*dies*

So I'm tired of blogging about identity. After this week is over, we'll see if I even have one left.

This week is insane. Just... insane.
Four papers due in one week: one four-page, one five-page, one eight-page, one eight-to-twelve-page (trust me, it'll be eight). And of course I've had barely any time to work on them yet because I've been busy just trying to keep up with normal homework and assignments.
So far I've got one paper done (the four-page), one book read, and three papers still to go. Are we sure college is really about learning and not just about testing the limits of the human brain's endurance? Because really. This is just not nice.

We'll see if I even want to be a writer anymore after this is over. You know, if I still have fingers and no carpal tunnel.

/rant

Still here

Bloggy blog blog... does this count as a post?

Kerri's brain exploded. Sorry.

So I’m looking for the Degree Requirements for the MFA Creative Writing graduate program at Mason. Let’s see how we do that. It’s pretty straightforward. One of the tabs on the header of the main pages says, “Graduate Programs”. Click. There’s a sidebar on the right of the Graduate Programs page that lists all of them, including the one I’m looking for: Creative Writing. Click. Sidebar to the left: Degree Requirements. Click. And done.

Getting back to the English department’s main page is a little tricky unless I use the magical “back” button. Otherwise my only link options that I can see are links to the Creative Writing program main page, and a link to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences page. Then again, hitting “back” a few times solves that problem pretty easily.

Redesign suggestions? A link would be nice.

I'm a little bad-moody today if you couldn't already tell.

I say, "Hmm..." to Amazon's Kindle

Perhaps it's just me, but Kindle 2 does not look nearly as comfortable to hold as Kindle 1. I have a Kindle 1, and personally, I like the thickness of it. The way it slants down on one side, it's very easy to hold in your hand. This new version of the Kindle is so flat, it looks like it would be much less comfortable to hold in one hand.

I mean, it's definitely that little bit more portable, and longer battery life, more storage, and more color levels are definitely a good thing, but as far as the actual physical design of the new Kindle, I'm not a big fan.

A Good Website is Hard to Find

A good website is hard to find... but I think I've found one!
I regularly read Susan Senator's blog. She's a mother of three boys -- one with autism -- and has written a book called Making Peace With Autism. Reading her book is how I ended up finding her blog, and now it's one of the ones I read every day.

Anyway, when thinking of design ideas for my website, hers is one of the ones I find myself thinking back to. It's got a nice layout, straightforward color scheme, and a good list of categories. As a writer and a blogger myself, her website is a good example of the kind of thing I'd like to do with my own website.

I like the fact that the header remains the same throughout the site, and that there's room on the sidebar on the left for different specific links (her blog has a chronological posting list, her articles section has tags on the themes of her articles). It's a very no-nonsense sort of website, not cluttered up with unnecessary information, and everything has its proper place. I like that sense of organization.

Another website I'm a big fan of is author Neil Gaiman's website. (Noticing the writer-blog theme?) Again, his website has a basic header-and-navigation-at-the-top layout, subtle colors, all the right information. His website has a little bit more of a design/color scheme, which I like but I'm not sure I'd be able to pull off at this point. Still, it's good to dream, I suppose.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I’m working on developing my website because right now it’s honestly quite boring. As of now, it’s just a space for me to post examples of my writing: papers and assignments I’ve done for classes, and one short story that I wrote last year. Really, there needs to be a lot more content on there. At the moment, my ideas for added content are lists of helpful links and communities, a page showing off some of my photography (just ‘cause it’s pretty), and – if I can format it properly – a blog embedded onto the homepage for updates and things. If I can manage it, I’d like to split the site off into two different sections: personal and professional. By personal, I mean more along the lines of my photography, a blog just about me (sort of like this blog), things like that. The professional side would be basically what my website now – an assortment of papers displaying my awesome writing ability. As a professional website, the only things I can put up there now are examples of my writing. If I do start getting published or something eventually, then I can add more content up there, but for right now, it’s just a record of some of the work that I’ve done.

