As someone who works in fan cultures and culture studies, I too was interested in the RE5 Youtube video. And while, yes, I can see the problematic representations at work in this game’s imagery, my own academic interests usually tend to focus on people’s discussions, enjoyment, and use of cultural texts. So I’m fascinated by the Youtube comments and actually find Ehren’s analysis of them more disturbing than the actual trailer (sorry buddy . . . that may be overstatement, but it made for a great line!).

First, thanks for giving me the opportunity to finish up my lil’ presentation today. I am an unabashed pomo-ist, so I was excited and felt it important to cram in that nugget of possibility to our continuing discussions. The nutshell (again) is that cultural studies (or perhaps the humanities in general) have gotten bogged down and stuck in this model of constant critique and criticism of cultural objects/texts.

Procedural Rhetoric & Persuasive Games

http://demo.fb.se/e/girlpower/section1/index.html

http://www.persuasivegames.com/games/

http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mpepper/flashgaming

Addressing one of Bacha’s discussion questions . . . cause he’s cool.

Maybe it’s from years of being in English studies. Maybe it’s from being a teacher where so much of the work and decisions you make are not held immediately accountable to anyone else. Maybe it’s being interested in computers and digital rhetorics when much of the field is still suspicious or downright hostile to such things. Maybe it’s all the punk music of my teen years. But one gets a very DIY ethic working in this biz. So when Zeppetello mentions how we might need to better articulate our needs from a comp practitioner perspective to software designers . . .

Pretty much from day one here at good ol’ Purdue I’ve been on a rant against culture studies. This has been problematic since most of the time I consider myself working in a culture studies framework, so it’s probably more accurate to say a certain brand of culture studies. And that brand consists of turning students against the cultural pleasures they take in and aiming for some sort of “liberatory” pedagogy that supposedly opens their blind eyes because the teacher is so much more gosh darn enlightened. No, not a fan.

After Tuesday’s discussion, and especially after reading Richard E. Miller’s piece, I feel that some wind has been taken out of my sails . . . though probably for the best. It’s very easy on theoretical and pedagogical levels to get excited about computers and new media composing. It’s especially easy when you’re currently at an institution that has so many electronic resources and an administration that supports such endeavors. Reading Miller’s account of the Dell driver dropping off 260 computers and there being nobody around who thought it was their job to deal with it?

A very interesting little class being taught.

From the syllabus:

"Just because a lot of people see your work on the Internet doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good… but it does mean you’re famous — Internet Famous. This course dedicated to learning how to spread your work to the widest possible audience online. We are going to study the art and science of getting hits. Internet Famous will be the first class in the history of academics where software will award each student a grade based on a quantitative measurement of their web fame."

Website: http://internetfamo.us/class/

Oh Chapman. That one just kinda irked me, (someone get this guy some media analysis skills that go beyond the simplistic and trite) so the less said the better. Two of the other articles for the week struck me at getting to an issue that I do think about and struggle with. While I love WYSIWYG editors as much as the next fella, there is a part of me that knows the value of a little HTML coding background. I don’t think I would ever want to have my students hand code entire websites. I think that would be akin to having them diagram sentences at this point in the game.

I didn’t get to elaborate in the presentation discussion on the issues surrounding race and gender in virtual space. Kolko asserts that factors such as race, gender, and class will likely play a role in how they feel about their words or virtual contributions finding a home somewhere else in someone’s citation. There are obviously a myriad of reasons why this may be so, but for some reason this point instantly made me think of a Second Life experiment I’d read about.