After reflecting on my blog posts from the semester, I noticed my propensity to focus on my own experience and making a personal connection to whatever piece(s) was/were assigned.
My first post found me reflecting upon a game I played with friends in middle school to personalize the concept of hypertext. Looking at my own experience with creating an information pathway through hyperlinks enabled me to better comprehend a text like “Uncle Roger” not requiring a reader to engage with it in a particular order. By bringing the concept of hypertext into my own realm of tangible understanding, I became able to detach what I knew about print literature from my broader concept of literature (including digital).
In my second post, I reflected upon my experience with the game-play atmosphere of the text “16 Ways to Kill A Vampire at McDonald’s”. Though throughout the semester I came to understand the potential “game”-like vibe of some digital texts, “16 Ways” prompted me to reflect on my own thoughts on the form. Ultimately determining that although the form was engaging, it lacked what I considered to be crucial features of a literary experience.
In my third (and unfortunately final) post, I used the text “Network Effects” to grapple with my final months of senior being detached from Davidson. As I noted in my blog post, I was very taken with the piece, in hindsight perhaps much of my enjoyment came from the headspace I was in when engaging with the text for the first time. The broader idea of fleeting moments narrating the story of one’s life definitely caught me at a time when fleeting moments were all I thought about. I plan to revisit “Network Effect’s” soon, as I approach my final moments as a Davidson student. Though these moments don’t look as I had always thought and dreamed of, their deviations from my expectations are part of my story.
Looking back on my blog posts made me incredibly aware of my tendency to bring the new and unfamiliar into the context of my own life to achieve an understanding. Grounding digital literature in my own tangible digital/personal experience(s) enabled me to breakdown my previous definitions of literature as a print medium, and realize the ever-expanding ways there are to tell a story.