New Media Writing: The Personal History of a Public Experience

The Essay:

Write a five-to-seven page essay or account that describes your individual history with a public experience. A "public experience" is something that a public experienced and remembers together: a television series, a local event, the career of a musical group, a forest fire, a news event, etc. The "public" may be a local (a town or region), national or global.

The purpose of the essay is to place the public experience in the context of your personal history--to "situate" that experience--in a way that makes the reader see the public experience differently from how it appears in purely in public terms.

Examples

• think about how movie Titanic attached new meaning to the famous, public disaster by placing it in the context of a personal story.
• Almost Famous--one kid's experience of 1973 rock-music culture.
• Muriel's Wedding--A girl from Porpoise Spit, Australia, figures out what life's about with the help of the music of Abba.

The Timeline Exercise:

Use this Timeline to brainstorm ideas of how the course of your life has been influenced by public experiences. (When you click the Timeline link, it you don't get a window offering you the option to download the file, right-click the link to get that option.) Open the file with Word or another word-processing application, and fill out the file online. Save it to your Zip in 5230 > newmedia. The following Web sites might give you some ideas for public events to put on your timeline, though you may also have luck doing search via Google.

• Twentieth-Century History
• The 1900s
• Internet Movie Database's Films by Year
• Factmonster's Television Timeline

Then, the Web Site:

After you've written, turned in, and received feedback on the essay, create a Web site about the same "personal history/public experience" using information and materials from your essay. What content can you repurpose, what must you lose, and what additional material must go out and find? Experiment with maintaining the personal perspective and tone--to distinguish your site from large, corporate-style sites on the topic already out there on the Web--while still creating a publicly useful site. Look for organizing principles other than straight-line narrative, which works best in print, not hypertext.

In creating the Web site, try to realize the following goals:

• iconology: In moving from print to digital form, you'll want to "visualize" your subject with pictures, maps, diagrams. You'll also want to unify all the pages by repeating certain visual elements (a banner, for instance) that create a consistent sense of place or "brand."
• texture: In words and images, you want to create a sense of voice, of immediacy, or of experience (rather than just giving a lot of information). Try to bring from your essay the interest and energy of your own voice and perspective. While a Web site is perhaps not as easy to make personal as a personal essay, it does not have to be impersonal and dull.
• hypertext: When you wrote your essay, you could expect a reader to read from the first word to the last, sequentially and completely. Not all readers will live up to that expectation, but that's their fault! When you make a Web site, however, you can't expect the same thing of "users." You need to reorganize the presentation your subject matter into non-sequential "chunks" (pages) that you'll make available through a menu of links. These links will be expressed as a set of verbal labels that should be meaningful to the audience, and give the audience a kind of map of your subject matter.

Turning in the Project

1. Post the Web site by the due date/time and send the URL to the specified Webx discussion.

2. Print out a copy of the Web pages, annotate them, and hand them in by the due date specified on the schedule.

3. Attach to the back of the printout the original copy of the essay with my markings on it.