powerful and most ancestral rivers in Chile.

This, and other water rights issues, dominate my mindset 97 percent of the time.

The remaining three percent of capacity seems to love doing extreme sports on horses, travel, red rock, tea and Edward Abbey, mountaintops, indelicate things, and the way the sun feels on my skin as it filters through the fingers of a Pine still draped in Montana dawn.

Ask me anything, I'm an open book.

The Walking Dead: other repetitious patterns in literature ROUGH DRAFT

Contrasting The Simpson's Treehouse of Horror and The Walking Dead t.v. series at first seemed... unconventional, to say the least. Being a fan of neither show, nor particularly keen on the latter's subject material, I can't say I held high hopes. As with most things though, I was pleasantly surprised.

The Walking Dead:
- Follows classical trends of Joseph Cambell's the Hero's Journey
     Rick; protagonist, sheriff, ---> "hero"
     Laurie; wife, mother, ---> "damsel in distress" (important to note she is the only female character we are introduced to in this episode)
     Shane: adulterer, protector, ---> "villain"



Important to note that the whole series will probably follow this ark, though each individual episode can see some crossover and continues building on the reoccurring themes. Can we imagine this picture to be anything but a circle?

2nd episode: would it be considered looting? Questioning of morals, Rick "don't think those rules apply anymore, do you?" Tug-o-war between tradition and modernity
binary between right and wrong, good and evil, us and the other? brings into question the very idea of our humanity, (id from dead zombie, crossing his chest saying oh mios dios, still reaching out for human connection or explaination higher than ones self) where are the boundaries of this new world? Capacity for forgiveness (handcuff and key on rooftop, racism)

The Simpsons:
[seems to] follow creative writing's 'story telling curve' in three mini-episodes
Lot's of parody and surprising number of literary references (ex: Hitchcock, Shakespeare, Night of the Living Dead, Nightmare on Elm Street, Creature from the Black Lagoon)

Patagonia Sin Represas

 I copy out mountains, rivers, clouds.

Welcome to Patagonia, Chile. Geographically, the 11th region- Aysen XI- of Chilean Patagonia, home to no more than 4,000 people in 42,095 square miles. To the north lie the Northern and Southern Icefields, and to the south, Antarctica. On a map, the west is marked by the flood of the Baker river's flow into the Pacific Ocean, and to the east, the Argentinian boarder. 

This is the wildest place on Earth.

I take a pen from my pocket. I note down

The people who call Region Aysen home are proud, genuine people. They spend their days simply, sunset to sunrise in the harshest environment on Earth. They love their mountains, their rivers, their forests because they understand that these are their livelihood. They celebrate each day with bread and wine, of which they find it impossible to overindulge. They are the most generous group of people I've yet to know. 

a bird in it's rising 

The small farms that speckle the landscape are duro, strong, like the hardened hands that have worked their familial lands for years. They've roped and wrangled this turbulent earth until they know exactly how it feels, stained like blood on their palms. 

Or a spider in its little silkworks.

Livestock have become a precious thing, always in constant battle with the unbridled elements- pumas, earthquakes, the never ceasing-winds. Farmers are finding it more and more difficult to maintain their traditional lifestyles in such isolation. Yet, they choose to remain.  

Nothing else crosses my mind. I am air, 

The river is their lifeline. The ancestral Baker river, the most powerful of all of Chile's water sources, runs south 170km from the east at the Argentine boarder. The Baker is the heart of Aysen, providing jobs and unaltered beauty to those lucky enough to call her banks home. The river is a mirror reflection of it's people: strong and running free- for now. 

clear air, where the wheat is waving 

Maykol and Luis operate a rafting outfitting service on the Baker. They run some of the rapids four and five times a day, discussing eagerly afterwards in excited Chilean slang how they can improve the ride. When the boat is packed up and wetsuits have been shed, they make sure the thank the Baker, both closing their eyes for a minute as they emerge dripping in turquoise water, knowing their free spirits would be lost without this river. 

where a bird's flight moves me, the uncertain

fall of a leaf, the globular

eye of a fish, unmoving in the lake 

In the 1970's under the military dictatorship of Pinochet, Chile lost national control of most of its resources, including water. The privatized companies that now control Chile's rivers span across continents. The United States hold rights to six rivers, triumphed only by Endesa, a company from Spain that has collaborated with Enel from Italy to create a mega-corporation: HidroAysen. They plan to build a series of five hydroelectric dams in Southern Patagonia, two of which would dam the Baker river. 

the statues sailing in the clouds, 

If HidroAysen were to succeed with the project, life in Aysen would be altered. The simplistic, traditional way of the people would not be able to compete with job offers and work on the dam site, and Aysen would be forced to modernize- losing a large piece of themselves in the process. 

the intricate variations of the rain. 

The area is biologically diverse, home to many endangered species and provides a large range of rare flora that were originally documented during Darwin's exploration in 1833. The trees are covered in 'Old Man's Beard', a lichen that grows as a sign of clean air and can create a sense of disorientation in the forests, as if Patagonia was endless.  

Nothing else crosses my mind except 

This is the last best place. This is rugged, unforgiving nature in tooth and claw. This is life in its rawest stage: pristine peaks that have never been climbed, terrain that has never seen a human footstep, where the darkest dreams persist and the brightest days uplift. This is Patagonia.  

the transparency of summer, I sing only of the wind, 

But to HidroAysen, this is Patagonia. This is Profit and Progress. This is energy and money to subsist copper mining in the Northern Atacama desert.

