To make this post more interesting than it is, I decided to put all of the text I wrote for this class (excluding projects) into an online word counting engine which excludes only common words, and otherwise returns the frequency of words used, and ranks them
| very | 29 |
| people | 28 |
| think | 24 |
| self | 23 |
| person | 19 |
| game | 18 |
| just | 17 |
| world | 16 |
| many | 15 |
| story | 15 |
| foreign | 15 |
| gam | 15 |
First, it’s obvious I talked about games a lot. Something went wrong with the code and it miscounted the amount of times I said game, but it’s in the thirties, and should probably be on the very top. It’s interesting, because I play games very selectively and I don’t really have a lot of time to play them, but the ones I do I enjoy analyzing and breaking down. I think they are very interesting because they are so new, but the craft of video games contains within it theories and understanding from all other fields: archit- (damn, I had to stop mid word to realize I’m writing about games again lol, anyways) -ecture, drawing, psychology, sculpture, music, communication, math, etc. You get it. They encompass everything and anything, and I think it’s beautiful, like a joined playground. Also, most of the games that I play are very related with death, and the way each one of them tackles it can be a post of its own.
I talk about the world and being foreign a lot as well. I remember that paper by Kocurek really stuck with me throughout this class. I felt it was so much deeper than just green blood in video games, and I could see a reflection of the paper’s point in so many other forms of media. I think it especially rang true with my experience here on earth, being that wherever I go, I’m considered foreign (I’m a third culture kid). And being foreign has its pros and cons which drastically shape the way you think about life, people, cultures, and conflicts, both global and local.
I also talk about stories a lot. I find narratives very intriguing, and especially how they tie into the world today, with social media, the internet, and level of globalization that never existed to this point. How our online digital narrative reflects who we are as a person (as explored by the episode of Black Mirror, Be Right Back), how well we truly know each other, and what our online secrets can tell us about ourselves. I remember watching a video by Slavoj Zizek, a modern day philosopher, who said that it’s exactly in the anonymous, fake profiles we might make as a joke on Facebook, that we reflect who we truly are. I would agree to some extent, but argue that we as people are much more multifaceted than what meets the eye, that our narratives can be both one thing and another. That our anonymous persona is just a thread in a larger narrative that encompasses what it means to be a person. That our digital self is just one dimension of our true selves.
I close then by saying, this statistic (word frequency) I drew on my own posts is also just one way of looking at the overarching narrative that I’ve told throughout this class. There are many ways to look at it, and I think personalities should treated as such, as multifaceted, with many perspectives, and no one ultimate perspective. I say this because it ties into the entire idea of who we are, how does technology change us, and if we uploaded all of this information about us, would we still be us. If we died in a time when technology allowed us to upload our brains into a computer, would we still be dead? My conclusion is that we would. Death in the digital age is no different than death in any time before. Death never changes, only life can do that.
P.S. I used the word frequency as an interesting way of quoting myself, just to keep things interesting. The final sentence of the post is my grand takeaway from this class.