I'm sincerely regretting doing nearly all the coding for this site by hand. While it's satisfying to create something like this from the proverbial ground up, I now realize I could have made this process go much more smoothly with the aid of some open-source tools (I made good use of jQuery, but no other freely available building blocks). Regardless, the outcome is a solid foundation for what we hope will blossom into a vibrant playground of collaborative creativity--anyone (this includes you) is able to:
Start a written work
Revise existing works
Vote on pending revisions
Make Sean Penn bob his head up and down incessantly
Still in the hopper for future versions, though, are several notable features like:
Tag clouds for browsing
Highlighted differences between current works and proposed revisions
Constraining/finalizing revisions
Comment fields for works and revisions
The success and continuous development of the site relies on active participation in creating, revising, and voting on other's work--it requires several users to output anything worth creating such a system for! We'll be participating, and listening to any and all feedback on how to further refine this environment of mutual interaction.
asymptotic elbow When thinking about as much of everything as we can process late at night, Nick and I came to understand that we cannot think about everything. Our professor's theory--a theory she describes as the theory of everything-- has "limited" in the name. Whether everything is processable or not, I am incapable of processing everything and there is a good chance that everything can't be processed by anything. Still, I must navigate the world. I must believe North Quad (the building I am typing in) is solid or I'd have far too much to think about. Once I read that people are more likely to help each other in small towns not because they know each other but because they are less distracted. But how do we filter content? Who filters content? Can I be content viewing content filtered by someone else just because I cannot wade through all of it? Seeing things as parts lets me type each individual letter of these words that you are reading, but trying to divide the world into parts leads to harmful stereotypes and assumptions that limit everything more than it should ever be. While I cannot live without separating things off, I am compelled to push them back together in a way where I can listen hopefully listen to car horns, street conversations, trucks backing up, my i-pod, and the person yelling for help. I don't believe melting pots that result in one homogenous whole are the answer, but neither are line segments. If everything came from everything why not smudge it back together a little.
she put shoes on feet often backward because she didn't understand that little bend designating each shoes' connection to one particular foot
like putting a sheet back into a printer so things go on the same damn side or not understanding tags on shirts should be closest to you before pulled overhead winding up neatly behind or pressing the gas pedal while in drive backing out of a driveway
but after awhile she learned which parts go where on our filing cabinet bodies belts on waists bindis on foreheads blindfolds on eyes bras on breast crucifix over collarbone hand lotion on hands hijab on head kippah on bald spot leggings on legs mascara on eyes scarf on neck scrapes on knees tallit on shoulders underwear on privates scrapes on knees she learned mirrors could show her hair too big legs too skinny toes too curled bellybutton too deep
then one day while looking at the elbow she couldn't think of any clothes or lotions to organize beside the bend saw how it curved into infinity just like the shoes that once were meant for every feet through the asymptotic elbow she stopped seeing hair as something to be brushed brain as abstraction hair grew into brains grew into soul not really grew everything smudged she could never keep papers without coffee stains pencil notes with solid lines but oh how she tried to pretend enough her zippers would align everyone could know she really tries to pretend like them to believe things are defined are designed are at least following trends have beginnings and ends can be filed between physical and fake can be without mistake but even as she tries her asymptotic elbow laughs line segments are just lies
Nick and I make a good team, except when we don't. We make good talking buddies. So many nights after class we developed the ideas that eventually started going into this blog while talking over tea in this Hoover Streetapartment building. We love abstracts and trying to understand wholes as best we can. Now though, it is time for parts and it's hard not to feel like we are generalizing or generally missing things when looking at the world that way. Like that game of telephone that never got very far, I worry we might always be concept folks and not practitioners.
