Why dung beetles? because they, to the Ancient Egyptians, symbolized "Eternal renewal" (see the wiki), which goes with my loose "eternal return of the same" idea here.
If I can speak plainly, though, the beetles call to mind the sheer amount of sh*t online and the need to pull it all together in a neat ball and deal with it bit by bit. Which is also how I view my research process...if I'm lucky, I'll get a nice neat sphere of an idea and take it for a walk. If I'm not, I go collect more stuff and bundle it up again in a new way.
I love beating metaphors into the ground!
digital mindsets (L&K, B) + "interactions thru and with electronic texts" (Hayles, Rheingold, Baker, Electronic Literature collection, Collins, and Hayles).
my hypertext essay topic examines trolling/sexism/online spaces - issues of power and control that pop up even in the ostensibly free internet...and i've done some work on cyber bullying which relates to aspects of this...
......
computer mediated communication literally "re-mediating" human behaviors, responses (eg, why do people act like idiots on the internet?)
flashmobs & twitter & video chat & ____more_____ as a way to put the humanity back? Whether your primary experience of "the internet" comes from an isolated monitor/keyboard or a tiny cell phone, you may treat it differently...tiny screens may lead to more face-to-face time with people, even ones you're not talking to, which may cause you to "mind your manners" more?
but what's going on there? there's a multiplicity of screens now, even non-interactive - are we really putting the face back onto face-to-face? or are we talking to mirrors? (echo chamber of similar opinons, facebook "friends" .... "facefriends")
"eternal return of remediation" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return) - human technologies go thru eras where they're in their infancy, then ornate, then stripped down, then fleshed back out again, then new things start and we all go over and over again) Books could be argues to start from skins and tablets then ornate scrolls and codices then back to relatively simple and cheap again with the press, then off in 2 directions of cheap (penny dreadfuls, magazines, paperbacks, pulp mags/novels) and expensive (hardcovers, sometimes with color plates and/or overlays, textbooks and now "multimedia books" (and, PS, I want that one in the link)
also, i'm thinking human behavior - we have all these things we can connect to each other with, to advance our species with - and what's being done? We still return to some of the problems (sexism, racism, etc) that have plagued for how long? Shouldn't we all be past this? Am I being too idealistic here?
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