Learning To Write: An Exploration of the Benefits of Digital Community Education

Traditional learning settings such as classrooms and job trainings allow students to learn constructive social interaction, fulfilling baseline work formats and standards, receiving a necessary (though often painful (I’m looking at you, memorization-based history courses)) rounded exposure to varied subject disciplines, and receiving standards-based feedback on performance. There are, however, a few all-important aspects that are almost entirely missing from (my) institutionalized learning engagement: unlimited interactions with internally legitimized teacher figures, access to large amounts of bizarrely specific niche-mates, and engagement with a more organic learning process.

In an almost subconscious search for supplemental learning engagements, my peers and I turned to forms of new media. One specific internet site provided me with the quintessential connected learning experience: AO3.com.

AO3.com is a fan-based community literature site that attracts every type of writer. From bored, vampire-obsessed 12-year-olds to published authors who like appropriating crime/drama characters in their free time, the website accepts anybody. Nobody wrote for profit. Nobody wrote for publication. AO3 is a vast digital gathering ground for self-motivated social artistry. And everybody has their niche. Where else am I going to find a larger group of people who’s as interested in moderately gay fanfiction about a teenage werewolf and his gangly human sidekick? Who else am I going to show my story about demon!sherlock to without intense fear of social rejection? Answer: nowhere.

The learning on AO3 is based on a unique, role-liquid student/teacher interface focused on improvement, encouragement, and the occasional humbling “your story gave me cancer” feedback. Everybody came to AO3 with common interests. Grammatical elements and writing proficiency often didn’t matter; instead, the community focused on emotional narrative, proper characterization, effective reflection on and/or misappropriation of the canon, and an accurate understanding of the target audience. Advanced-level writing concepts learned organically through community interactions on a grandly anonymous scale.

New media engagement fosters immersion with interests not accessible by traditional, analog means of connected learning. Although I had received formal writing training for years in school, I never truly developed a fictional voice until I found AO3 and related sites. Traditional education and new media connected learning buffered and built off of one another to round-off my education, to show me interesting ways to involve both critically and intuitively. Modern day learning is not complete without the benefits of new media community engagement.

Twine Poetry

interTwine'd

InterTwine'd is a Twine-based poem grappling with different forms of expression to process the complicated experience of memory repression. My own limited understanding of the Twine platform directed InterTwine'd's aesthetic into a very unique world; I could control pacing. The timing of the piece--the poetry breaks, the highlighted words, and the direction of the hyperlinks--created InterTwine'd's main aesthetic experience.

The poem starts faster; the frames are as glancing to the player as the thoughts are to the poem's consciousness. The content may be dark and somewhat disturbing, but the words aren't given any special attention. They exist in their own stilted reality. The player can read them in moments and move on to the next frame of the story without engaging, experiencing, or truly understanding their meaning.

And then the pacing changes.

The player gets stuck in a contemplation of the words "Repetitive growls." At first, the words seem as darkly inconsequential as the preceding phrases, and yet the consciousness sticks to it. Mulls on it. Warps it. Strips the words of the softness of vowels, leaving only cold percussive consonants.

The next frame is the largest block of text in the poem, with three potential links. Each link leads to a different surrealist representation of the female body. The player sits stuck in the frame until they have clicked all the options, forcing the player to engage with the information in the frame. and then all the options again. The second time around, the pictures are different. Warped. Inverted, blurred, made terrifying and indistinct. And yet the player is stuck with the images. with the text. with the memories made vibrant by a new air of violation. This pacing aesthetic forces the player to revisit unsettling imagery until the consciousness's memory has run its course, and an escape route presents itself.

And then the player faces Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory warping herself into a facsimile of normal. The piece returns to the glancing treatment of text, accompanied by a new blatantly modified copse of images. Shaking fragments of dream flicker over a visceral representation of more warped memories. A non-confrontational banana held gingerly in front of a woman's onesie. A pair of identical faces repeated but distorted. A woman's torso, arm, and leg thinned out. Wrong, somehow, with a clumsy black swipe across sexualizing features. Once more, the reader is stuck in contemplation. Coming out of the vortex of varied memories, the reader sees this one photo repeated. Again. And again. Replaced by black, and then disappeared all together.

In retrospect, I should have utilized Twine's hyperlink function more cohesively into the narrative. The process of memory suppression is complicated and cyclical enough to work well with complex hyperlink paths, but I didn't take advantage of that in the narrative. Additionally, Audio would have contributed to the piece more effectively than the pirated photos I used. My knowledge of photo imbedding outweighed my knowledge of audio integration, however, so I stuck with the photos. Using an unfamiliar medium to create an immersive user experience proved more difficult than imagined, but the pacing and visual aesthetic elements of Twine helped me translate my piece more effectively.

