#20 – Gibson

I’m not going to lie to you guys, I’m only about 100 pages into this book. I spent all weekend working on my papers so that I wouldn’t have an anxiety attack in two weeks when they’re almost due and I’m still working on them! But what I did read, I actually found surprisingly intriguing. I guess since I’ve read “Neuromancer”, I was expecting to hate this book. I don’t necessarily have anything against Gibson, but his stiyle of writing kind of freaks me out. His short, choppy sentences that sometimes aren’t even really sentences but thought fragments from the main character, they make Gibson a little harder to read than other authors we’ve covered.

Plot-wise, I hate to say it but I find this book to be kind of predictable. Just judging by the fact that this is obviously a post-modern novel, and from the way I read “Neuromancer”, I’m going to venture to guess that these film clips end up being a big nothing, a hoax or something tossed out there by bored teenagers who want to stir shit up. On a deeper level, I think the book is about the eternal search for meaning that each of us either voluntarily or not engage in.  What set this book so much apart from Neuromancer in my mind was Gibson’s focus on slogans and signs of the marketplace and capitalism in this book. While he’s describing how Cayce doesn’t wear clothes with labels, Gibson is sure to describe exactly which brands Cayce is wearing, offering a little plug for that product anyway, which I find really odd and kind of annoying actually. I don’t care about Cayce’s 501’s, especially since she filed off the logo, right down to the freakin’ zipper! It’s a weird way to set up the character I guess, and I didn’t really get it. Also, is there a good reason why Gibson uses the same name for both books? The main character in “Neuromancer” is Case, a male.

I will be very interested to read the rest of this book, which I plan on doing as soon as I get out of work tonight, because it’s got me pretty sucked in, wondering what’s going to happen on the plot-level, and then also wondering (from a post-modern perspective of course) if what happens on the surface is even as important as the way the characters interact and what Gibson is trying to convey through all the symbolism of the society he’s creating. I think that a lot of what we do with reading books and what we’ve been doing in this class is like what Cayce is doing with the flim clips and the title of the book; Pattern Recognition. As Gibson himself says on page 22, it’s “both a gift and a trap”.  I’m spending the narrative of this book in particular trying to figure out what it all means, trying to connect the clues and plotlines to form some kind of coherent meaning in my brain, just like Cayce is trying to figure out, or recognize the pattern, behind the film clips. The scary part is thinking that it’s not the ultimate in meaning that we thought, and that sometimes patterns are just that…meaningless. But what does this really say about the act of reading? I guess these are just some things I’ve been thinking as I started the book. I look forward to breaking from my papers and talking about it tomorrow night!

#19 Annotated Bibliography

Well I had a little trouble over the weekend trying to find sources. After a panicky email to Kim suggesting I change topics, she gave me a couple names and convinced me to stick with it. I’m still powering through the massive amounts of research I came up with that might or might not have anything to do with what I want to say, but that’s what research and the weekends are for right?! Here are some of the works I’ve actually been able to get through and understand enough to think that they could help my argument, pretty much in order of importance:

Egan, Jennifer. The Keep. New York: Random House, Inc, 2006.   I’m using this as my primary text and it’s going to take up a big part of my paper. I want to show how Danny and Howard characters were essentially part of a larger metaphor of the keep as the canon and the tunnels beneath as the network that Egan was employing to show the reader a point much like Jenkins in Convergence Culture in that a compromise must be reached between classic literature and the book and technology in order for both to keep thriving. That’s the super short version.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.   I want to look at the way Jenkins argues for the convergence of technology and literature. He eases the anxiety of obsolescence by showing that old media and new media can coexist by allowing more room for each other.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.   Fitzpatrick has so many ideas in this text that I haven’t really been able to decide exactly which aspects of the anxiety of obslesence I would like to use in my paper, but I’m especially interested in how she theorizes the position of the reader and relate it to howDanny and Howard navigate and read their way through the network.

                                  The Exhaustion of Literature: Novels, Computers, and the Threat of Obsolescence. Contemporary Literature. 43.3 (Autumn 2002). 518-559.   In this article, Fitzpatrick really gets into the idea that the act of being concerned and writing about the anxiety of obsolence, the fear of what will happen to print texts with the computer, is a way of battling and protecting that extinction many so fear. I think this is most useful in my character analysis of Howard, who is obviously our own little Sven of The Keep.

