This semester has been a really interesting one in terms of the progression of my research topic and my feelings toward it. I can honestly say that I've never had a semester that was so frustrating , but I've been able to push through and have come to a synthesis moment, to borrow the term from Hegel.
I think one of my problems going into the paper for this class was that I came with so many topics that I wanted to address. Awe was and still is, in my mind, an interdisciplinary notion, and I think that biology, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and critical art theory all have important things to say about it. As I studied it more, though, I began to realize that I wasn't the only one having problems figuring out awe. The texts contradicted themselves, everyone used different words for the same things, and the works that seemed to be the most accurate in trying to define awe seemed to be the most abstract and vague and well. You might say that for about three months, I was pretty frustrated and had no idea what I was doing.
I began with this idea of disruption--the idea that something like a child's laugh or a new idea can completely change the way that we look at the world. For me, this was something that I could definitely relate to, and it was "true," so it provided a good foundation for me. With that idea of disruption, though, came the notion that we can be jarred from our main course of progression: that it's possible to become addicted to the disruption and the highs. As a result, I steered my research in that direction, looking into the physiology of awe and addiction. I read a lot of psychological stuff while trying to pound through Pearsall's excessively sentimental Awe: The Delights and Dangers of our Eleventh Emotion, and I came to teh conclusion that the digital world had introduced us to a new level of insensitivity to nature, religion, art, etc. I felt that the general premise was true, but I didn't like it. It wasn't constructive at all, and if there's one thing that I didn't need to encourage, it was my own cynicism, my own negativity. So, I kept looking.
I took a jaunt into the synthetic or technological sublime, because honestly, technology is something that invites awe into my life. I wrote about robots and synthetic biology in one post and followed up with a post on video games because I realized that each of these had been technological areas that had been very influential in helping my construct my conceptions of awe.
Realizing that if I shifted my focus just to awe in technology or video games, I'd be focusing more on spectacle, I went back to my notion of addiction to awe. When we started more so into the critical portion of our research I already had a pretty good foundation, having built on ideas from ENGL 451, where I studied early literary theory from Plato to Nietzsche. Hegel was one who stuck out especially, and I had done some research on the dialectic as a model for the progression of art into the current age, so I wrote a post about the Hegelian dialectic and the progression of art.
I kind of synthesized some of my ideas into a project prototype, and that helped me to concretize my claims, but I still felt like it was too negative, so I decided to look for a solution to this notion of addiction. The dialectic, in some sense, was my answer already, i.e. that we hadn't reached a synthesis point, so we as a society wouldn't be able to truly experience genuine awe through the content available on the Internet. Nonetheless, I still didn't feel like I had the right direction.
Eventually, a Pinterest board helped me to realize that one of the problems that I was having was that some of the awe I was experiencing on the Internet was founded in things that were completely made up--unreal, in a way--and that bothered me until I realized that essentially art or fiction is the same thing, simply in a medium that we've come to accept broadly. Anyway, this became a foundational point in my case against digital formats, but I still didn't want to write a negative paper. It's easier to do, but it's not worth it in most cases.
I wrote a couple of drafts nonetheless, based on the negative perspective, and it wasn't fun. The latter of the two drafts built on some ideas that Eileen and Dr. Burton had talked to me about--the idea that the Internet is basically a tool that "reads" humanity-- but I still didn't feel like I was where I wanted to be. I felt like making that kind of conciliation ignored in some sense the negatives without really providing a way to understand the positive uses for the Internet. I kind of lost my interest in the paper for bit because of it, but what it did for me in the long run was really valuable, because it took me out of my critical, negative mindset and let me see things more objectively.
I had some good experiences with social proof that helped me to change the direction of my research and get excited about my topic again. I felt like the social proof part of our assignment came right when I was reaching a point where I could actually see where I should go with my paper, and when I pitched the ideas to Jeffrey Davis, a writer for Psychology Today's "Tracking Wonder" blog, he had a lot of really positive things in affirmation of the notion that I was working toward: that we are increasingly experiencing awe through abstracted, non-real mediums, but that that doesn't have to be a negative thing. Really, my first full draft was the first time that I felt like I had a thesis where I could support it fully and where I felt good about the implications. That being said, I was three weeks from the end of the semester, and having built up an enormous volume of literature in support of my various other topics, I realized that I had next to nothing on my new topic of evolving notions of awe. I've done a ton of reading over the past two weeks to try to compensate for that, and I got a manuscript for a book that's coming out soon that is right up my alley in terms of subject matter, but I still wish I had had more time to research this topic, because, it's been the most constructive for me.
In the end, my final paper turned out to be really useful in shaping my understanding of the digital world. I don't know that I would count it as the best piece of writing or the best researched topic in the world, but in terms of the ideas that I discuss and the way that they've shaped my thinking, I view it as a great success. I think it's fitting that it ended up being a lot more abstract and philosophical than I had intended, as awe itself is something abstract and philosophical. In any case, I didn't think I would come to a resolution with awe this semester. I didn't think I would really come to understand it any better or to calm any of my apprehension about the conflicts that I had found. But I have. And it feels good.
