Citations

Citation is troublesome in the media, because, again, the idea is not the collection of information, power, or credit under one name, but the diffusion of all these things into manipulatable pieces: unlimited distribution for maximum creative potential. I have given all my internet names, but I withhold my real world name in this project because I not feel as if it is that version of myself that has created this. I say: "I have created this." But I say also: "I am Nautiloons."

I have tried to keep all of the authors we have read in mind while creating this, though most prominently, Paulo Freire, James Paul Gee, Megan Foss, Shirley Heath, and Elizabeth Daley.

Further, as is characteristic of both the internet and Trackton, it is uncharacteristic to say what is already known (or in the case of the internet, what can be known)--I cannot ignore that I know not only that I have an audience (Blogger now tracks the stats of those who visit a blog), but that I know my audience personally; I cannot ignore that I know my audience is familiar with each of the aforementioned authors and and their work. I will spend this space, rather, giving what information is not known.

The Pokemon Facebook event I mentioned may be found here; a similar recent event that calls for changing your profile picture to a cartoon character may be found here.

The main websites I used were Facebook, Plurk, GaiaOnline, Myspace, and Blogspot.

The title of this blog is from Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem of the same name.

The picture in the background for this blog is the same I use for my persona Fuzzcat on plurk, and one I am considering using for my main blog; sometimes, discourses mix in this way.

This is my Gaia avatar--I haven't touched it in a long time. Although GaiaOnline still has a large forum and art community, they've lately been working on a Flash role-playing component, which would make it more on the level with games like WoW that allow more real-time interactions and quests.

~

Class is over; but here, through the extension of my various identities, I can continue to integrate these thoughts into future work; here I exist continually, always open to dialogue; here, the writer writes with the possibility, maybe even the hope, of being interrupted.

-R

Plurk Hide-and-Seek-Tag

(Click on the pictures to see larger versions)

So this was a silly game that developed around the function of message (plurk) deletion. After a plurk was deleted, it would take a few minutes before it would leave the timeline (the field where all plurk messages appear) or until it could no longer be found or viewed. Until that time, a viewer could still click on it, but the message would read "this plurk seems to have been deleted." Any comments made on the plurk are replaced by this statement--however, the opening post can still be read for several minutes after the deletion (or until the page is refreshed, sometimes). This turned into a game of "catch-what-the-poster-said-first," as after the plurk fully disappeared from the timeline, the original poster would entirely deny its existing in the first place.
So how do you catch what isn't there? How do you prove the existence of something that no longer remains and leaves no proof of its existence behind?
You screen capture it.
One person deleted a plurk; another person took a screen capture of it, posted the picture in their own plurk, and then, soon after, deleted that plurk; then, if someone was wise enough to catch on, they'd have taken a screen capture of that plurk, and so the game would continue on, like a leapfrog of shadows, leaving no evidence (with the exception of these pictures) of it having ever happened, and even the pictures really, don't quite seem to capture the entirety of it.