I've been trying to go back through notes and feelings to remember the parts of our ideas. Nick has been computing like mad to create a prototype. We are trying to facilitate collaboration and have been collaborating to do so. The goal is eventually to create a site that allows for and even pushes collaborative creation in multiple genres and between genres. But just as the surrealists began playing with exquisite corpses in the creation of poetry and prose, only moving on to collages of words and images and creating images once they got a handle on the words, we had to start small too. We had to take our abstracts down to something we are capable of now, but even though we are creating a more limited version of our concept to start and even though all new things are made from old, what will come out of this still cannot be determined. Our limited idea has endless possible outcomes. Will we only attract an audience of our friends and classmates or can we extend the reach of our machine to those beyond our social sphere? Will we have encouraged the creation of inside jokes, a group of people dedicated to making art relevant to and capable of reaching as many folks as possible, some loosely affiliated people, some bad poetry, genius? We'll soon see and then soon have a better idea of where to wander next or how to wander better.
For our website, Nick and I don't want names of people or of art. Instead of titles, the art will be categorized by subject matter, and instead of names, people will go by IP addresses so that if we don't get the categories right at least we have changed them from the norm so people will have to adapt.
On a summer night in northern Michigan I was doing somersaults in the water while trying to fend off the sleep that sun--still on my face even under the stars-- demanded with the help of water's chill. When I surfaced for air--instead of the comforting voices of people who talked so much that day humming over the surface--I made out a bit of a yelling conversation. One friend was rather angry about an MIA song sampling "Straight to Hell" a song by the Clash she'd grown up listening to while the other believed that you are always using something old when making something new. I surfaced and listened to the voices softened by the water ripples but carried over enough I could float on my back and hear.
Where collaboration went.
Something Older. Something better?
Every time I write my opinion about copyright law, I should have to cite that night. Who do I cite though? My friend's voices or the water rehashing sounds I'd heard before without paying for any of them or the muscle memory of my body so self-assured from years of floating on a lake that the motion had been perfected. In that moment, I knew that even though my friend could pinpoint the bit of the Clash within MIA's music enough that she was annoyed so much else went into that song that wasn't new. Everything has roots. No song begins in midair. No person starts as a tabula rasa.
Some genres even expect people to reuse notes or continue on a structure and even knowing where those came from we can't ever understand the entire genesis of an idea because so many other ideas were part of creating a new one and so much was there before that. While we can try to piece back the origins of everything our role as piecer changes everything and time does and sometimes just walking past a television saying something or other may imprint on us and show up later and we may not even know. I think there is value in knowing where things came from, but I don't know how anyone claims an original idea. They are not new. The things they saw, heard, did. The language they have to work in. The people they talked to. Their genes. Do we have to cite all of those things?
Of course I do my best to adhere to copyright laws, but in all the voices how do I know for sure which ones are in mine or when someone else has taken mine. Is it really taking? Should I cite the makers of my computer knowing my ideas come out differently on here than in a journal? I hope that my words appear in someone else. I love when a phrase starts being uttered regularly by a group of friends and no one knows who said it first or who said it to them. Should they trademark the words? What happens when a year later they meet someone else who has been saying the same phrase longer than any of them? Experience mostly overlaps. When we say mine mine mine, we forget how much is ours.
Interruption. And then Forkergirl said every interaction changes you Sean Penn
In the middle of our work on whatever this project was going to be, Forkergirl went and threw Sean Penn into the mix.
And then Forkergirl said at least I didn't say Charlie Sheen
but of course Forkergirl knew she had said Charlie Sheen too and both celebrities were now imprinted on our project. I felt like we had pulled over for gas on our road trip and had our car keyed. HAHAHAHAHA. Forkergirl frolicked around the room a little too smug about what she had done. The weekend before I had gone home and seen Mr. Sheen on the television. My Dad was quite interested in the story. Then I knew Mr. Sheen was exactly what we did not want in our project. The culture of celebrity like the culture of Facebook is centered around the identity of individuals. We want art where no one person has too much control.
