I enjoyed writing blog posts. I think it became such an habit that I even considered creating a blog section to my website, where I can write in two different languages – English and Turkish. Most of the content that we talk about is available in English, but I doubt that is the case for Turkish. I indeed drafted a blog post about how someone could use the Snapchat map to figure out where you live as almost all of us are at home. This is really disturbing.
Looking back at what I learned and wrote about in this class, I explore a variety of concepts. In my first blog post, I built top of my understanding of decaying media. I was critical about all web-based art and literature becoming obsolete, and I explored how we can make these works eternal. Although my direction was to take all these games to some sort of a virtual reality version, it is also possible that every single platform we will create or created will become obsolete some point. I asked the following valid questions that I still don’t have answers to: “Would these kinds of revisions be welcomed by the creator of early hypertext pieces? Would the authors feel the need to revise their work to keep the authenticity of their stories? Is there even a need to revise and revisit these literary pieces?”
In my second blog post, I dived more into Twine, an open-source platform for text-based game creation. Twine has been a good fellow in the COVID-19 quarantine not only in this class, but also in Gender and Technology as well. In this blog post, I appreciate the rebellious nature of Twine as it has challenged the traditional practices of publishing computer games. One question I raised in this blog post was that although Twine games included a wide range of topics such as mental health, they have not taken the approach to guide you how to solve these issues.
As we discussed the importance of Flash Player for web-based electronic literature, my third blog post discussed how my understanding of this platform changed. I report in this blog post that “for me, Flash was just a tool for eye candy and games, but now I also consider it as a medium for kinetic poetry.”
In my final blog post, I discussed the faulty Manovich argument that narratives and databases are enemies. I rather posed an important question: “Isn’t it fair to argue then that databases and narratives are allies rather than enemies when we look at it outside of the modern media and information technologies?”
Looking back on my progress throughout the semester, it is amazing to see how much I learned and grew. My desire to create and be a part of the electronic literature has grown. I am excited to tell different stories as new platforms come into play.