My audience, or as far I as can guess, will be anyone who I give my business card to who has enough time to go take a look at my website. Other than that, I’m not sure anyone else knows it exists at the moment. I’m still in the process of figuring out who the readers of my website would be. I’m too used to blogging – thinking in terms of my website, which is much more static, is a difficult shift for me.

I want to make some changes to the design of my website. At the moment it’s pretty simple, but it’s boring-simple, not aesthetically-pleasing-simple. Things I need to work on? A good, subtle color scheme – pleasing to the eye but not completely boring. Better site navigation system with headers and sidebars. Adding all of the little technical details – copyrights, last update dates, my name.

One of the things I’d really like to add is a list of links that are helpful to me, and that would probably be helpful to other writers or people who share my other interests. Right now my site is pretty self-contained – I don’t think there are any links to the outside web anywhere, except for crediting sources on papers.

Actually making all of these changes will be the real challenge. I’m in the process of learning CSS, so that will help. I’d love to be able to use Dreamweaver, but I really can’t afford it right now, so hopefully CSS will do the trick until I have some actual money. I don’t really need anything fancy, just something that looks good and navigates smoothly. Good luck, me.

I need a Teach Yourself CSS CD

You know those Teach Yourself (insert language here) CDs that teach you how to say, "Which way is the train station?" and "How much is this newspaper?" and all that? I need one for CSS, plzkthx. I learned HTML a long time ago, and it's taken over the programming language portion of my brain. There is no room for CSS. My brain is getting old. *trudges off in search of CSS sites*

Blogger is a lonely place...

Maybe I just haven't quite figured it out yet, but I find Blogger to be a very lonely place. It doesn't feel like there's as much of a sense of networking. I feel a little isolated.

I'm finding that I prefer LiveJournal a lot more for blogging and getting a sense of interaction with other people. I've had this blog for about a month and no one's commented on it yet. With LiveJournal, I'd have been a member of at least a few communities by now, there'd be people on my friends list, and I'd comment and receive comments. Blogger feels like much more of a jumble of separate blogs without many real connections.

For instance, if someone links to my blog, I have no idea that they have. In LiveJournal, they'd likely be on my friends list, and I'd be able to see their entry just by checking my friends list. With this, if I want to see if someone's linked to my blog, I have to check the entire internet. DO NOT WANT.

/rant

Naming Defines Us

I was thinking about the post that I made last week, about searching for myself on Google, and that got me to thinking about names and their power.

Recently, I wrote a critique of the movie Boys Don't Cry for the Women and Gender Studies class that I'm taking. The movie is about the true story of Brandon Teena, a transgendered girl (born Teena Brandon), who was murdered in small-town Nebraska in the early 1990's when his friends found out he was biologically female. In my critique, I discussed the power of names on one's identity. Here's a little excerpt from my critique:

"Brandon is born Teena Brandon, and assumes several fake names through the course of the film. He introduces himself to a girl at the beginning of the film as Billy. His fake ID, shown later in the film, has his name as Charles Brayman. Throughout most of the film, he identifies himself as Brandon Teena. Brandon was already in the habit of lying, telling Candace that he had a child of his own, and that his sister was a model in Hollywood, so assuming fake names was probably not difficult for him. It made me wonder, though, how much someone’s name can affect their personality. When Brandon is addressed as Brandon, his personality is proud, eager to please, and a little reckless. When he is addressed as Teena, he becomes meek, not like the outgoing person he is when everyone sees him as Brandon. He even refuses to acknowledge Teena as himself, saying to a police officer when confronted of a photo of himself as a woman, 'This Teena chick seems pretty messed up.' So how much does a person’s name affect how they appear towards others? When Teena assumes the identity of Brandon, he becomes that person."

Writing that critique, combined with all of my recent posts about identity, got me to thinking about what significance a person's name - or sometimes in the case of online identity, a person's screen name - really has on that person's identity.

