It's eerie, but the wordle cloud of my blog thus far accurately describes my state of mind with regards to my writing on this project. All of these themes whirling around in this spinning conflagration of chaos, yet gravity is beginning to make some headway in pulling some of these larger concepts into place as my research influences its formation.Foremost, there's the governing aspect of the Internet of course - which I'd approach from a capitalistic vs. communistic perspective in following with the major theme of Grapes of Wrath. Going along the lines of economic and social ramifications of these governments and their (r)evolving relationship in the Internet, I'm interested in the question of how communication technology shapes society. Then there's the socio-cultural aspects to look into along with the idea of property rights and their influence on sense of online community interactions.
Now that it's all coming together, I think I'll be able to organize some quotes into this congealing idea tomorrow. Stay tuned.
It looks like you've got a lot of interesting ideas, even if they are a "spinning conflagration of chaos." One way you could help organize is to narrow your focus. I was also following tons of ideas and threads about the internet and community and cathedrals and communication and identity etc etc, but once I chose to just focus on the Bloggernacle it was much easier to come up with a more solid thesis.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Ben. Try narrowing your focus. Of course your argument is going to be multi-faceted, but it is not bad to just pick one thing. I wanted to talk about language, identity, and a bunch of other stuff in the context of two texts and the immigrant/native metaphor, but I just choose to stick to native identity and one text. My advice: at this point, pick one thing in Grapes of Wrath and research the heck out of it in context of the digital world. You'll be given more direction and see more parallels with your text.
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