Our website will only allow posters to write something between the size of a text and a tweet: 150 characters at a time. Then the post will have to be approved by multiple people. Then someone else will post. Posters will keep going back and forth until they have created something with no one name or voice dominating the project. Someone can claim the work is finished, but others will have to approve that claim as well. We don't want a world where "By: Charlie Sheen" comes before the ART or where Jessica Suzanne Stokes comes before every post. We want to inspire collaboration centered around what is being made not who is making it.
While everything spills over into everything, we have to start somewhere or we'll only have talking to talk about for our final presentation in English 420.
Meta-Exhaustion Age has replaced writing about what I have learned with writing about whether learning is possible. One paper about that should have been enough One suggestion of solipsism should be effective too but people keep telling me my brain is in a jar, keep making me write that I don’t know anything. In the bathroom parlor of my stain-glass pseudo gothic revival church, there were two mirrors facing each other. I would wait until the sermon to pee. And then I’d stand there in the parlor and enjoy what in child’s time felt like days and may have been eight minutes of staring at myself and my other self and my other other self and well you get the image(s). But that kind of thing has messed with my head. It is one thing to stare into the abyss for a minute or eight but to stare infinitely into infinity is just exhausting. I’d like to know something again but the world has fallen away and all there are are dueling mirrors.
Here is the idea. Ellen Dissanayake in her essay "Very Like Art: Self-Taught Art from an Ethological Perspective" argues self-taught art is something that was evolutionarily selected for not because of its ability to attract mates to the creator but because art once served as a vehicle for uniting communities and united communities were more likely to survive (Dissanayake). In these communities that practiced art-making, the time, energy, and creativity put into the creation of art reflected how much people cared about the community or at least the event or deity the people were making the art for and the act of creating extravagant art mobilized and united communities (Dissanayake).
The internet is often focused on the individual. When I put the text of my facebook page into wordle "Jessica" "Suzanne" and "Stokes" were some of the most prominent words displayed.
Nick and I want to create a website focused on the creation of communal or collaborative art. In a community where name is not important.
Forkergirl's Limited Fork Theory maintains that nothing is maintainable.
Entropy The second law of thermodynamics says:
there are no sheets on my bed and there ought not to be hair on
my head because I do not have enough energy to keep either properly made.
Every day I work to keep my teeth from falling out and my skin from wrinkling away but Part of me has no desire to be an übermensch Part of me loves dilapidated sofas and didactic TVs and the idea of fading into them until there aren’t any parts of me at all and the couch and tv and bed are comfortably put to rest in a landfill
Everything has been moving outward from the first interaction. Everything has been branching further and further away from where it started. In class, forkergirl gave us each a piece of paper from the same journal and asked us to mark it. I traced hand prints onto the page. She asked us to fold the paper in some way. I crinkled the page from flat into a wrinkly mess. She had us unfold it and pass the paper on to another classmate to make something else. Though our pages all looked the same when we began none of them ended that way. Like the bread that multiplied for the son of the Christian god and became something different for everyone who ate it over each generation, our papers were not the same. Some people had folded their paper into airplanes or flowers. Some cut theirs into pieces. Others made messes like mine. Interaction had made each piece different. But their origins were oh so similar.
An Email from Me to Nick in the Aftermath of that Class:
Here I am up late again trying to figure everything out, which all of college has taught me is impossible but heh. A week ago, I returned to Owen and talked for an hour to some random guy chilling in our kitchen about the universe. Yesterday, that man, Kyle Holton, died in a car crash. Even though I don't really know him particularly well, we had a moment over peanut butter toast and it's strange to know he is no longer out there in the world putting only peanut butter on his bread and never jelly. I guess this is one of those times that folks starting asking a lot of whys but somehow I am feeling a little more stable than usual.
Sitting here watching the movie--the Big Chill--seeing this group of close friends try to figure things out in the aftermath of death, I realize the thing they have been missing since college is each other. Brought together over death they see the importance of the connections they had once worked to make and nearly forgotten about. We sit up all night trying to find enough footing to face the world--enough certainty to make any kind of decision. But maybe we can gain that certainty through the friends we spend our nights discussing shit with... we can trust each other enough to learn to trust ourselves--believe in the me that believes in you or something. Without a God or overarching belief system, we don't have a way to understand the macrocosm of it all, but I know that having Claire or Aaron or any of these folks to spend nights and days with is something.
