Monday, October 1, 2007

Project Help

Hi Guys....i have this idea for a project using narrative of facebook....yes, i know it is a little lame. however i feel that facebook has changed narrative for our generation or at least helped to adapt and alter it in many way. I don't really know how to focus this, and make it specefic. I was thinking that maybe do a choose your own adventure and put it up on facebook in some way..maybe a thread. ( I don't know.) If you have any ideas i would love to hear them. Also i was thinking about maybe looking at the narrative of facebook photo albums..and the options to comment on peoples albums ( A.K.A. give them immediate feedback on their lives..acording to personal standards..)..Again this is vague. Please leave me your thoughts..thanks

Joy

2 comments:

Josh P. said...

I think using photo albums on facebook is a good way to discuss narrative and technology. In class we defined narrative as a representation of an event of series of events. Photo albums fit that description exactly. It is a representation of (most likely drunken party) events that occured at an earlier. As far as technology goes, facebook is one of the new ideas that is changing the internet.

For a specific idea you could create an album but do not post things about the pictures, instead leave that to other people to post what they think is going on in the pictures so they are basically writing their own story out of your photos. It is kind of like a silent film where you have to make your own interpretations of what is going on.

Adam Johns said...

Joy - I'm struggling with this one since I don't know anything about facebook (someone get me my cane...). But Josh's ideas are helping clarify things for me a little bit.

A couple thoughts:

1) You could analyze the facebook page (is that even the right word?) of someone you know (perhaps your own, if you have one). I think one thing that interests you might be the ways in which people construct a tidier narrative out of their lives to present to the outer world, using tools like facebook.

Let's especially think in terms of friends who we know largely or entirely online (that doesn't apply to anyone for me, but then I'm getting grey hair). "Ordinary" friends experience some fraction of our lives with us: we share events with them. Online friends know us only through how we represent those events. I guess that's obvious, but it might help you get at some of what interests you.

2) I like Josh's idea of starting out with the raw images and then imagining what they represent. You could even start out with the bare bones of a page and then interpret it different ways, or see how a couple different people interpret it.

3) Somewhere in here is the possibility for an actual _experiment_, one which would involve the creation of a fictional persona or personas. One simplistic form would be to create a couple fictional lives and see if you how many friends you could get for each one, then try to explain why...

I might just be rambling. Like I said, I only know what I hear about facebook - I've never actually looked at it.

Anyone have other ideas?