My project is a combination of a paper, accompanied by a short podcast that compares the form of Reddit.com, as well as the feelings created but it, to the form of and feelings created by Mark Danielewski’s The Familiar. The podcast, the “other” mode of my multimodal final project, (Working Ttitle: The Fi-Pro-Podcast with Griffin Day, college student) uses a variety of different techniques to analyze some similarities between Reddit and The Familiar that are difficult to articulate in an academic paper. For example, one segment of the podcast involves comparing a result from the “random” Reddit button (which brings me to a random subreddit), with a random page of The Familiar.

In other words, the podcast offers a different type of analysis and experience but contributes to the arguments that I make in the paper. In another segment of the podcast, I compare positive and negative reviews of The Familiar, culled from goodreads.com, to positive and negative reviews of Reddit.com to explore ways that people interact with websites and books besides visiting or reading them. I think that the podcast, being of a more informal nature than the academic paper, adds to the comparative analysis of Reddit.com and The Familiar in an accessible and entertaining way.

Another reason that I decided to do a podcast is because I wanted to further explore the idea of “hyper attention” as it relates to Reddit.com and The Familiar, something discussed in the paper, further and I thought a podcast would be a good way to achieve this “hyper attention” because I think it’s easier to switch between topics in podcast format, and podcasts are more engaging than blogs and (for this purpose) more entertaining than videos because it’s not very interesting to watch a video of someone on the computer. I wanted the podcast to be a kind of “variety” or “late-night” type show with lots of different segments covering lots of different topics because of the nature of the artifacts that I analyzed. Both Reddit.com and The Familiar consist of multiple information streams and require a reader to “switch” attention rapidly. An experience of reading the paper while listening to the podcast would be similar to Reddit, The Familiar, and even our “wasting time on the internet” class day in the way that it immersed the reader in order to create a unique experience.

I was thinking that maybe to maximize the hyper-attention made possible by a podcast, a reader of the paper could listen to the podcast at the same time and see what they could absorb. It might be difficult to focus on the podcast and the paper at the same time, but since both explore the same theme (that The Familiar is similar to the website Reddit.com because both Reddit and The Familiar are collages of different media, viewpoints, cultures, and people from different countries of origin put together into one eclectic package for analysis by a reader) parts of the podcast will inform an understanding of some parts of the paper and vice versa.

 

Here is a link to my podcast, hosted on YouTube.com: