I Like Painting Watercolours and I Can Not Lie

This site’s not finished yet – the ‘about‘ page is less than informative, the theme’s a little clunky – so you might not know that I’m doing a leading-edge research course in academica. Well, I haven’t really brought it up.

As part of that course, we are occasionally required to write essays, and I wanted to post up my essay that I’ve just completed. The full title is “I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE: How are the use of memes and tropes by those within online communities
building a self-critical approach to contemporary cyber-culture?”

I’m also going to post up the proposal for the essay, which was radically different to the actually essay (in my opinion). This was mainly due to the fact that, upon really reading some of the authors namechecked in the proposal, I found my skin crawling at their apparent misconceptions of contemporary internet culture. This is one area where I find that the value of fiction writers such as Charles Stross far outweigh the perceived academic value of authors such as Paul Virilio. Why?

Where this essay goes into a academic discourse about the effects of a convergent culture on socialisation, and how networked lives will be different to what has gone before, Stross has written a novel called “Halting State” that looks at the dramatic knock-on effects of today’s technology. Some of the questions he poses are what will it be like when the police start to use networking in a realistic way, and how will the future economy cope with online gaming?

I am planning to post a longer article about Stross’s work and other sci-fi authors who are influencing and predicting the changes related to technology, but that will have to wait.

I-see-what-you-did-there (Essay)

online-essay-proposal (Essay Proposal)

Topics covered in these essays include 4chan, twitter, and social networking. All constructive comments are gratefully recieved.