StoryTelling for New Media

Reading: Read Bolter and Grusin, “Remediation.” If you did not receive a copy already email me and I will get you one.

Writing: Spend sometime looking at blogs your classmates have recommended, add ones which interst you to Google Reader. By Sunday midnight you need to write a post which comments on another post (from somewhere in the Blogsphere, use one that is not written by one of your classmates). A few things to keep in mind:

• Quote the section of the most you want to comment upon, you can refer to the whole post, but you should focus on detail containted with in a few lines, and requote that part on your blog. (Use the blockquote function in Wordpress—it is to the left of the link button when you are writing a page.)
• Have a Headline that helps your reader know if they wil want to read your post.
• Finally, the most important guideline . . .Good writing focuses on detail in order to make the implicit explicit.

Here is an example:

Making the rounds on the blogpshere is an article out of the Sydney Morning Herald which claims that Facebook is a 5 billion dollar waste of time. Leaving aside the metrics of such a study, or the fact that nearly anything could be analyzed along such lines (”Saying ‘How was your weekend’ the multimillion dollar time wasting conversation that is eating up your business”), what interests me is the language that the article uses to talk about Facebook.

Employees are more likely to be whiling away the hours on the social networking site Facebook, a report says.

While Facebook is often described as “whiling away the hours,” a “time-waster,” “recreation” . . .work is described “slaving over office accounts.” Apparently the Sydney Morning Herald doesn’t understand that social networking is part of work, or that the division between work and entertainment is not as rigid as one might expect . . .even if their rhetoric tries to preserve just such a false divide.