Discourse Communities : Archive
Research & Speculation
Choose a discursive community to study and answer these kinds of questions: How are these 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
You must document your project using our satellite website. This consists of a series of screenshots with explanatory text. You can also include links to materials, if you wish.
If you want to make your files publicly available, you will need to post them in your own webspace.
Presentation
During the last two meetings, everyone will present their findings and their results. You will have roughly 1/2 hour.
Considerations
Do not be let your design be limited to what you can technically accomplish today. This does not have to be a fully functioning online application. Present is as a proposal, outline its features and contours, what would be required to implement it, who you would need to enlist in your aid to construct it.
Obviously, in six 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 ... ???
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?