Digital Media: Self-Reflexive Self Reflection

The other night I dreamed that I had to live on a street corner for a week for my Digital Media class in order to compare my social interactions with those of online social networking. There are two things to get from this: 1) this class is making me think in so many circles in my waking life that somehow it's made it into my subconscious (awesome), and 2) my dreams are getting way too intense.

Last fall when I transferred to CU I took Literary Theory and it blew my mind. The post structuralist and linguistic theories especially made me think constantly about the importance, or lack thereof, of being an English major. If the ultimate pursuit of the humanities is to search for personal and philosophical world truth, what does that matter if we agree with the post modern ideas of fragmented self and a lack of absolute Truth? What I mean is, why search for the truth if there isn't one? I expect that though an absolute truth maybe doesn't exist, there is certainly something to be said for our understandings and interpretations of humanity within text. Along that vein, the genre of texts to explore is rapidly expanding with the glut of information via relatively new media sources. Picking up the threads of thought that I encountered in Literary Theory, it seems that this Digital Media class will continue with this analysis of fragmented self as it goes through the public world of the internet. I'm really looking forward to how theoretical analysis can tease out notions of self from web personas.

Do I believe that Twitter and Facebook and Blogger can be read the same way as a (proper) physical manifestation of the written word on a page? No, not exactly, but they certainly are textual representations of self, just as books are. And I do love books.