Newbs No Longer

I thought today's thought-jam was the kind of 100 minutes we hope for in class discussion. We have spent about 900 minutes together, that's 15 hours of class time. That's almost like flying as a class to India or Japan. We should do that (I'll apply for the grant).

It's more like we skipped around to all sorts of weird intellectual scenes. Over the past five weeks, the menu has included philosophy, media studies, primary source material in cybernetics and technologies born from the military industrial complex, linguistics, cultural theory, historical media, plus consistent doses of new media artefacts:: Situationists International, Tactical Sound Gardens, Waking Life (Linklater), web-based indie and official news feeds from Burma, YouTube video of a late-1960s debate between McLuhan and Norman Mailer, et al. . . . bottom line, we have crucial experience here in new media theory.

The other professors cannot believe that we have read and talked about Heidegger, and some of the other heavyweights like Borges, Deleuze, and Guatarri. I was asked, 'How'd you get them to read -'. And, I just grinned.

But I am really impressed by the sheer volume of writing you all have done. I know it's rigorous to write as a thinking practice. But, by having done this amount of writing for the past five weeks, let alone the exam, well, you've thereby already done some 'upgrading' of your thinking, without a doubt. You've extended your intellects by using the medium of thinking-writing. Writing is a form of thinking, as the postmodernists would have it.

The last half of our theory excursions together are the most exciting, in my opinion. We are going to think about the body-self nexus as it represents in new media, and theoretical writing like "Virtually Female: Body and Code" by Margaret Morse, Linklider's "Man-Computer Symbiosis" - wild - and then N. Katherine Hayles . . . some wicked theory, folks.

And, just to make it official, per Chris's idea, the quiz credit will go to everybody who interacts/discusses just like we did today instead of the writing. In the first half of the course, then, we have concentrated upon writing-thinking // and now we're playing with conversing-thinking.

But I reserve the right to start classes off with new media artefacts.

Speaking of: there are new goodies in your YouTube bag above. Go ahead. You know you wanna click one of those YouTube videos. (Extra credit for anyone who can weave in something to tell the rest of us about one of the YouTube videos - even if you click and see Salt n' Peppa or something random.)