Over the years, I've had several different blogs and most of them haven't been associated with my real name. Still, screen names have the ability to create a new identity. While your given name may not reflect very much on your personality, a name you choose may have more symbolic significance. These are names that you cerate for yourself, and because of that, you have the ability to reflect certain aspects of yourself in the name you choose. Hobbies, fandoms, favorite films or songs. A screen name has the ability to immediately give insight to what sorts of things you're interested in.

Because of the separation between identities online, you also have the ability to create several different personas for yourself. Who you are on a message board may differ from who you are as a blog writer, and blogging itself can be as personal as a journal read only by friends and family, or as public as a commentary on entertainment, society, politics, or anything else.

Autism: The Musical

Now, before you go thinking this is a completely random post, let me explain. Last year, I wrote a short story called Coping Mechanisms, and one of the main characters in the story is autistic. As I was writing the story, I did a lot of research and I've kind of developed an interest in reading about autism.

So, recently, I heard about this documentary, Autism: The Musical, and immediately Netflixed it to watch. It's about The Miracle Project, founded by Elaine Hall, and it's a drama program specifically for developmentally disabled kids. The documentary is about the six months before the first show, filmed in 2005 and 2006. The documentary focuses on five kids - Neal, Henry, Wyatt, Lexi, and Adam - all with varying degrees of autism and Asperger's syndrome.

What I like about this documentary is its immediacy, its realness. It shows these kids and their families as families, dealing with having an autistic child, but also just dealing with real life in general. While it certainly doesn't cover all of the positives and negatives of raising autistic children, it doesn't shy away from showing the problems along with the successes.

By the end of the movie, you are rooting for these kids to succeed, and you've had a look into their lives and see them not just as autistic, but as kids, too. The same crazy senses of humor, same anxieties, same desires.

I'd definitely recommend this movie to anyone, not just people who are involved in the autism community.

Where Am I?

Or more specifically, where am I online?

When I googled my full name in quotation marks, I got about 58 results. Most of them were for my website, my blog and other students' blogs from a class I took last semester, and a few were from the NaNoWriMo donations list. Interestingly enough, I got a link to this blog, but with the url that I had before I changed it about a week ago. I suppose the Google search bots haven't quite caught up to that change yet.

Now, if I google my name without any quotations, I get 5,190 results. Some of them are for CSI websites, because one of the main guys behind the show (writer? creator?) is Anthony Zuiker, who's distantly related to me. Apparently there's also a zuiker.com, though I don't think there's much -- if anything -- about my immediate family on there. The site was having issues, so I couldn't really see very much of what was on it.

Of course, there's a lot more of me online, but my real name isn't connected to any of it, so it doesn't show up. It's interesting to see what kinds of personas you project online, and how much of it really reflects who you are. For example, with me, most of the stuff online that has my full name attached is academic work. On the other hand, none of my hobby or fandom-related stuff has my name on it.

For writer types

I just recently found a wonderful little blog called Black Cover. Although updated sporadically, it's a great resources for writers like me, who are constantly on the search for the perfect journal. Their tagline is "The Search for the Perfect Little Black Notebook", and that's exactly what they do. They write reviews of notebooks, for the most part pocket-sized and black. It's a search for an alternative to the ever-popular but oh-so-expensive Moleskine.

...I myself recommend Piccadilly notebooks, but who knows? Maybe I'll find something better thanks to the folks at Black Cover.

I am he as you are he as you are me

...and we are all together.

That's me remembering "I Am The Walrus" by the Beatles. But really, I want to talk about identity and the internet. Coincidentally, after I made the last post about online identity, I read a chapter in my Women's Studies textbook about gender. One of the sections in the chapter was about gender swapping online.

So I did a little looking around for more articles and I found this. This study was done mainly with participants in MMORPGs, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, so it's not representative of the whole internet population. In the study, though, over half of all of the male participants reported swapping genders at some point through a gaming avatar, while about two thirds of all female participants reported swapping genders.