Nunberg, Geoffrey. The Places of Books in the Age of Electronic Reproduction. Representations, 42.SI (Spring 1993) 13-37.   This article really gets into the act of reading and the idea of readership in the technological age. Most of it really gets into the future of publishing if anyone is interested in that, but I’m more interested in how he defines the differences in reading with the computer and how this relates to the death of the book Howard so fears and why the keep is supposed to ban technology.

Altieri, Charles. An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon. Critical Inquiry, 10.1 (September 1983) 37-60.   I thought this would be an interesting article to reference in the discussion about the keep representing the canon and the baronness’s statements about protecting history and how this relates to how we cling to the traditions of the literary past without making room for the technological change bceause we’re afraid to totally alter our methods of reading.

Hawisher, Gail, and Selfe, Cynthia, et al. Becoming Literate in the Information Age: Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology. College Composition and Communication, 55.4 (June 2004) 642-692.   This article looks especially at the idea of individual and social agency, and how acccess to technologies and how we are able to read the digital world is a major part of how much we are able to control things. I want to use this to show how our agency in navigating the network is also dependent upon our position of power within that network.

Bell, Madison Smartt. Into the Labyrinth. NY Times Book Review, 2006.   This is just how I want to show what some of the opions were about Egan’s book and what others though she had to say about the position of the reader within the network. I would like to find more, but there are not as many as I’d like that address the issue of the network!

Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Reality. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc, 1991.   This book seems like it would be awesome to read, and I probably will after all these papers are done and handed in, but right now I’m just skimming it for ideas about navigating through the network. He also has a couple other books that I’m trying to get from UAlbany, but one is on order and one is checked out.

There are still quite a few articles I’d like to go through and one more library I can try before I really finish figuring out where my paper is going to go, but I think this is a pretty good start and I’m hoping I can (Tim Gunn pun intended) “Make it work”.

#18 Paper Argument

Well, I thought I had everything all planned out like a good little grad student. I knew what my primary text was going to be and what the focus of my paper and argument would be…then I started attempting to do the research and realized I’m screwed unless I change my plan of attack a little bit. Feel free to give me ideas on which direction to head in because, at this point, I really have no idea and I think my head mat explode before I can even figure it out!

I originally wanted to do “The Keep” because I connected best with that text, and I think it had a lot to say about the role of literature and the canon within the network, and that’s what I knew I was most interested about all semester. Ideally, I could like to write about the way that each of the characters in the novel navigates their way though the tunnels at the keep, and how this is really a metaphor for the way that individuals gain a sense of social agency in their worlds to be able to find a way to make it through the network of mass digital media, eternal connection and instant communication. The characters I want to focus most on are Danny and Howard as two different ways to either embrace or reject the technology that keeps us constantly connected, and also on Mick/Ray and Annie as two characters who show that power and one’s position of power within the network really influences how much of a sense of social agency one can even have to be able to navigate through the network. Also, the baronness is a good example of a Sven-like character who refuses to give in to the network. Basically, my argument comes down to the fact that an individual has to possess some kind of position of power within the network and have some sense of social agency in order to be able to successfully come out on the other side of the tunnels. The major texts I want to bring up from this semester are Fitzpatrick and Jenkins. By looking especially aty Jenkins through the characters of Howard and Danny, I’d like to show that one can neither wholly reject nor wholly embrace the network and survive. There must be some form of compromise between the two sides in order to navigate successfully tthrough the tunnels of the keep.

I guess what my biggest problem is at this point is the fact that there is no research on The Keep in particular because it is such a new book. There are a couple of reviews that I think would be good to work with, but no scholarly journal articles like we love so much. Another problem I think I need to address here is the fact that I don’t know if I’m a good enough writer to be able to convince my audience that the tunnels are a metaphor for the network and the keep for the canon. My argument really depends on this, however, so I’m not really sure what to do. Essentially, I want to argue that the baronness is the worst way to approach the network because she refused to let the new technology into her canon of the keep and she ended up turning into dust because she couldn’t keep up with the times. Howard tried to keep all technology out and ended up crying hysterically until Danny had to lead him out of the tunnels. Danny’s life revolved around the network and staying constantly connected until he turned his back on that technology and then ended up dying! Mick/Ray is the only one who seems to have a grip on the situation, and that comes from the fact that he is the narrator of the story, he is writing it down. This is his sense of social agency and the way in which he navigates his way through the network, he narrates it. Writing becomes Mick/Ray’s only way to escape, his only freedom. Annie is both a woman and Howard’s wife, so she seems to have no sense of agecny whatsoever, which may explain why she has an affair with Mick, to gain some control over her own fate within the narrative.

