Elit 2.0 (a guide to literary works on social software)
Published by Mark Marino July 1st, 2008 in HCTI, Poetics, Features, Text Art, Software.(8/17/08 Update: I’ve updated the list with some of the works from the notes and others people have emailed to me separately).
How do you teach Web 2.0? With elit, of course. This post offers an elit work for each tool.
A number of my colleagues (myself included) attempt to teach courses around Web 2.0 technologies. The idea is that if you can just get students to blog, bookmark, twitter, annotate, wiki, wink, and aggregate, they’ll be ready for the bold new world of networked software applications– building on their existing propensity for social networking, facebooking, IMing….
What these skill and tool-based courses miss is an opportunity to enrich this education with some electronic literature. You wouldn’t think of teaching writing without some examples of powerful rhetoric or inspirational works of literary mastery. At the very least, you’d expect students to be aware of some of the poetic, evocative, and creative potential of language. So why teach a course in Web 2.0 tools without some examples that push the boundaries of functional literacy with these tools?
This post offers a companion to your course in social software and multimedia literacy. See it as that set of short stories or classic essays in the back of the writing text book.
Please help me develop this list. It is hardly exclusive, but a useful resource.
| Tool | Elit Work |
| RSS Feeds: | J.R. Carpenter, Tributaries and Text-Fed Streams |
| Blogs: | Rob Wittig, Robbwit.net and Toby Litt, Slice Jay Bushman, Spoon River Metblog Jeremy Hight, Nothing at All (Here) |
| Social Annotation, Social Bookmarking: Diigo: | Mark C. Marino, Marginalia in the Library of Babel |
| Facebook: | Kate Armstrong, “Why Some Dolls are Bad“ |
| Wiki: | multi-authored, Los Wikiless Timespedia, A Million Little Penguins |
| Twitter: | Jay Bushman (with Herman Melville) The Good Captain Ian Bogost, (with James Joyce) Twittering Rocks Mez, s[p]erver[se]_: 404 poetry_ |
| Page Aggregator: Netvibes | Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, Flight Paths |
| Online Maps: Google Maps | Charles Cummings, 21 Steps J.R. Carpenter, in absentia |
| Flickr | Jennifer L. Smith, Don’t Breathe |
| Web 2.0: Wikipedia, Amazon.com, Facebook, email, and more…. |
Serge Bouchardon, The 12 Labors of the Internet User |
Each of these works reimagines the Web 2.0 technology through a distinctly literary end. Several take on multiple pieces of software. Serge Bouchardon’s “The 12 Labors of the Internet User” offers a multiple parodies at once, including everything from Amazon.com to Facebook and Wikipedia, as well as more common herculean tortures (sisyphussian?), such as purging an Inbox of spam.
While students are still developing literacies in new technologies it is important that their adoption involves more than just accepting the software at interface value. What these technologies are and can be has yet to be decided and this set of electronic literary works offers an artistic exploration of their possibilities that will enrich the quest for software literacy.
Many of these works were featured at the recent ELO conference Visionary Landscapes. For more, see the gallery here.
hi mark,
elit 2.0 from my own stable:
*twitter:
1. s[p]erver[se]_: 404 poetry_ [2007]
[also in: http://www.youownmenow.net/exhibition.php]
2. [started today] New Media Scotland’s new Twitterist-in-residence [2008]
http://twitter.com/mediascot
3. _Poetic Game Interventions [V.1]_ entitled _Twittermixed Litterature [2007]
http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/elit/elit_software.html#mez
http://groups.google.com/group/leanmp/browse_thread/thread/a0fd5a15177c964d
*blogging:
1. cross.ova.ing ][4rm.blog.2.log][
http://netwurker.livejournal.com/ [since 2003]
2. ______dis[ap]posable_
http://disapposable.blogspot.com/ [2007]
*facebook:
1. _Tag Platform Poetry_ [2007]
[A Poetic/Social Network/ MMO/Visual Mashup where character screenshots of
of World of Warcraft Characters are imported into the Facebook. The photos in the respective albums are then tagged with poetic descriptions in the areas normally reserved for traditional photo labelling. These description lines are then aggregated at the bottom of each album to create a type of cross-plaform tagged poetry.]
cheers,
mez
Good idea Mark! Great start to a good selection.
mark, this is SO helpful. As always, you are an invaluable resource on and offline.
Interesting list! What about some art as well?
Perhaps also look at this ‘exhibition’ of creative mis-use of web2.0 services, logos and discourse - initiated by Geoff Cox:
Antisocial Notworking: http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/projects/2008/antisocial/index.php
Thank you for the link, Søren, this looks great!