Participants were asked about why they swapped genders when establishing an avatar, and there were many different reasons cited, a few of which I'll quote here:

"Extract 22: I just felt like it, really. Mostly my characters
are female, but I think I made my male character
because I was tired of creepy guys hitting on
my female characters. It’s utterly ridiculous, very
annoying, and not the reason why I play the game.
(P39, female, age 32)"

"Extract 23: Because if you make your character a
woman, men tend to treat you FAR better. (P49,
male, age 23)"

"Extract 25: If you play a chick and know what the
usual nerd wants to read, you will get free items . . .
which in turn I pass them to my other male characters
. . . very simple. Nerd + Boob = Loot. (P65,
male, age 20)"

"Extract 26: I mostly play female characters, but
sometimes I make a male character and don’t let
anyone know I’m female in real life. It’s interesting
how different people treat you when they think you
are male. Kind of like a window into their strange
man universe. (P117, female, age 23)"

It's interesting to note that the female participants who played as male characters said that they played as males in order not to be hit on, or to be respected more in the game. On the other hand, the male participants said that if they played as females, men treated them better and gave them more items within the game simply because they were male characters. Obviously, the viewpoints vary on the difference between friendly interaction and sexual advances.

This study is just one example of one area of online communication in which a person's actual gender may not be consistent with their online gender.

Just who are you, really?

As soon as you enter the online world, you are no longer yourself. Your identity as a human being is stripped from you and reformed through your interactions with everyone else online. So who do you become? Are you the same person that you are in real life? Or do you change, do you become someone new?

The question of identity online is a fascinating one. If I want to, I can be a thirteen-year-old boy in Nebraska, or a sixty-year-old woman in Tokyo, or a blind girl in Australia. It doesn't matter who I actually am, what matters is who I want to be.

So how much of our identity is constructed by the way we look and the way we speak and what we do, and how much of it is an unchangeable part of our personalities? How much stays with us even when we exist only in ones and zeros and pixels?

I'm asking a lot of questions and giving very few answers.

Here's a few:

Answer: For a long time, I thought one of my favorite fanfiction writers was a girl, only to find out much later that he wasn't. I just assumed, because I didn't know anything about the person and most of my other fanfic-writing friends were girls.

Answer: I can know the intimate details of a person's life and know nothing about them at the same time. Through reading someone's blog, I can learn where they live, what they do, what their favorite color is or how many kids they have or when their birthday is. And at the same time, I really do not know that person. And they may not know me.

Answer: 42.

Answer: A lot of people online thought I was a guy, simply because of a username that I was using. After all, you have no idea what I look like. It's up to you to figure out who I am.

In this world, gender and age and ability and appearance disappear. Fantastic, innit?

Map of the Internet

That is just really cool...



And that's only a general map of the major internet networks, apparently. I've been wondering about this lately. What does the internet really look like? Can there be internet countries? Will people be citizens of online countries in addition to being citizens of physical locations someday?

My Culture is Web Culture

Web culture, as defined by the book Web Theory:

"The manner in which the Web represents, enacts, and supports the network society and how its users construct a space that exemplifies the fragmentation of the postmodern and the flows of information that loosely underwrite a sense of dispersed globalization and identity."

...I'm sure that's supposed to be English. You tell me. These definitions really do nothing for my understanding of the term. For an introductory text, they assume we have a lot of knowledge already. But at the same time, they feel the need to complete words like webcamera, because we might not know what a webcam is? Come on. (Okay, soapbox moment over.)

When I think of web culture, I think of basically what I've grown up on. Now, a lot of my experience has to do with fan culture, although I know that's not the only sort of culture on the web. What web culture means to me is this new method of networking between people, and the new ways that information can be shared through digital formats.

Since I was twelve years old, basically since I've been using the Internet, I've been active in fan culture on the web. First, it came through making fan sites. This was before the more community-oriented sites were available, and the Internet seemed like a much smaller place. I might have linked to some other websites on my own, but there was very little communication with other people. When I became interested in a new show or book or movie, I made a new website. There must be dozens of old Angelfire websites floating around out there with my crappy teenage writing on them.

