I enjoyed most of the works this week. Signing up for 43 emails is not something I wanted to do for MEZANGELLE, but reading about it in Rettberg has definitely piqued my interest in the real time story-telling structure it portrays. The Instagram novel I did not quite understand how to follow. The Listeners I couldn’t quite enjoy because my own Alexa consistently wanted to participate.
In regards to “degenerative and regenerative”, I am actually learning about HTML, and at least the first couple of pages, I could decipher what the coding was. HTML really is an entire language in and of itself so beyond that it was fascinating to see the code slowly disappear as the “corruption” spread, and yet still see something of a storyline, simply with some words or letters removed (until the last few pages). I loved listening to “I Love Alaska”, as the search terms progressed into the user’s personal life. I only listened to the first episode, but I plan on continuing on my own.
“The Fall of the Site of Marsha” was very interesting because of how the story was laid out, and how you could read what left behind when they made edits, only crossing out previous text on the website. It turned dark very quickly and I like those kinds of stories. It was somewhat easy to follow but alongside it the reader can see, how the relationship between Marsha and her husband devolved, as well as the sinister implications of Marsha’s involvement in her father’s death, online.
A piece that I actually did further research on outside of our assigned works, was Online Caroline. The idea really intrigued me and I actually wanted to sign up. It doesn’t appear to work anymore though, so I found a blog article of someone else’s experience with it. You receive emails from this ‘Caroline’ and with information about yourself that you provide, she will email you things regarding her life (namely, her work, and her boyfriend David). The blogger I read mentioned that she had a child, and ‘Caroline’ replied “There was me banging on about not liking children, and then discovering you’re already a parent. Ah well, you still came back for more.” You have a choice sometimes to reply to her (if you think she’s boring, or happy, or if you think she should leave David), but she may not take your advice. As problems surface in her relationship with David, the story begins to take a dark turn and in the last few bits of the experience, it is David, not Caroline, in her webcam videos, a company called ‘XPT’ emailing the reader, not Caroline.
Although you can go in and enter your information and interact with certain links on the surface, the information you enter doesn’t seem to actually go anywhere anymore, I never received any emails.
Works Cited:
Walker, Jill. “How I Was Played by Online Caroline.” Jill/Txt, 23 Apr. 2004, jilltxt.net/txt/onlinecaroline.html.