Real live thoughts on chapters and work

I feel like I've got a few chapters of academic work in me. Whether it's a real live dissertation or not is still to be determined, but the thoughts are there.

I'm thinking lately about how we create and define our social selves. I'm thinking in the social ecology sense, where everything somehow interacts to make us who we are. This is coming out of the paper I'm currently working on, which traces the changing ethos, and therefore connection to "people" of Captain America. Don't laugh. My brother said, "I guess you write what you know". I hope he's right.

I've been in love with comics for a long time. I've also come to love the way people work together (or don't). It's what I think is, as grad schoolers are saying, is "so interesting". This course on Rhetoric and Poetics is making me see that these things can go together, with problems of their own, sure, but together nonetheless. So I want this project to end up as a chapter, I think, in a tentatively titled, continually revised, dissertation about the way we revise and reform our ideas about the social and our place in it through different conduits.

Some of these are what I've recently seen coded as "Imaginary Worlds". And it's all rhetorical--which I think means I can talk about it in rhetorical terms. Captain America changes with our culture, but never ceases to be connected to what Americans (a problematic term..but) see as patriotic. In some of the same ways, people (real ones) interact in MMORPGs in ways they never could in real life. Our newly found connectivity via new technologies means that it's a very different world (an imaginary one, in some cases) that we have to interact in.... and I think there's plenty to be said about the (rhetorical) choices that folks make when they log in to a game next to someone from across the world.

Changing courses slightly, I also want to write about music--my students have trouble doing so, but I'd like it to get easier for them. I'd also like to write about the pedal steel--not only an overlooked instrument, but an overlooked topic in academe, as far as I can see. The pedal steel's been synonymous with what "folks" would refer to as "real country" music for a long time. As "country" moves away from the twang of Hank Williams, et al, though, the instruments (IMO) are still being used to sort of "namecheck" the old styles, so as not to lose fans. No one's going to argue that country radio has and will continue to change--and I don't have a particular beef with that. I do, however, take note that the steel guitar still pops here and there where it really doesn't, for lack of better word, "fit" in the more rock sounds of present country radio.


All of these topics trace networks of association, which while I may be joining the bandwagon too late, as least I'm still on it....and they all link back to what I would consider my main research interest, "how can i get my students to learn"? I taught a class on what it means to be a student, and it seems like looking at the ways that the social (community?) can be created could certainly link up with how to create those communities in the classroom, for better learning, better etc etc.

Now, though...it's off to actually doing it.

Aa...

Fake Plastic Trees

I wish my camera phone still worked, then this post would be littered with shots of the following outing.

Tonight, I was, as apparently, most dad's in our fair city were, of the mind that "McDonald's Playland on Clark Ln. sounds GREAT!"

I was right. It WAS great, and if you've ever been there, you understand about the trees.

But here is what it "connected" for me. (I know I know--you're thinking, maybe he could post MORE about connectivity today. Sue me. You'll get everything, which is nothing.) My son is 4. And as we might rhetorically say, "fairly kinetic". He eats (some) and then says, "I'm going up". I quickly take stock of his face, and after making small touchups, send him to play. This is how it works. He climbs the first two steps, is met by a little girl, who says, "Want to be my fwend?" He's all, "Yes" And it occurs to, me--that was JUST like a social networking site! It DOES happen in real life (presentation fives all around) perhaps it just doesn't happen for adults like it does for kids.

BUT, it gets better. And this is where I'm pretty sure I'm the only dad (and I'm not kidding about it being dad's night--there were lots) in the place thinking about social networking. He asks the girl her name, she says something... and she says, "What's yours?" And he says, "I'm Harry. Harry Potter." For the next hour, he is Harry, and she is his friend, and they make other friends, and don't seem really broken up when they separate to go back to their dads and their homes.

Maybe this is all a stretch, and I just wanted to post the neat link;) HOWEVER, I THINK that it's meaningful, given our prior discussions about the way Web2, the network, and our interactions seem to be different in terms of those same issues.