Maybe instead of looking at the whole and trying to find ways to simplify it enough to interact with the world, maybe it is possible to use our relationships as the footing on which we stand to face the world. I don't ever want to forget how important ya'll are to me or even to forget that short conversation with Mr. Holton over a sandwich. I may not have a god to turn to in the uncertainty of death and life, but there is a stability in friendship I've never found in other things I've tried to grab onto. Though we might not understand the macrocosm of it all or maybe there isn't a macrocosm to be understood, I feel most stable with friendship like the one our group of friends has been building. Being connected to ya'll reminds me of my responsibility to everything else.
Though I only spoke to Kyle for a bit, he isn't made past tense by death because my interaction with him will influence other interactions and his interactions with others continue doing the same. Here I am typing at 2am in part because of my interaction with Kyle. Like those papers we folded and traded and marked in class, we are made different by interaction, but maybe it is more than that. Instead of just continuing on with the markings of the people that we have met, we can use our connections to people as a way to feel more grounded--roots that keep growing as we keep moving outward so even though we don't understand it all we can find good in our starting point. Something continuous in it all even when things change--a handhold tangible enough to grab in the chaos. Like the relationship of Moss and her mother grounded the Glory Prelude, from friendship we can try to create and maintain other relationships with the universe.
science explains that folks in cities don’t help each other when it’s noisy we can only be aware of so many things she stood there and told us all about the lines between everything connecting all things but even someone that aware couldn’t realize she invented lines it’s all solid there is no empty she talks about the space between fingers but we invented fingers so we could see the space between them as empty empty being equivalent with irrelevant of course I made my first PB&J from scratch the day I pulled the wonder bread out of the bag before dad could
but I wasn’t at the factory the day the bread was made or in the field obtaining wheat before that I want to talk to you and be aware of all but if I think about all the processes in your body or all that’s happened in this house I’m calling something all that’s only some which I hear is lying I don’t know what to add to reach a sum that’s more than some that’s equivalent to experience
Here I am sitting at home with a fever, and I realize I have done this all wrong. Too much time writing poems has made me vague as a blogger. Let me see if I can still articulate what this is.
This winter, my friend Nick Mitchell and I decided to take a class together. The class we picked had the name English 420: Technology and the Humanities- A Limited Fork Theory Perspective on Remix Culture. While we thought there was something a little crazy about the class--maybe the length of the title or that we didn't understand what it meant (even after reading the class description)--something about those words and the class they might represent excited us.
For some time, Nick and I had been vaguely talking about making a website. Both of us hoped the class would be an opportunity to do just that. I say vaguely so much because prior to beginning English 420 the only fragment of our website idea we understood was "branches." We wanted to make a website where things moved in branches. We came to the class looking for directions: for mile markers to count on our way from here to there. Of course as advocates for branching we should have been prepared for what we found instead.
On the first day of class, I realized the class was on North Campus which wouldn't be a big deal if I had not been a poetry major. Since freshmen year, a majority of my classes, food consumption, partying, and general existence had taken place here:
This picture at the right is East Quadrangle. Those people in front of it I am lucky enough to call friends. Some of us are part of what the University of Michigan calls the Residential College. The RC sells itself as a "a unique liberal arts community," and the students at UofM agree that it is unique. The first time I heard someone talking about the building she was referring to it as "Odd Quad"--"you know the one where they read the commie manifesto on the rooftop." While the people I met there didn't do that, they certainly went their own directions. Steering off the course of normal whenever it seemed obtrusive. For a long time I thought I wanted to be normal:
Oh to be
"the kinda guy you'd have a beer and watch the game with"
if the game were Jeopardy maybe or
Cash Cab...