After the websites came the communities. A few years later, I began to use sites like Yahoo!Groups and LiveJournal, networking with other fans to form communities and friendships. The Internet suddenly exploded with people, all out there on their blogs, ready to give their opinions and show off their fanfic, fanart, videos, icons. That's when the idea of web culture first started with me, though I didn't know the term for it. But here was this whole world of other people who were interested in the same things I was interested in. The Internet did become that global village, everyone and everything available to me if I could find the right links and communities.

I will admit, there is the "dislocation of identity and community" that this book talks about. I am not, perhaps, the same person I am online as I am in the real world. Some of my friendships are with people I've never met, people whose real names I don't know. But this new culture has its advantages, too. There are millions of people out there who share my interests, and I never would have found them if it had not been for web culture and the opportunities it provides for worldwide networking.

Living in a Global Village

Global village, as defined by the book Web Theory:
"A term coined by Marshall McLuhan to describe how the new technologies of communication provided a different form of connection that resembled the village. It remains a celebrated term in discourses on both the Internet and its relationship to globalization."

To quote the ever-popular Wikipedia, "McLuhan describes how electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media."

With the rise of innovations such as radio, telephone, film, television, and the Internet, the world becomes progressively more connected, and on a more immediate scale. News on a worldwide scale can be transmitted almost instantaneously, and one's physical location becomes less important. Internet communities, for example, have less to do with the area a person lives in, and more to do with their interest. Therefore, Doctor Who fans, for example, from the United States and England can interact with each other based on their shared interest, and not be limited by the fact that physically they are thousands of miles away from each other. As information becomes easily accessible by people all over the world, the world becomes, in the virtual sense, one giant village. Everyone is able to find their niche, regardless of physical location.

Introductions and Explanations

Hi. I'm Kerri, blogger extraordinaire.

I'm an English major, with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Japanese Studies. I work part time as a library page, shelving books. I hope to get a full time library position after I graduate, because it's an environment that I enjoy being in.

I've got a few goals I'm working towards. We'll see if I actually achieve any of them. One thing I'm working on is improving my knowledge of web design. I have a website already Squareways.com, but it's still pretty basic and I'd love to develop it further. I've been making websites since I was twelve or thirteen years old, fan pages on Angelfire and LiveJournal blogs, but my experience has never gotten much farther beyond basic formatting. I'd like to develop those skills, because web design is one field that interests me, and even if I don't end up using it professionally, I'd like to be able to make my own website as shiny and impressive as possible.

I'm also a writer, and though I have yet to be published anywhere, I'm working on it. So when I become a famous author, I'm going to need a good website to go with it. I'm fascinated by blogs, too, and would love the opportunity to develop my blog writing skills further. There are several blogs that I read regularly, and I have to say I'm a little jealous of their success as bloggers. I'm hoping this class will give me the practice that I need.

I'm part of several different online fandoms, and lately I've been interested in writing about that kind of thing for classes. It's always fun when an appreciation for something like that can be discussed in class or incorporated into a project. I find it fascinating that the internet has changed the way fans interact with and support what they're interested in. People who once may have been isolated, with no other friends who share their interests, now have the opportunity to find other people who are part of the same fandoms.

Take Joss Whedon, for instance. The man has a huge fan following, many of them incredibly loyal and determined to see his shows be a success. When Firefly came out in 2002, and was threatening to be canceled by FOX, his fans took out a full page ad in a magazine in an effort to save the show. Without the internet and the sense of community created by fans throughout the world, something like this could never have happened. Firefly, though canceled, went on to be a film, Serenity, a few years later. Without the dedicated internet fanbase, this probably never would have worked.

I've begun to ramble, so I'll wrap this up. But now you know a little bit about me, and I have an idea (I think) of the kinds of things I'd like to explore.