Writing the Future

In case you’re not convinced by Oryx and Crake and you want an alternative vision of what the drive toward efficiency looks like when taken to its logical extreme:

• *”Design Your Own Utopia”, a very thorough checklist of things you want to think about in some form
• *hilariously, eHow has a “How to Create Utopias” page
• “How to Create a Dystopia”
• “Dystopias:  Definitions and Characteristics” (PDF)
• “What to think about when creating a dystopian future”

• *Clive Thompson on the death of the phone call
• *Pew on how Americans get their news now
• *“Artists Find Backers as Labels Wane,” on the shifts in the structure of the music industry (counterpoint:  “The Web’s Elusive Promise of a DIY Career in the Arts”)
• *“Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age”
• *the new literacy, which we’ll read next week
• *“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (and relatedly), which we’ll also read next week
• *“The infertility timebomb: Are men facing rapid extinction?”
• *100 years of style in 100 seconds
• *“Ancient Aliens, Scientism, and the Need for Myth,” on the rise of the “paranormal edutainment complex”
• *“The Rise of the NBA Nerd”
• *“From Hogwarts to Harvard: Survival Games for the 21st Century”

• *three things we looked at on drones:  how robot drones revolutionized the face of warfare, “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man”, and the “Living Under Drones” report
• *“Brain Gain,” on the rise of neuroenhancing drugs

Lastly, here’s one more example from PSU English’s own Jessica O’Hara, who has posted a link to an essay she wrote for an edited volume on the philosophy of horror.  The essay is entitled “Making Their Presence Known:  TV’s Ghost-Hunter Phenomenon in a ‘Post-‘ World,” and you can find it on Google Books here.  She calls particular attention to the “Spectres of 9/11” section, near the end of the essay, as an example of paradigm shift argumentation.  Here’s Jessica talking about the development of the essay:

When I developed this essay, at first, all I knew was that I wanted to write on ghost-hunter shows because I liked them and the Paranormal State people were local.  The section about 9/11 came out of my realization that the structure of ghost-hunter shows mimicked HGTV home-improvement shows. Once I made that connection, which amused me, I started to wonder why both genres of shows appeared this past decade. Then I connected their rise to the rhetoric of home improvement, which imagines the home as a “sanctuary.” Why does the home need to be a sanctuary? I thought about this question in relation to 9/11, the emergent dread of public spaces, and the decline in organized religion.

Just so you can find it if you want to take a look back at it, here is Stuart McMillen’s comic version of the foreword to Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which we looked at in class today.

For anyone wishing to take another look at it, or to pass it along to others, here‘s the piece we read in class today, Emma Woolley’s “What it’s like being a teen girl.”  After the post went viral, she wrote a brief thank-you followup that’s worth reading.

Here‘s the piece Jess mentioned, “An Account of Sexual Assault at Amherst College.”  And here‘s a good piece on the term ‘rape culture’ (wikipedia entry here), which I invoked a couple times in class today to describe the cultural and institutional status quo Woolley’s piece targets.

Thanks, once more, for the wonderful discussion today.

The LIVESTRONG Manifesto:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HVxZnz20PM

The Health Justice Manifesto:

The Happiness Manifesto:

The Bacardi Manifesto:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUHkm94TDWE

• *on creativity and writing manifestos
• *“The Manifesto Manifesto”
• *wikipedia’s list of manifestos
• *the principles of the Dogme 95 filmmaking movement
• *“This I Believe” (and WPSU’s local version)
• *10 example manifestos
• *The Checklist Manifesto