CPE Reflection

I think what I wanted to do most with this project was create something that was useful in addition to being insightful. I often find myself feeling that even those writers who are clued in to the ways that platform design and personalization shape discourse (and, as the most recent  Facebook controversy revealed, that’s not everybody) struggle to see themselves and their own work from within that discourse. Without the structure that warranted the ethical commitment of the old editorial boards, what new ethical concerns are emerging that writers have immediate contact with in their own work. That’s how I fell into language. Because it’s so culturally marked, it answered some of the dissatisfaction I felt while reading Pariser and Manjoo as far as the image of democratic discourse that they appealed to. Plus, writers work with words, so maybe talking about words can help writers discover their own cultural commitments in the sentences that they write.

This piece, for me, falls short in not offering a clearer tool kit to its readers, something where I distill my thinking on writing into concrete actions or rules of thumb that can help writers. But I know that my own heuristics are situational and only partly clear to me. I think following that path would have turned this paper into a mess of examples, at least at this point.

I went with a Wix site because I’m familiar with Wix. It gives me a lot of freedom in layout, although the cost of that freedom seems to be the loss of automatic text wrapping, which would have made incorporating images less of a headache. The thing I’ve had the most trouble with in all of these projects is the incredible potential for time wasting in the search for a functionality or workaround, and a general lack of fluency. Using Wix did limit me to what I knew I could do with Wix, which does not yet include that medium’s potential to make a site more interactive, and so I ended up with a single column essay with pictures and a menu for navigation. As unimaginative as the layout felt, as soon as I got the menu together with the header and the first image (the Caravaggio), I fell in love with it. I wanted to look at it. I hope it invites readers to spend some extra time on the upper part of the page before moving into the text. I just wish I didn’t have the Wix ad on top of each page. It breaks the harmony.

The images I used at the top of every page felt like the biggest rhetorical risk to me. The idea came from an etching of the Second Circle of Hell in Inferno that didn’t make it into the final draft. It depicted the whirlwind of souls, driven by the winds of Hell as a consequence of their uncontrollable lusts, and to me it felt like a fair depiction of Twitter, or at least what’s spiritually wrong with Twitter. Some of these images conjure up myths that speak to the themes I wrote about, like Narcissus and Babel, but others have less obvious valances, and my own experience of each of these artworks could be idiosyncratic enough that I can’t predict what they call to mind in a reader. I’m even worried that Las Meninas might be so ubiquitous that readers scroll right past it. I like the unconstrained quality though. Hopefully they add some play to the themes of seeing and fragmentation.

The most fascinating part of this project was setting out to find specific examples of the language use that makes up online discourse. That Urban Dictionary definition is a gem, and I only wish I had pulled together a more comprehensive way of reading it. This section also gave me a chance to explore this idea I have of writers being a stripe of educator, who in using language in particular ways actually model discourse. Maybe I should add that sentence in right now.

The final takeaway for me was realizing that composing text in a program like Wix is infinitely slower and more frustrating than using a word processor. Part of that might be that I am doing layout at the same time as I am drafting. Another part might be that what I see in the editor is what the site looks like, and I just don't do well carrying out the messy process of drafting in that space. My most fluid writing happened in a separate document. On the other hand, I think my best use of image in conjunction with text came about when I was thinking about both at the same time. The last element of composing that this brought to my attention was the importance of the shape of text and image, not just its meaning. I personally hate screen reading, so I will do whatever I can do to make that a more peaceful experience.