OK, so then I try to do some research, realize I’m screwed and want to change it to research MySpace. The whole new paper topic I came up with was going to argue for the benefits of MySpace in terms of the way in which it can connect and further certain subcultures and groups that wouldn’t have a voice otherwise. What I specifically had in mind were music groups and certain humanitarian efforts that would go unnoticed without a community online like MySpace. I thought I could come up with a lot more research on this topic and maybe make my paper into a debate about the pros and cons (pedophile abuse vs. exposure for bands and groups) of MySpace, and conclude with how it’s just like most technology in that it can be used for both good and bad and that regulation and moderation are the only way we can ensure that it’s used for its good purposes instead of the bad. Of course, when I went on MLA again this weekend with the new MySpace topic in mind, I couldn’t find anything in terms of scholarly journal articles either. So I’m screwed again!

As of right now, I really don’t know which direction I’m going to head in. I know that I have to write my Southern Women Writers paper today so I won’t be able to think about it too much more until tomorrow…which is actually probably a good thing because my head is starting to spin!

Thoughts on Kinder and Amerika

OK, call me a “tre-flake” lover, a stubborn traditional reader, or just ignorant to the benefits of technology and the internet, but I felt like I was in another universe where there was no hint of anything I’d ever really known before to let me know I was real. Maybe this is the point, and that utter confusion is a rush to some people, or maybe I completely missed the point, but I felt totally confused while all the images and sentences went flashing through my screen. I had no idea what was going on and never even really began to grasp what the point may have been to it all. I read the Kinder article and thought I could relate it much more to “The Diamond Age” than to the online “reading” I did with Amerika. I took Kinder’s advice and tried to locate the ruptures in the narrative of Amerika’s pieces, but I think the problem really lies in the fact that I never felt like I understood what the narrative was, who or where it was coming from or why. This all goes back to the problems I knew I would have in the beginning of the class with expanding my idea of reading and the act of understanding meaning from a text.

In the Murray piece we read, she talked extensively about the idea of agency and narration, and this struck a bell with how I felt about the Amerika pieces. In the section called The Pleasures of Navigation, Murray discusses video games and how “the ability to move through virtual landscapes can be pleasurable in itself” and how they “allow us to experience pleasures specific to intentional navigation: orienting ourselves by landmarks, mapping a space mentally to match our experience, and admiring the juxapositions and changes in perspective that derives from moving through an intricate environment” (129). I didn’t feel any of that with the Amerika pieces. I couldn’t even click the screen or slow the images down to be able to absorb them, some came and went faster than others, and the blazing color and random and repeated pictures that didn’t seem to make sense really all just gave me a headache instead of making me feel like I had any sense of agency in the situation!

To be honest, this all made me feel very Baudrillard in thinking that this is all just a simulation of reality, and maybe we’re all just crazy and want to escape the realities we live in by trying to find some sense of real or agency or whatever online in these weird little worlds where you click your way to your destiny. But eventually we have to come out and experience our own lives and realities, and how do these sites and online virtual reality experiments help with that? I guess I’m reverting to my Sven-like ways again with this one, and I apologize if I seem a little unwilling to accept the greatness of the network here and the way it lets us interact, because I think this all just points to the fact that everyone is acting and nothing is really getting done.

Expertise Project – Marsha Kinder Article

Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever. Bunuel’s Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative. Marsha Kinder. Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 4. (Summer, 2002). pp 2-15.

 

Before I even begin to look into Kinder’s argument, it becomes necessary to identify and explain why Bunuel is so important and why he is a good example of the kind of theory Kinder is dicussing in her article. Here is the Wiki-link on Bunuel ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Bu%C3%B1uel ), so you can see that he was friends with Salvador Dali, which will explain a lot of the surrealist tendencies in his cinematic visions. Also, they did a short film together, Un Chien Andalou, that caught a lot of attention. I couldn’t find a link that would let us watch the film, but here is what Wiki said about it! ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_chien_andalou ).

