{"id":692,"date":"2020-04-08T04:09:34","date_gmt":"2020-04-08T04:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/?p=692"},"modified":"2020-04-08T04:09:34","modified_gmt":"2020-04-08T04:09:34","slug":"experience-a-humanitarian-crisis-for-only-2-99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/2020\/04\/08\/experience-a-humanitarian-crisis-for-only-2-99\/","title":{"rendered":"Experience a Humanitarian Crisis for only $2.99"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was going to begin my blog post with something along the lines of \u201cWhile participating in the work, <\/span>Bury Me, My Love<\/span><\/i> I found that\u2026\u201d but then I realized \u201cparticipating\u201d may not be quite the right word. I think of participation as an active thing, a way we contribute, perhaps with some degree of intentionality. In some important ways, the user does participate in <\/span>Bury Me, My Love<\/span><\/i>; we receive the messages on our phones and then we have to choose how to respond to Nour. Our replies in turn influence the trajectory of Nour\u2019s journey.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Although we participate in the game through our responses, I felt as though this contribution was mediated in certain ways. Or, if not our participation, perhaps our full-immersion in the work. For example, I found myself distracted by my assumed identity as Nour\u2019s husband. While I may not have made different choices if I were playing as a female friend of Nour\u2019s, I did have to remind myself that I was supposed to be participating as if I were sort of responsible for Nour because of the nature of our relationship. I also felt that my participation was mediated at the level of the text(message). Sometimes I felt like neither of the options were what I might say myself, mostly because of tone or word\/emoji choice. Additionally, when some texts were sent without my decision, I felt as though my active participation waivered. However, some of these instances seemed to try to mirror human behavior. For example, at one point, we send a typo, \u201cHang in tree!\u201d instead of \u201chang in there.\u201d Could we view such events as instances of dysfunctionality? How else is <\/span>Bury Me, My Love <\/span><\/i>an example of the dysfunctional? Perhaps political in its individualized depiction of the refugee crisis, which disrupts the popular portrayal of nameless masses far away from us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What remains a topic of international conversation now takes place as a dialogue between two imagined people through an app for a small fee. Although the work\u2019s intention may be to expose a wider audience to the experiences of refugees, I\u2019m curious if others felt vaguely voyeuristic while interacting with it? Is there a danger of essentializing the refugee experience through these generated text messages? Can an argument be made that the work commodifies the experience of a refugee?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was going to begin my blog post with something along the lines of \u201cWhile participating in the work, Bury Me, My Love I found that\u2026\u201d but then I realized \u201cparticipating\u201d may not be quite the right word. I think of participation as an active thing, a way we contribute, perhaps with some degree of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":255,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-b"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/255"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":693,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions\/693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/elit20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}