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Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters. Central to repositioning critical inquiry, so it can attend to the specificity of the medium, is a more robust notion of materiality. Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. It makes materiality an emergent property, so that it cannot be specified in advance, as if it were a pre-given entity. Rather, materiality is open to debate and interpretation, ensuring that discussions about the text's "meaning" will also take into account its physical specificity as well. [End Page 67] Following the emphasis on media-specific analysis, nine points can be made about the specificities of electronic hypertext: they are dynamic images; they include both analogue resemblance and digital coding; they are generated through fragmentation and recombination; they have depth and operate in three dimensions; they are written in code as well as natural language; they are mutable and transformable; they are spaces to navigate; they are written and read in distributed cognitive environments; and they initiate and demand cyborg reading practices.

Let's read this at the end of the term!

My immediate thoughts are against setting standards for being a "social media maven." It seems that the abilities, standards, and etiquette contextualizing what determines a social media expert are changing so rapidly that it is difficult to set such specific questions rating expertise. I think these are good questions, but it seems the answers are either subjective or subject to change at a moments notice. For example, who says I can't upload a slick graphic containing contact info in my facebook timeline banner photo (that is, until facebook skewers this feature too)? Why is this a no-no? Unless the individual asking the question is actually referring to the content type allowable in this field .... in that case, it would be an image.

We talked about Nyan cat. It used to be quite the cred to report how long you could last looking at the "longest videos". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKzqP4-0Z6M

New technology: take a photo with a web-enabled camera, and receive a short description of said photo, provided by a real, live human! Will this really change the way we take photographs? The reasons we photograph? What about questions of editing, curating, filtering?

Uno, Nessuno, Centomila (One, No One and One Hundred Thousand) is a classic novel by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. Published in 1925, it recounts the tragedy of Vitangelo Moscarda, a man who struggles to reclaim a coherent and unitary identity for himself in the face of an inherently social and multi-faceted world. What would Moscarda identity tragedy look like today? In this article we transplant Moscarda's identity play from its offline setting to the contemporary arena of social media and online social networks. With reference to established theories on identity construction, performance, and self-presentation, we re-imagine how Moscarda would go about defending the integrity of his selfhood in the face of the discountenancing influences of the online world.

Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author provides another interesting facet to this discussion. In the play, a family of characters arrive at a rehearsal-in-progress, begging for the producer, playwright, and other actors to write down and perform the family's story. The family members do not exist outside of their interactions with the rest of the family; the characters themselves cannot exist without the acknowledgement and assistance of the artists; and, despite traditional lines between real life and fiction, every family member character and "real-life" character is altered by the interaction. How much are our identities--as we experience them--dependent on others for validation? Are we performing our lives for others? At what point do we (can we) draw boundaries between spectator and performer, especially in relation to identity creation?