Gif Cinema

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         Repetition: brushing teeth, combing hair, walking, eating, resting. Waking up. Falling asleep. Working. Life twists back on itself. Schedules and structures and circular moments make up our existence. Before we have a chance to recognize our reality, our body has aged and warped, while our mind floats in the circulature of existence. We are ageless in our repetitions.

        It’s a little strange, then, that I've ignored this repetition in my past narratives. Strict linear structures. Point A to Point B. People waiting for moments to irrevocably change their existence when, in reality, those quiet tooth-brushing wake-sleeping loops form the foundation of our lives. We are all part of an endless cycle of existence, but I generally choose to highlight life’s linearity.

        Making a story based strictly on loops and cycles was difficult. Everything sublime, in my mind, came from the integral changes I associated with linearity. People can’t change if they exist in a loop, and change is the foundation of good storytelling. Loops, however, are the foundation of good GIFs.

        So how do you rationalize the two? A looped structure and the idea of change? I didn't want to focus my narrative on day-to-day, but I wanted to do something cyclical. Something on a grander scale than brushing teeth, but something that still reflected mentality. A life/death, give/take that could be read forwards, backwards, or started at any time during the narrative. I don’t know if my gif cinema ultimately read that way, but that’s what I was going for.

Interactivity/immersion

In the beginning of Murray's chapter, she discusses the physical distance placed between ourselves and the encompassing worlds of media. Older media, such as books, theater, and television, rely on analog pages and sedentary interactions to keep the consumer grounded in the physical world. In the case of video games, however, the user physically interacts with and--to a varied, limited extent-- controls their environment. The player is more causally connected to the media's world, but the reality of the controllers, keyboards, and phone screens act as distancing artifacts. 

In my experience, I've had an easier time immersing myself in the more traditional forms of media: text, performance, and direction as forms of storytelling. In an almost counter-intuitive way, the worlds I engage fully with are not the worlds where I have the physical connection. Video games give me sentience in a narrative world, but they don't necessarily sweep me into that world. 

Interactivity and immersion seem to have an inverse relationship when it comes to narrative. The Prince of Persia movie immerses me much more than the Prince of Persia video game, despite my actual physical interaction with the video game.

When it comes to immersion in media, body mindfulness is the enemy. Anything that brings you out of your mind and into your body disrupts full psychological engagement with a story. Even virtual reality games, where the experience is supposed to be fully immersive, still encourage the inherent barrier of body mindfulness. No matter how realistic the VR skiing experience, computers can't recreate physical touch.

Books, movies, and theater, on the other hand, don't encourage body mindfulness. In fact, they discourage it. Movies and stage performances shut off surrounding lights and sounds, dumping a fully-formed, non-interactive story onto a stationary audience. Aside from occasionally turning a page, people sit still and absorb the narrative in a book. The sedentary consumption of old media forms enables consumers to detach from their bodily awareness and dive deeper into the media.

The "New Aesthetic"

Digital interpretations and manipulations of real-world imagery. Snapchat filters, for example. Our image is absorbed by a digital entity and displayed back with pre-programed tweaks and tricks. We read the imagery as us, but it still intrinsically carries the warped foreignality of digital medias. A program captures our image, our identity, as data and plays it back to us in novel ways. We recognize that the image isn't necessarily us, yet we still identify with it. On a more subtle level, we experience this digital aesthetic, this interactive phenomenon, with front-facing cameras. Selfie cameras warp our image instead of reflecting it. Whether it warps through specific intent--making our eyes slightly larger, for example-- or through user-friendly convenience--mirror-imaging our photo to better match our own perspective of self--the digital world leaves its own distinct interpretations on our reality.

We also have real-world manipulations of digital interactions. Heat signature cars emitted from tanks. Marine camouflage meant to confuse both humans and machines. Alternatively, however, this same aesthetic exists as an enunciation of digital properties. "Pixelated" buildings or public art pieces fit into this category as well. In our interactions with digital media and a digital world, we have developed an aesthetic comprised of ways to trick and/or embrace the other party.

Colloquialized digital manipulations exist, for example, as masks. Martin Backes created a pixelated street mask that, although giving the impression of a digital face to normal humans, fools facial recognition software. People read the mask as a digital interpretation of reality, while actual digital software cannot interact with it as intended. Snapchat filters cannot recognize Backes's mask as human enough to manipulate, while real people see the mask as a reflection of low-res or problematic coding. Backes's mask employs the new aesthetic to float in a digital/reality middle-ground, disconnected from humanity, disconnected from new medias, all while existing as a product of both.