Suburbia has been the monster under my bed and my greatest
aspiration
since it ceased being my surroundings
But is the normal of the 1970s
the normal you know from the analogue tv
even here among the blogosphere and local
music scene
Sure mtv still wants a hand in normal
but they have babies at 16 or giant birthday
parties or get married.
3 years after that mark I listen to banjo music
want to start a commune and my best birthday
was spent with flasks of whiskey crazies and a 4am
swim in a 40 degree river
Can I at least get back in long enough to sit
feverish on the couch and watch Wonder Years
marathons with you
til I recover or
have I lost whatever
normal I had and the way back with it
I spent most of middle school and high school trying to be average from a wheelchair. Until one day, this weird boy with red hair refused to be everyone else. He kept telling us we didn't need to fit into a perfect suburban mold and when he wasn't saying it his orangered dreads said it for him.
He showed us being normal is not particularly possible and being strange is not only fun but has the power to transform the normal around you spreading like paint spills until everything is tinged orange or red.
But I was still afraid to deviate too far from my normal path, even after making a normal path that didn't fit into mainstream culture's concept of normal. When I found out this technology class was on North Campus, I had a minor freak out. North Campus is generally the place for engineers and dancers and overworked art school students and nature. I once heard a rumor that a deer jumped through a window one summer into a dorm room and died only to be found right before move-in. The people assigned the room were told they would have to live somewhere else for awhile while the carcass was removed. Never in my career at the University of Michigan had I thought I'd need to go to North Campus to learn anything. Sure, I knew of the Duderstadt. That was the place my engineering friends went to make like that deer. While we had picnics in the Arb back on central campus, they disappeared for days and came back unshaved and covered in bits of junk food. Why would I need to go to the place even animals know as dead for an English class? But my schedule clearly said Duderstadt: DL1. As I asked around to figure out which buss to get on and when to get off, I concluded this was a much longer journey than the 2.5 miles counted on google directions.
I got on a bus with Commuter North on its display. Later I'd realize that this is probably the slowest of all possible bus choices for getting to North Campus, but then I knew I needed to head north and north was in the name. That day I had decided to leave for class two hours early with a Winter Weather Advisory posted for the night. I wanted to be inside before the snow started so I was no where near late despite the slow trip.
Which one is the Duderstadt? I asked the crowd making its way from the bus to a building where signs advertising Quiznos and Panda Express were lit up. Someone pointed me away from the food and down the cold street. What was this semester going to be? I found DL1. Design Lab One. Was I in the right class? I can't design anything. Labs are for chemistry majors. I waited another hour outside the room clicking impatiently around facebook on my laptop, wishing I had cash for food next door to hold as a prop so my fingers would cease their nervous tapping.
Sound started emanating into the lounge. Sound from my future classroom. Maybe class was about to start? I closed facebook into my backpack, and walked toward my alleged destination. In DL1, there were couches. There was a large television. There was a workstation that looked like sets might be created at it. There was a projection screen. There were macs with those Bamboo tablets (the ones that let you draw on your computer). I felt I had entered a room where the wants of all the Art School and Engineering kids were pieced into fruition. My eye darting slowed as a woman approached me, speaking in a breathy cheery voice she was obviously controlling. Somewhere behind the breath I picked up on a much stronger sound being held-back. To make out her words over the sound that had drawn me into the room in the first place, I had to lean in and look and focus. Otherwise her voice just added another layer to the noise or I guess I should refer to it as music because it was coming from an ipod.
The first time I ever listened to music people might consider noise music, I was listening to a CD burnt for me by a friend on my way to Freshmen Orientation in Ann Arbor after a sleepless night worrying about driving there alone from my home 2.5 hours across state. When I got to A2, I got off at the wrong exit (which I didn't know then) and couldn't find the next road google told me to be on. I spent an hour getting later for the orientation, asking folks for directions. All while the unfamiliar music ground at my nerves and the summer morning turned to 95 degree summer day in a car with no AC. When I hear music considered noise now, I feel particularly lost. My first day of Limited Fork was then more directionless and anxious than I ever imagined.