 My first goal is to unpack the language Kinder uses by providing some definitions that will make it much easier to read through Kinder for her ideas instead of vocabulary. 

1. When she uses the term “New Digital Media”, Kinder is referring to the internet, electronic games, CD-Roms, DVDs, VR Environments, and interactive installations. (4).  

2. When Kinder says “Interactivity”, she says it’s difficult to define because of the fact that it “wavers between two poles” (4).  All narratives are interactive to an extent because they are always based on the relationship between aithor, reader, culture and audience. But interactivity is also an illusion because the “rules established by the designers of texts necessarily limit the user’s options….it’s a normative term that either fetishizes or demonizes as the ultimate pleasure or deceptive fiction” (4). Kinder’s solution to these exremes is to make the player a “performer” of the narrative. She says that “By privileging interactivity, new digital media and their critical discourse encourage us to rethink the distinctive interactive potential of earlier narrative forms, which is precisely what I am doing here in the case of Bunuel’s cinema” (6). This reminded me of Nell and Miranda in the Primer and seems like a very good example of what Kinder is desribing here. By having Miranda as the ractor in the Primer, she is drawing from her own database of memories in order to make the Primer and Nell’s databases bigger and better. She is contributing her own experiences to that of the book and little girl, making it fully interactive. Miranda is performing the life laid out for Nell as opposed to just reading about it.

3.  “Database Narratives” is perhaps one of the most important terms Kinder uses in this essay. She defines it as, “narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and that are crucial to language: the selection of particular data (characters, images, sounds, events) from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then combined to generate specific tales” (6).  Kinder claims that this is how most stories are created, and that examples can be found throughout the history of literature. What the realization of these database narratives really gives us as readers, is that they reveal the “arbitrariness of the particular choices made and the possibility of making other combinations which would create alternative stories” (6). She really highlights this term in relation to that of the dream according to Freud. She uses this as a way to introduce the idea of dreams as the perfect example of interactive database narratives because of how we censor them. These ideas come from Freud, that when we wake up and the meaning of the dream is not clear anymore, we use secondary revision process to protect ourselves from “those discreet precepts that threaten to explode all master narratives, their authorizing regimes of religion, nationality and class” (8).

With these definitions, Kinder goes on to explain how Bunuel’s films are full of “surprising ruptures” (7) that reveal the radical potential of the underlying database structure that usually lies hidden behind the story.  This is just like the process she described regarding how we make meaning out of our dreams. It is here that Kinder makes her most important point amid all the definitions and cinematic references to Bunuel. The fact that she points out these ruptures as scenes for social change and agency, really make the reader a more interactive part of the story itself, whether it’s in Bunuel’s films or in the last few books we’ve read for class. 

More important definitions to understanding Kinder’s argument are based on the first definitions and expanded into the words she uses in the title of her essay. The “Hot Spots” are the “commone objects or incongruous details in an inappropriate setting” which possesses “considerable transgressive power” (9). Basically, the hotspots are the places in New Digital Media where the ruptures in the narrative can be seen most closely and efficiently. Kinder believes that these places are the most apt for social change because they directly confront and attack what we think we know. A good example of this can be found in The Diamond Age when Miranda is shocked by the treatment of Nell in her home. This is a rupture, because the setting is the home, where love should abound and little girls should feel safe. Yet, Nell is being attacked by her stepfather in her own home, and this moves Miranda to a position of social action and change. It is this rupture that allows Miranda to see the situation clearly and decide to take action.

According to Kinder, “Avatars” are the “semi-intelligent agents – human actors who are manipulated and objectified like puppets and whose behavior is not necessarily bound by consistency, psychology or narrative logic” (11). This definition immediately made me think of Miranda, who by these terms is most definitely an Avatar. It also explains the way we’ve been saying all along that it’s difficult to relate to the characters because, according to Kinder, in the New Digital Media, the characters are not “unified 3-dimensioal characters with whom you can easily slip into a comfortable stable identification. Rather, they confront us with absurd inconsistencies” (11). Miranda is a complex character in this sense, and she does not allow us to whole sympathize with her nor dislike her. She simply allows us, as readers, to view the gross inconsistencies in the narrative of her world that allow for the ruptures that make the reader question those inconsistencies and therefore work toward a change. Kinder calls this act “exposing the power dynamics behind this casting system”, and it’s way for the reader to clearly see how “characters function not as individuals but as subject positions, which are defined by history, culture and genre, and which are only temporarily occupied by individual players or actors chosen from a database by those in charge” (11).

