*Note- Our class will be using this website and a Google Apps site for our coursework instead of ICON.
In this class, we’ll examine the ways in which the Internet and digital media formats have changed how we experience or tell a story. At the same time, we’ll experiment with new mediums to create our own compelling works of writing that fit trends in media consumption.
“But the Internet, while it might excite the desire for creative self-expression and sudden acclaim, does little to slake our deeper yearnings. What we want in our heart of hearts is not distraction but just the opposite, the chance to experience what Saul Bellow called “the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.” We want to be heard and acknowledged. It’s the difference between someone “liking” our latest Facebook update versus agreeing to listen to our story, the whole bloody thing, even and especially when it runs up against bruising revelations.” Steve Almond, writing for the New Yorker |
To do that, we’ll blog and vlog, Tweet and Tumblr, rant and rave, meme and mash up. We’ll write reviews about fictional places and products and comment on fake articles and blogs, adding details to create narrative richness at a meta level. We’ll write treatments for Web video series and graphic media formats, including video games. And we’ll also discuss how, whether we mean to or not, we are generating memoir through social media and our very public online curation of the personal.
The class will operate in equal parts as a salon, where we will discuss the ethical and artistic considerations of writing for new media formats; lab, where we’ll work together on in-class writing projects; and workshop, where we’ll discuss the merits and points for revision in each other’s individual work.
Students will be graded on attendance, participation, in-class writings, efforts toward a group project, and a final individual project.
The following required texts are available at Prairie Lights Books:
Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, by Douglas Rushkoff
Reality Hunger, David Shields