Discourse Communities : Archive
Research & Speculation
You will choose a discursive community to study and answer these kinds of questions: How are subjects constituted by their means of communication? How has your group been constituted historically? How are they now? Who talks to whom? What kinds of messages do they exchange, and how do those affect their material conditions and subjectivity, their consciousness and behaviors? How have those practices been expanded, contracted, deformed, enhanced, etc., with the interpolation of digital means of communication?
Speculate, how could they be in the future? Extrapolate beyond your research to design possible means of communication. This could be tools for this community. Alternately, you may leap off from your research into an experiment in writing in digital media. Critically engage your own research results. Derive your forms from your discoveries. Be wildly creative or mildly prosaic. You decide how to move forward, but discuss your ambition with me before completion.
Your work will become part of a digital archive of probes, which will continue developing through future class contributions.
Documentation
Your documentation must be in a digital format, available online (this is true for all projects). KEEP IT IN YOUR OWN SPACE! Our discussion group on Yahoo is not public (yet?), so anything you post there will not be available to people not invited to our group.
Presentation
During the last two meetings, everyone will present their findings and their results. You will have 1/2 hour.
Considerations
Obviously, in seven weeks you will not master a new field. You are not expected to be absolutely exhaustive. Think "case study." Trace out signal moments of transformation, significant changes ... or, ... be qualitative, descriptive ... ???
This does not have to be a fully functioning online application. Make a proposal, outline its contours, use-cases, ..., what would be required to implement it.
internal v. external communication
How do they communicate among themselves (esoteric).
How do they communicate to the outside (exoteric).
You could consider how this expert knowledge could become useful to citizens or consumers.
The older means of communication have not simply disappeared. How do the new means affect the old?