In the last section, Kinder talks about the “Narrative Fields with proliferating possibilities” (12). She says that, with Bunuel’s films, we do not focus on the beginning or end, but on the narrative field of the middle. “Instead of solving who done it or other enigmas in the plot, Bunuel’s search engine is concerned with revealing shocking connections within the narrative field while maintaining constant movement, a process which keeps both protagonists and readers alive” (11).

Kinder has taken a deep look at these three strategies of Bunuel in order to show that “by privileging the disruptive power of sensory performance over the normalizing drive of secondary revision, Brunuel’s films reveal that so-called master narratives are neither inevitable nor natural, but, like all stories, mutable. Thus, the vast resevoir of databases from which their narrative elements are drawn proves to be a poweful repository for social and revolutionary change” (8).  By revealing the ideologically based narratives hidden in the cracks of the new digital media, Kinder provides us with a new way of reading text, whether it be books or online sources doesn’t even matter. She has given us a new tool with which to become social agents and to dig deeper into the ideologies behind story-telling, as well as find locations from which to rupture those ideologies.

On an end-note, I also found this link describing Children’s digital narrative and found it interesting in terms of how we should be thinking about the way our kids will read and grow up in a technology dictated world. Maybe just something to think about. http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/children.htm 

Also, this is kind of a random website I cam across that deals with Kinder’s criticism of Post-Modernist Theories. Enjoy. http://www.arasite.org/guestsnw2.html

I’m sorry this is so long, but she had so many trains of thought that really all rolled into the bigger picture that I didn’t want to leave anything out and render her argument incomprehensible. I almost wish we had read this article with The Diamond Age, and I may not have had such hard feelings toward the book! I look forward to a good class dicussion on Amerika and Jackson!

#16 – Diamond Age Wrap-up

I’m sorry I wasn’t in class on Tuesday guys. Honestly, I was feeling ill enough so that I was pretty sure talking about the Diamond Age would have put me over the edge! Just kidding, really though I actually liked the second part better, and it made me like the book in general more too. I’m still not a fan of how, plot-wise, Stephenson jumps from character to character and never fully explains the situation, geography or how each character gets to where they’re at. But I think I understood better what he was trying to say about collective intelligence, education and technology all coming together to form our ideas about our own worlds.

I felt about this book like I have about so many others in this class this semester: Like if I had been able to read them twice I would be able to grasp the concepts a little tighter. I constantly feel a battle in my mind between reading for plot and charactertization and reading for the subplots and underlying themes that reveal so much more about the work. But with these books, especially this one, I feel like I want to read it the first time strictly for plotline and character development, and then a second time to understand the real message behind it all. The Diamond Age is trying to say so much about humanity and technology, that I think it’s really important to follow the plot and characters closely, then go back and figure out how it all connects to the greater themes. Of course this is impossible when one works full time and takes 3 classes, so I’ll have to settle for mostly understanding the major themes, while still being a little confused about how I got there!

One of the things that struck me the most about part II was the fact that I was focusing a lot on the differences between the phyles and how their different systems, values and hierarchies all affected their different views on and places in the world Stephenson creates. But Madame Ping’s glorified virtual reality whorehouse changed my mind and complicated things a little bit more for me. When she explains how she uses one basic structure for the fantasy and then alters little parts about it for each individual, Nell is surprised that there is only one general fantasy. Madame Ping explains, “We changed the script a little, to allow for cultural differences. But the story never changes. There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories” (374). This sentence made me realize that while I was trying to figure out the differences between the phyles, I should have been paying more attention to how much they are alike in many ways. I think this was a problem with the Primers too, the fact that they took individual differences too much into consideration, and it caused Fiona and Elizabeth to have a very different experiences and eventually for them to join very different phyles. My confusion about the basic plot probably led me astray here, but these are my thoughts and I hope they make sense to someone other than me!

#15 – The Diamond Age Part II

I’m not going to lie, I passed out on the couch last night with 30 pages left to the book, but I’m pretty sure I see where this is going and I like it a little bit better now…that doesn’t mean I understand it any better of course, but I can at least see where Stephenson has wanted to go with this since the beginning when he had three different girls with three different Primers in his plot.