When Nick finally sat down beside me in the class, I felt a little less lost and more able to focus in the noise. As the breathy voice continued over the music, I understood a bit more. She guided us to a site that explained as much of Limited Fork Theory as she was capable of explaining. Between the fork pendant pinned into her shirt and pictures of the bifurcating bronchi and bronchioles in the human lung posted on her website, I realized forks sure look a lot like branches. While our teacher whose online identity was forkergirl would be as likely to give Nick and I a single destination in our creative process as the noise music was likely to help me find my way, she would probably be excited to cheer on our unidentified journey. Forkergirl would be ok with Nick and Jessica wandering through the internet, hoping to change something or other.
I remember leaving class that day a little sick to my stomach from all the noise. Some people walking passed us mentioned they were so dropping that class. Nick was confused but kind of excited. At first, I wanted to assume the teacher was crazy was weird was too outside of normal for me. But I as a proud resident of Odd Quad should have been above that kind of thing. I asked Nick to put on music with no recognizable chorus or melody that night when we got back to his apartment to hang (the bus ride back was easy with Nick to follow). I realized I wanted to learn how to love being lost instead of fear it. To try to maintain normal would be to limit possibility. To try to aim the branches of a tree from point a to point b would give me a trunk and no branches.
So "this"
this blog
this project
this is being lost
without defined
destination.
Our goal is not
to get to any end goal
but to always figure out
how to keep going
This is every cliche
about the journey
being more worthwhile
than the destination
you've ever heard
this is our road trip
through over out of in on above between after before with
the internet
"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
Henry David Thoreau
Envelopes are a reminder of something specific—a reminder of letters and private correspondence between two people, but everyone can see the outside of the envelope.Who needs to put anything inside or in the mail when the best canvas is the ever resizable outside of the envelope?A canvas that can keep growing into whatever it needs to be and whoever it needs to be for. Even though the parts of pattern are choppy or disjointed from text or surroundings at times, just like humanity, the envelopes still create one heterogeneous whole.
The lead of the pencil created separate parts, but parts fade into others on the page and rub into my fingertips. Each smudge is a different shade of experience connected to everything else. No one needs a melting pot to make humanity easier to handle. All our quirks can be connected like the envelopes and the smudgy lead—stretching out into the world—. We don’t have to encompass everything in each ‘I’ we write or pattern we start because we have to keep going afterward and might as well have something to do while we go forward—even if that just means smudging ‘I’ into ‘we’—.
After spending too much time on the internet, I have noticed a stigma around digression or--as it is known on some parts of the web--derailing and c-c-c-combobreakers. Whenever a thread in one of the groups that I chat in diverges too much from its original path some people follow the change in subject matter happily, but others remain pouting on the sidelines wanting to return to the original point even if it has already been the subject of hours of conversation even if the new topic incites insightful replies.
Most sites that come close to being as well known as Facebook make changes in slow, calculated manners to avoid angering their user base so much that there is any kind of mass exodus. Although a website ought to change with time to stay relevant (unless you're Craigslist), well-known sites cannot change rapidly without annoying or worse confusing their users. A change on Facebook as small as removing the reply button from wall posts might be water cooler talk. We see that these small changes shape what we get out of conversation (without the reply button I don't look up from the keyboard before sending so tend to edit less and post more). While I believe in the process of change through digression or progression or whatever, I want more influence over that process so I can effect good change rather than just change. I don't want to limit the conversation to discussing how the conversation has changed either. I don't want to shout c-c-c-combobreaker from the sidelines. People should have direct influence over changing content they see online so they can articulate not simply that a particular change isn't good, but also how and why change can be great.
We had a plan: to take that childhood game called telephone--where one child begins by creating a phrase which is whispered from child to child around a circle until it gets back to the person who first uttered it and the phrase is uttered again, checked for validity with the person who initiated it, and normally quite different from the beginning words--and play that over a multi-media web, rather than whispering, to see how each technology shapes the idea over time.
