critical questions
During Thursday's class, groups identified aspects of web pages or online environments authors Charles Cheung, Tyler Curtain, and Lisa Nakamura call our attention to. Cheung, Curtain, and Nakamura encourage us to ask the following questions as we analyze web pages.
cheung questions and issues
- How do authors strategically present themselves via personal web pages?
- Does the web author present himself/herself in a positive light?
- Does the author address controversial topics such as politics, gender, or race? Does the web page reveal any indications of censorship?
- Does the author contradict himself/herself?
- What the author assume he or she has an audience?
- What does the page tell you about the author's interests?
- Is the author using his/her page to develop an alternate persona?
- What type of identity is presented on the personal web page: a strong personality or a self-exploratory personality?
- How does the author use his or her page to create a self-narrative?
- Cheung contends that personal home pages offer authors the opportunity to strategically represent themselves and to continually revise their identities. Moreover, with personal web pages, viewers have more time to analyze an author's self-presentation.
- Cheung draws our attention to restrictions involved in personal home page authorship. For example, people with few economic resources or inhabitants of areas with limited technological infrastructure may not be able to create home pages. Commercial, gender, and ideological factors may also impact the content of an individual's home page.
curtain questions and issues
- For Curtain, blogs are important. Just as we cannot offer a generalized description of "books," we cannot argue for a singular description of "blogs."
- Curtain emphasizes the notion of "public," arguing that "public, in my discussion doesn't describe some static, unitary collection of persons. Public is the on-going, unfolding history of readers--and within the ready and fluent power of the net and blog-tools, reader-writers--who come to interact with the blog. Thus, we can ask who is the public created by the blog? How does this public interact? What is the interrelationship between the public and the blog?
- Curtain also discusses how bloggers remake and remark cultural artifacts. How does this strategy influence the "literatureness" of blogs?
- Is there an actual construction of knowledge in blogs that is comparable to the scholarly peer review process?
- What topics or communities is the blog characteristic of?
- Are blogs that deal with identity or identity politics important?
- Why would groups of individuals--for example, people who identify as queer--choose blogs as a medium for interaction?
- How does the online medium influence people's responses to ideas expressed in the blog? How are these responses different than face-to-face interactions may be?
nakamura questions and issues
- Nakamura argues that the term "surfing" suggests that the web offers viewers a way to experience other, exotic cultures. Taking on a virtual identity can represent a trip into a different life. She would have us examine how racial stereotypes exist in online environments.
- How is racial identity presented online--overtly or not?
- Does the presentation of race on a particular web site constitute identity tourism?
- How are online interactions shaped by the racial identities users present? Do interactions and behaviors change as the racial identity one presents online changes?
- How would Nakamura categorize the validity of personal web pages, given the fact that authors may be exploring another racial identity?