I wondered in the beginning how it would turn out with the three girls, and it’s become clear to me now that the difference in the Primers was in how the ractives interacted with them. Nell became the special one because Miranda was always there on the other side to be her constant. Elizabeth was interacting with many different ractors, and therefore didn’t have a concrete sense of the world like Nell did. Fiona’s ractor was her father, and so she got a different sense of the world of the Primer as well. The way in which these three girls had the world presented to them through the Primer directly influenced the path they would later take. Finkle-McGraw’s plan for Elizabeth to learn an alternate form of education and question the status quo worked and then some. She became so disillusioned with the world in which her parents grew up, that she joined CryptNet as a way to approach it with a different set of rules. Since I haven’t yet finished the book, I’m still trying to figure out what life has in store for Fiona, but I’m going to guess that’s she not quite as well-rounded as Nell in any way.

On page 356 of the book, Nell and the Constable are talking about the different approaches to learning and what works and doesn’t. The Constable sums up why Nell learned so much more effectively from her Primer when he says, about the Vicky’s code, “The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code — but their children believe it for entirely different reasons. They believe it because they have been indoctrinated to believe it. Yes, some of them never challenge it — they grow up to be small-minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel”. This accurately desribes the effect the Primer had on Fiona and Elizabeth. When Constable Moore asks Nell which she will be, she says “Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded — they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity”. It is with this realization that Nell makes it clear that her Primer had the best effect on her because she is able to make conscious decisions about making meaning on her own and through her own lens of the world.

I think this book raises significant questions about the state of the education systems in society and what role they play in shaping the lives of the youth who abide by the rules and those who break them. The real question comes down to how we are educated in order to make meaning.

#14 – Scattered thoughts on the final paper

Thinking about what I would like to write about for my final paper in this class has proven to be particularly problematic for me because I don’t think I’ve yet decided where I fall in the spectrum of arguments regarding literature in the information age. Behind a hardcore tree-flake lover my entire life, I’m tempted to side with Sven and start spewing doomsday visions of the death of the novel. But the part of me that seems to be giving in to theory more than I thought I would, wants to be able to see the different sides all at once as opposed to taking a serious stance for or against the technology. I guess what I’ve learned so far this semester is that, as a reader, it’s really important to be able to adjust my way of reading and the very concept of reading I’ve held my entire life in order to allow a more complete view of what makes a text valuable.

During class last night, talking about Ryan’s ideas regarding potentiality really made me start thinking about reader-response theoretical criticism more. I’m hesitant to associate myself with any specific theory for the simple fact that I don’t believe I have enough knowledge of any theory in particular in order to be able to make it the lens through which I choose to see the world. But if I had to pick a theory that struck me as something I would be most interested in researching more, it would be reader-response and the ideas that Ryan brought up in her article that we discussed in class. Maybe it’s because the act of reading and the way a text makes me feel and think it what I read for, and maybe it’s because I like the notion of interpretation and the reader being an active part of the meaning-making, but the ideas posed by Ryan about potentiality really made me think a lot harder and if I can figure out what it means I’d like to write about it.

When Ryans says, citing Ingarden, that he “conceives the literary work of art, in its written form, as an incomplete object that must be actualized by the reader into an aesthetic object” (44), I immediately thought about what we’ve been talking about in class regarding adjusting the ways we view reading. I also thought about Oedipa in Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lor 49″ when it comes to social agency. That eternal search for meaning and the meaning-making process that gives us a place in the world and a voice to make ourselves known is something that Oedipa finds constantly out of reach. It’s like that with meaning within texts with a reader as well. We’re constantly searching for the meaning, while part of that meaning resides within our own conceptual frameworks.

I also thought about Danny in “The Keep”, and how he was constantly searching for himself in the technology that was taken away from him while he was there, and then his eventual abandonment of that same lifeline. He sough his meaning in his connection to the Network, while Howard sought his meaning from the removal of all that life. Or even more so, Richard Powers and his search for humanity in the machine he called “Helen” and fell into a sort of love with. I don’t really know if that makes sense, but it came to mind while I was writing this.