One of us began by passing the initial few lines of this post to another in a note. The first person considered the pen the note was written with and the paper it was written on technology, though some might argue they are only the product of it. But this is where our project slowed. The recipient of the note wanted to mail the words to the next person. They never found the address and four days later decided simply to call instead. After that it took two more days for the final product of the project (the picture in the upper right-hand corner of this post) to be sent on.
Unlike on social media where comments on comments happen minutes after something is posted, we couldn't even pass an idea around our circle of three more than once in a week. One technology seemed so separate from the next. Even though we each posted on our facebooks and called our friends many times over the course of the week, this classroom assignment seemed distant from all that. Our phones at our hips and our profiles a few clicks away, we found it easy to have a conversation in the ways facebook and text-messaging set up for us, but failed to rise fully to the challenge of interacting all these different medias with an idea.
Since this is about communication, the last piece of our conversation couldn't help but focus on social media--using the placeholder images from facebook--the current pinnacle of media platforms by sheer traffic. They are symbols of generic-ness and anonymity as well as the fastest form of interaction technology has given us. They remind us of the compromise of personality for popularity, a small network of strongly connected friends for a large network of sparsely contacted acquaintances. New social media unifies all forms of human discourse, and fosters new and challenging forms of discussion, but might this cause our interpersonal dialogs to take on a homogenous form? When we tried to interact with each other, as well as various forms of technology in a dynamic way, the process seemed too slow and tedious.
The first step is admitting that we have a problem. While we might not be there yet, we have started to realize our potential failings in our increasingly technology-dependent world. We've failed to leverage the benefits of the diverse, multi-media tools at our fingertips, in doing so we came to terms with our over-use of single media communication. We check our Facebooks like Pavlov's dogs -- when a telephone ringtone is like the bell that they run to for nourishment. We feed ourselves with our Feeds.
Is a feed better than a conversation?
It is certainly faster.
How can we facilitate the use of multiple forms of technology to create an easily accessible, but diverse, mode of conversation? We need a platform that supports conversing almost as quickly as Facebook but challenges its posters to try new forms to communicate their ideas.
I erased the history on my computer gone was a week of my life a week is history actually today is even listed among the histories I can delete
my brother tried to type about how history repeats itself but missed a few letters typing as quickly as he could so as not to be forgotten now history eats itself
once I tried to go back back more than a week on my Facebook newsfeed I kept clicking each link reading each comment I didn’t post anything in four hours I made it through all of what had happened so far that day
in one high school in one city in one current events class one teacher spends one hour detailing what happens in one minute in this singular world he doesn’t get beyond trying to explain exactly how his face manages to move in that one minute manages to move to explain that he is explaining how explanation happens
the class more or less understands some processes that allow his face to contort they think still no one understands what allows his face to be or how he is making noise
someone has watched eternal sunshine of the spotless mind on tv the night before so raises her hand for one minute thinking the movie might be relevant she reads on a smartphone as she raises her hand reading all about the movie party Janey will host that evening currently the sun shines through her mind shines forward like a headlamp she might be going somewhere if she only can find someway to understand direction without having to comprehend back
maybe if she uses the delete button to backspace the save function out of being and then deletes delete or leaves it because it has no function in an always forward world
With the worry about having to put scare quotes around our scare quotes whenever we talk about "good" or "conversation," we choose, instead of looking for exact definitions, to attempt the know-it-when-we-see-it approach.
This brings us to omegle.com. Why? Well the random nature of the conversations possible on a site with a tag like "Talk to Strangers!" offers an interesting way to experiment with what we want out of online conversation. While the site claims--"Omegle is a great way of meeting new friends"--is it? Is that even what we are looking for?
You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
Stranger: hi
You: howdy
Stranger: are you one of those creeps looking for girls in here?
You: nope
Stranger: great
You: just a girl in a class about computers
You: talking about whether or not omegle is worth it
Stranger: is it worth it?
