I'm Reclaiming Awe: It's Gonna Get Personal

I've been thinking about what I wanted to do to try to make my creative project more personal, because as Dr. Burton aptly noted, the personal has legitimate power and serves as a way of making something more relatable and interesting on a number of levels. In some sense, I really like the way that Jason Silva does his videos (see his newest one to the right, for example), where he intermixes the personal and the scholarly and all that, but at the same time, I think with my project, I want the two to be more subdivided. Silva's downfall is that he's creates a cult around himself without giving his ideas (which are remarkable, in many cases) the prominence that they deserve.

So, with that in mind, I'm going to be doing a short introductory section where I talk about my experiences with digital media and kind of the back story of why all this is important to me. Up until two years ago, I was one of the most ardent critics of digital media, and I had renounced video games almost entirely as time wasters. My paper for the first of my classes from Dr. Burton was one about individual creativity, and I think it fitting that my final project in my capstone class will be revisit both the disillusionment and the creative component as dual edges of the digital realm. Realistically, I'll probably just tell my story briefly and then talk about how the creative component of my project is, in itself, an attempt to bring into reality the kind of creation that I propose in the second half of my paper/project. Thus, it's kind of self-reflective and recursive and wonderful (or at least that's the hope).

Another benefit of that is that I can get out the analytical part of my creative project briefly and reserve time in the creative component just for the emotional and poetic. I've seen some instance where a combination works, but I think it helps to have some kind of subdivision to help the mind change modes. Anyway, what are your thoughts? Do you feel like that will be successful, or will the introductory portion not be relatable enough to keep people interested for the latter portion?