What this made me think about the most, was the way that reader-response lens that Ryan was talking about with Ingarden, also makes sense when it comes to the different phyles in “The Diamnond Age”. Each phyle has it’s own way of reading the world and their own way of doing things, which makes it very hard to communicate. There is a constant need to be connected in order to make meaning, and that has a lot to do with the idea of social agency. I think Finkle-McGraw wants the Primer to be able to give his grandaught the kind of life his daughters didn’t have because they weren’t allowed to see the world outside their own and develop their own sense of meaning-making in the world. This quest for social agency and the question of how meaning is made is central to the ideas behind reader-response theory, and I think this has a lot to do with the ways information literature forces us to adjust the ways in which we read texts.

Wow, does any of this makes sense? My brain hurts.

#13 – The Diamond Age

OK, I’m trying really hard here to get into this whole postcyberpunk thing, but I guess I must have missed the memo on the cyberpunk and maybe I should start there because I’m just not into this book at all. It could be the fact that I read it on two rainy days on the front porch with tea and a blanket and just couldn’t get into any of the characters, or maybe it’s because I didn’t really have any idea what was going on until about halfway through the first part.  I’m starting to connect with the characters a little bit more now, especially Miranda because I’m really amazed at how interested she’s becoming in Nell’s well-being. It makes me wonder if Hackworth and Finkle-McGraw thought of this aspect of using the ractors, the emotional investment that may become of it. Also, Hackworth doesn’t plan on using this part of the Primer for the copies he makes for the baby ships, and I see this being a big deal later in the book…at least in the way my mind sees the book going.

I think what Stephenson is doing here is interesting, even though I don’t really totally get it I guess. I take it in the context of Galatea 2.2 as our last book. Richard wanted so badly for Helen to have real human feelings and consciousness. Well now this Primer kind of does in the sense that Miranda is acting as its voice and essentially controlling what it tells Nell. This brings up a million questions in my mind, because I can’t really see how this can be totally good for the kid. I mean, she’s taking her life lessons from a voice in a box!

Another thing I found really interesting was Finkle-McGraw’s criticism of the education system in the book. The whole point of the Primer is to serve as a substitute, kind of make up for what the schools are lacking in teaching the children. But who is deciding what the Primer is teaching Nell and eventually all these other little kids?

We’ve  been talking a lot about the role of the book and the author now and a quote by Judge Fang on page 163 really stuck out to me. I’m not sure if this is the author’s way of being sarcastic or not, or if he really means it because the judge’s character is hard for me to figure out yet. “If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different – it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence, to a well-ordered society, as the Master stated many times”. It’s also really significant that the Vickys, who I’m assuming to be the highest class in this odd little hierarchy going on, use hand-made things as opposed to M.C created things and read real books and do everything old school, which is a sign of their wealth. It’s almost the opposite of right now, when everything cool and revealing wealth is sleek and fast and technospiffied. It makes me wonder where this book is headed, and which side of the debate Stephenson is going to fall on.

#12…huh?

I’m not gonna lie here, I left class with more answers that I had questions. I thought I really liked the book, classic “until-I-thought-about-it” mistake I guess. I almost liked Richard Powers the character, if not for his character itself but for his honesty in restrospect and introspect as well. He may not be the best or more reliable narrator in terms of the plot or Richard Powers the author, but I thought that the way he confronted his character flaws – especially when it came to his relationship with C. and the way he held her down while thinking he was protecting her – and was honest with the reader about his part in the negative aspects of his story was a good way to connect. I fell for it anyway!

I still stick to my original thoughts about the narrative being like how Hartwick explained “back-propagation”, but I don’t know if I’ll ever really understand exactly how the neural nets worked in the story. What I did gather from the class discussion though, made me think a little bit about the education system in America in relation to the progression through “Imps”. The “knowledge” each implementation acquired was somehow added on to the next, like the layers we were talking about that form the neural nets. It’s like building one on top of the next, and each absorbs all the information from the one that’s added on. That’s kind of like the public school system in way…the one I was a part of anyway! Students go through each grade like a little machine, each teacher pumping knowledge suitable for that age group, and sending them on to the next level where more knowledge is added right on top, in addition to and to expand the knowledge from the previous grade – or layer, if you will. If I think about it this way, however, I’m afraid that my brain is going to shut down or I’ll have a nervous breakdown of some sort like Helen, with all the questions theory poses!

I think that’s the part of the book I’m most confused about. Which side of the “Canon” debate is Richard Powers the character really on? Which side is Richard Powers the author really on? The lines become blurrier the more I think about it.