You: probably not
You: thoughts?
Stranger: about omegle?
You: yeah
You: ever met anyone on here worth your time?
Stranger: um...
Stranger: no, not really
Stranger: mostly creeps
You: ever had a worthwhile conversation?
You: if not then why do you do it?
Stranger: omg ur right.. im waisting my life in here
Stranger: it's fun to talk to people from other places though
Stranger: it's intresting to get to know people from korea and australia
Stranger: i mean, i would meet them anywhere else
Stranger: wouldnt*
Stranger: so why not in here
You: makes sense
Stranger: yepp
Stranger: where you from?
Stranger: you dont have to answer, i was just thinking of ur spelling
You: Michigan in the US
Stranger: no waaaay
Stranger: lots of snow?
You: too much
Stranger: same here, snowed 10 inches over a night
Stranger: perfect snowboard weather though
Stranger: are you in class?
You: yeah
You: teacher chatting with me nao
Stranger: teall him/her i said hi
You: she says hi too
Stranger: thats great
Stranger: here in sweden its 02:11 am
You: procrastination
Stranger: i guess
You: how old are you?
Stranger: no no no, the question is. how old are YOU
You: 20... I guess
Stranger: so, your not sure eh?
Stranger: im 16
Stranger: well, i should go to sleep
Stranger: good luck in class
Stranger: was this conversation worthwhile?
You: yes
You: I think
Stranger: ^.-
You: have a good night
Stranger: i will, thank you
You have disconnected.
As a bit of a disclaimer, we had four or five conversations before this one where the topic was simply whether or not we were a girl and whether or not we were interested in men. Still, when answering the question--"Was this conversation worthwhile?"--I don't think we lied. One of the great opportunities of the internet is the access it provides individuals to other individuals all over the globe: from Michigan to Sweden. Somehow though, I spend far more time talking to people I know online--from email to facebook--than to anyone else. In better using the opportunities the internet provides, expanding individuals interactions beyond their own circle of friends is good.
As a high school student in the United States, I was taught that a good way to begin an essay is with a definition; by providing a definition, I was told that I would have something concrete or rather “definite” on which to base my argument.
When writing an essay about a poem, I might have gone to dictionary.com, looked up the definition of “poetry,” and copypasted the first definition listed—“the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts”— at the beginning of my paper. This method worked very well for my four years of secondary education, but its versatility and even veracity came into question early in my university career.
In my first college class on poetry, the teacher wrote the word “poetry” on the board and asked us to shout out things that a poem must have. The class began shouting out ideas—a moral, words, a word, letters, an author—. Once the board was covered in requirements, the teacher went through and showed us one by one poems that did not fulfill each of our requirements.
There was found poetry, spoken poetry, sound poetry, poetry written by computer programming, and my favorite poem of all—“aaple.” “Aaple” had once stirred up all sorts of controversy when Congressman William Scherle decided it was not a word or a poem and thus government money should not be used to provide grants to “poets,” like the 750 dollar grant provided to “aaple”’s author Aram Saroyam by the National Endowment for the Arts (Mikolowski). Quickly I realized that definitions were not as definite as I once thought. Things that considered themselves poetry, things that were worthwhile would have been excluded by the definition I once had.
So for this project we are starting with the general idea of bettering conversation and little concept of what we mean by "better" or "conversation" online. At least we know dictionary.com doesn't have a definite answer?
asymptotic elbow 
Is there anything to talk about without sandwiches on the table?
In all of these conversations in all of these locations there is good and not so good an maybe even evil. I had an image of their interaction in my head, but another interaction with my friend Evan Clark resulted in his creation of an image other people can interact with and that interacts with this poem.
apartment building. We love abstracts and trying to understand wholes as best we can. Now though, it is time for parts and it's hard not to feel like we are generalizing or generally missing things when looking at the world that way. Like that game of telephone that never got very far, I worry we might always be concept folks and not practitioners. 