Two and a half years ago, I sat down in the first my classes from Dr. Burton as a staunch critic of the digital movement, and two and a half years later, I stand up, still wary but thoroughly convinced of the power and beauty of the medium. For a long time, I couldn't see the humanity in the digital humanities, and still, even in things involving actual humans, like Twitter, I'm not a huge fan, but I've come to see technology as an art form in itself. I've come to see the digital sphere as the child of brilliant and passionate minds seeking to shape the world, and for me, that is as beautiful as any painting or novel. It means that we still expect something of the world, that we still think the world can change. And that's beautiful. Change.
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I began with this idea of disruption--the idea that something like a child's laugh or a new idea can completely change the way that we look at the world. For me, this was something that I could definitely relate to, and it was "true," so it provided a good foundation for me. With that idea of disruption, though, came the notion that we can be jarred from our main course of progression: that it's possible to become addicted to the disruption and the highs. As a result, I steered my research in that direction, looking into the physiology of awe and addiction. I read a lot of psychological stuff while trying to pound through Pearsall's excessively sentimental Awe: The Delights and Dangers of our Eleventh Emotion, and I came to teh conclusion that the digital world had introduced us to a new level of insensitivity to nature, religion, art, etc. I felt that the general premise was true, but I didn't like it. It wasn't constructive at all, and if there's one thing that I didn't need to encourage, it was my own cynicism, my own negativity. So, I kept looking.
I took a jaunt into the synthetic or technological sublime, because honestly, technology is something that invites awe into my life. I wrote about robots and synthetic biology in one post and followed up with a post on video games because I realized that each of these had been technological areas that had been very influential in helping my construct my conceptions of awe.
Realizing that if I shifted my focus just to awe in technology or video games, I'd be focusing more on spectacle, I went back to my notion of addiction to awe. When we started more so into the critical portion of our research I already had a pretty good foundation, having built on ideas from ENGL 451, where I studied early literary theory from Plato to Nietzsche. Hegel was one who stuck out especially, and I had done some research on the dialectic as a model for the progression of art into the current age, so I wrote a post about the Hegelian dialectic and the progression of art.
I kind of synthesized some of my ideas into a project prototype, and that helped me to concretize my claims, but I still felt like it was too negative, so I decided to look for a solution to this notion of addiction. The dialectic, in some sense, was my answer already, i.e. that we hadn't reached a synthesis point, so we as a society wouldn't be able to truly experience genuine awe through the content available on the Internet. Nonetheless, I still didn't feel like I had the right direction.
Eventually, a Pinterest board helped me to realize that one of the problems that I was having was that some of the awe I was experiencing on the Internet was founded in things that were completely made up--unreal, in a way--and that bothered me until I realized that essentially art or fiction is the same thing, simply in a medium that we've come to accept broadly. Anyway, this became a foundational point in my case against digital formats, but I still didn't want to write a negative paper. It's easier to do, but it's not worth it in most cases.
I wrote a couple of drafts nonetheless, based on the negative perspective, and it wasn't fun. The latter of the two drafts built on some ideas that Eileen and Dr. Burton had talked to me about--the idea that the Internet is basically a tool that "reads" humanity-- but I still didn't feel like I was where I wanted to be. I felt like making that kind of conciliation ignored in some sense the negatives without really providing a way to understand the positive uses for the Internet. I kind of lost my interest in the paper for bit because of it, but what it did for me in the long run was really valuable, because it took me out of my critical, negative mindset and let me see things more objectively.
I had some good experiences with social proof that helped me to change the direction of my research and get excited about my topic again. I felt like the social proof part of our assignment came right when I was reaching a point where I could actually see where I should go with my paper, and when I pitched the ideas to Jeffrey Davis, a writer for Psychology Today's "Tracking Wonder" blog, he had a lot of really positive things in affirmation of the notion that I was working toward: that we are increasingly experiencing awe through abstracted, non-real mediums, but that that doesn't have to be a negative thing. Really, my first full draft was the first time that I felt like I had a thesis where I could support it fully and where I felt good about the implications. That being said, I was three weeks from the end of the semester, and having built up an enormous volume of literature in support of my various other topics, I realized that I had next to nothing on my new topic of evolving notions of awe. I've done a ton of reading over the past two weeks to try to compensate for that, and I got a manuscript for a book that's coming out soon that is right up my alley in terms of subject matter, but I still wish I had had more time to research this topic, because, it's been the most constructive for me.
In the end, my final paper turned out to be really useful in shaping my understanding of the digital world. I don't know that I would count it as the best piece of writing or the best researched topic in the world, but in terms of the ideas that I discuss and the way that they've shaped my thinking, I view it as a great success. I think it's fitting that it ended up being a lot more abstract and philosophical than I had intended, as awe itself is something abstract and philosophical. In any case, I didn't think I would come to a resolution with awe this semester. I didn't think I would really come to understand it any better or to calm any of my apprehension about the conflicts that I had found. But I have. And it feels good.
Two and a half years ago, I sat down in the first my classes from Dr. Burton as a staunch critic of the digital movement, and two and a half years later, I stand up, still wary but thoroughly convinced of the power and beauty of the medium. For a long time, I couldn't see the humanity in the digital humanities, and still, even in things involving actual humans, like Twitter, I'm not a huge fan, but I've come to see technology as an art form in itself. I've come to see the digital sphere as the child of brilliant and passionate minds seeking to shape the world, and for me, that is as beautiful as any painting or novel. It means that we still expect something of the world, that we still think the world can change. And that's beautiful. Change.
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