Doing It Right

My English 1110.01 class is currently working on our first blog assignment for the term. I have asked each student to tell a story using only internet memes and captions.  As the first few have started to trickle in before Friday afternoon's deadline, I find that I cannot contain my excitement.  The first few have already shown an ability to manipulate this form of language with humor, creativity, and a rather sophisticated level of self-awareness.  I know that one forthcoming post will superimpose my image from the English Department's website onto a series of internet memes in the format of a RageComic in order to talk about this student's experience in the first week of my class; it is both wonderfully creative and incredibly informative (a far better class evaluation than anything I have read on my electronic SEI's or on the discursive evaluations that so often read like mini-love letters).  If the students permit me to do so, I might share some of their work here, but in the meantime, I would like to tell the story about my (mistaken) attempt to introduce the students to Donna Haraway.  What follows is a bit of a mash-up of what the students will be producing; it is part memespeak, part rage comics, and mostly just a bunch of nonsense.  This is my first go at creating these things, so please be gentle in your criticisms.

Mainly because

But then the next day of class goes something this:

So I bring in a one-page excerpt from Katherine Hayles' book to give them some concrete examples of the ways in which the organism/machine boundary has steadily been eroded - not just through physical changes to the human body but also through our affinities to particular objects.  The students' response to which looks quite similar to this young lady:

Until I ask about the newest iPhone, and we talk about
our affinities for these particular objects for the next twenty minutes.








Then, I offer some discussion questions for the next class and suggest that we should return to Haraway, the possibilities of our own becoming-cyborgs/cyborg-being, and her chart of the "informatics of domination" (because it is creepy how prescient that thing was/is).

(One needs to imagine a small room of twenty-five students doing this simultaneously to get the full effect.)