When HidroAysen looks out at this piece of land, they see charts, graphs, and plans for how they can commodify nature. 

and history passes in its carriage, 

Dam site number two- the Confluence. The Nef river rolls in from the west, the Cochrane from the northeast and the Baker, moves south. This is the point on the river with a maximum energy output that would generate more than 2,750 megawatts of power for the North. Despite it being a multi-million dollar project, the dams will come at a much greater cost.

collecting its shrouds and metals, 

How can this strip of paint be that mighty river?

and passes, and all I feel is rivers. 

These waters are home to the largest exportation of salmon in all of Chile, third largest on a global scale. The eco-tourism generated in this region is one of it's most profound economic contributions. Aysen claims to provide 'the best fly fishing in the world' and with the highest volume of water to land mass in Chile, it is easy to see why.

I stay alone with the spring. 

If the dams are built, tributaries like this that provide income and habitat will first flood, then dry up from imbalance of flow, destroying much of the unique ecosystem that relies on this rivers persistence.

Shepherd, shepherd, don't you know 

The Baker fjords of Tortel, the most beautiful place I've ever stepped foot, will also dry up. Once dammed, the river will no longer reach the Pacific Ocean, causing massive ecosystemic shifts in not only the river, but smaller scale to the ocean's aquaculture as well. 

they are all waiting for you?

Dam site number 1.
There is still hope in Chile. The Patagonian people are not handing over their rivers in peace. The Patagonia Sin Represas movement, a group of conservationalists who are fighting to keep the dams out of Aysen, has made waves in delaying HidroAysen's project by demanding adequate environmental impact reports, which must then be approved by the Chilean government, for both the mega-dams, as well as the 1,500 feet of accompanying transmission line that are needed to transport the energy to the North. 

I know, I know. But here beside the water, 

The transmission lines will run parallel to the river, and require more than 300 feet on either side of the cable to be deforested and stripped bare. In Spanish, they will become cicatrizes, scars on the face of this beautiful place.

while the locusts chitter and sparkle

The river's color is distinguished by the unique shade of blue in the glacial waters, unlike any river I've seen. The legend in the region says that her waters are colored as such because of a large deposit of gold in the glacial runoff. Some Chileans even fear an upcoming gold rush after the dam project brings more people and attention to the region. 

although they are waiting, I want to wait for myself. 

Here in Tortel, a small fishing town on the farthest tip of Aysen, the locals are all fishermen. The pueblo is connected purely by a series of hand built boardwalks that allow the boatsmen to dock on either the Pacific side or off of the Baker. Life is hard here, trade has become the predominate means of survival. Maria Jose sells menthol cigarettes by the carton, and trades for homemade bread or a rare ration of fresh fruit. The Chileans here are adamantly against the dam project because they will lose their jobs on the river and for many, this means their homes and lifestyle as well. 

I too want to watch myself.

People won't be the only thing affected. The fauna of Aysen are some of the most rare in the world, including the condor, the blue-footed boobie, and the hooded grebe. Much of their habitat will flood as an effect of the dams, and they will significantly change their dietary trends by altering the migration of fish, particularly salmon and zebra fish, in the river system. 

I want to discover at last my own feelings 

Guanacos, vicuna and huemuls also share the benefits of the river, and have foraged in this area for centuries. Much of the land surrounding the dam sites is part of Conservacion Patagonica, a project run by Doug and Kristine Thompkins, American conservationists, to preserve land and habitat for these animals. 

And when I reach the place where I am waiting, 

The damming of this river puts much more in jeopardy than just the water. Every form of life in this area would be impacted, causing irreversible changes to the landscape and ancient ecosystems. This is not the first river to be dammed, nor will it be the last. We have seen the effects of our modernization, we have seen the effects of dams, yet still choose to sacrifice balance and harmony for progression and profit.  

I expect to fall asleep, dying of laughter. -P.N

The most beautiful places are dying. The last living Eden is about to be sacrificed. The Baker river will just be the beginning, and once it is dammed the Pascua river and the rest of Chile's abundant water sources will be quick to fall.
When does it stop? Where will it end?



Patagonia Sin Represas 










Pastoral
By Pablo Neruda 

 I copy out mountains, rivers, clouds.

I take my pen from my pocket. I note down 

a bird in its rising 

or a spider in its little silkworks. 

Nothing else crosses my mind. I am air, 

clear air, where the wheat is waving, 

where a bird's flight moves me, the uncertain

fall of a leaf, the globular

eye of a fish unmoving in the lake, 

the statues sailing in the clouds, 

the intricate variations of the rain. 

Nothing else crosses my mind except 

the transparency of summer. I sing only of the wind, 

and history passes in its carriage, 

collecting its shrouds and metals, 

and passes, and all I feel is rivers. 

I stay alone with the spring. 

Shepherd, shepherd don't you know

they are all waiting for you?

I know, I know, but here beside the water

while the locusts chitter and sparkle, 

although they are waiting, I want to wait for myself. 

I too want to watch myself. 

I want to discover at last my own feelings. 

And when I reach the place where I am waiting, 

I expect to fall asleep, dying of laughter. 

- The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, text 2003, pg. 484 - translated by Alastair Reid