I did my final project on how control can affect people differently through different types of media.  The artifacts that I used were _The Familiar _by Mark Danielewski and the twistori site, which is the screensaver on the homepage of the course website. It is similar to We Feel Fine, but I could not access We Feel Fine so I used twistori instead. It gets its information from twitter and relates things in certain categories in real time The link is here.

http://twistori.com/

It was mostly a straight up paper. I used graphics and digital media with it too, but most of my project is text.My project incorporates the text of The Familiar and the ideas from it to the stories on the twistori and the form that they take. At the beginning of my research and of my paper, my argument was solid. As I wrote it; however, the solidness began to unravel and wind itself back together into a completely different being. This is always how it is with ideas though. They have a mind of their own. They unfold in ways you never could have imagined. My paper started out as a dichotomy, a dichotomy that was very well outlined and reasoned, but it ended on a far more neutral note than I had origininally intended. I could have tried to push it back into the box of my original ends, but to be honest it was 9:00 and I had plans to go see the Avengers: Age of Ultron . On a serious note though, it would have been several hours of wasted effort. It would have been inorganic and unproductive. My paper became about how to use the forms of control and their affective consequences in harmony. I feel that this is important because so often people will outline something and will say something similar to “Here’s the problem/Here’s the dichotomy now you figure it out. I’ve done my part.” I wanted to do more than that. I don’t profess to show how these things can work in harmony with each other rather than always antagonize each other. I have cited people that know far more than me on this subject, like Catherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman.

The only project that this is similar to is the one project I had to do in my Freshman general education course where I analyzed a Youtube video. This was a very unusual experience and I must say much more interesting than several of the other papers I had to do this week. I would have never imagined using something like twistori as an official source of an academic paper, much less one of the main sources.  It was interesting because I never knew what was coming next and among the weirdness there were some genuine gems. A few of them I saved but unfortunately could not find a place in my project for it without it feeling redundant. I will place one of them here as a sign of goodwill to end the semester.

i feel funny. i’m in an extra good mood. i think it’s cuz i dreamt that i was in a super mario video game. (Unfortunately the format won’t cooperate, but the words are there.)