New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology » November 4: Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Part 1

November 4: Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, Part 1

Plan for the Day

  • Election Day tomorrow–get out and do your civic duty (if you haven’t already)
  • Social Construction of Sexuality–Wednesday, 10/30
  • Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (time permitting)
  • ENGL/AMST 3050 “Science Fiction and American Culture”
    • Spring 2025
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 1:00pm-2:15pm

Social Media

This week’s Weekly Discussion Post asks you to reflect on how you construct your “self” on social media. When academics started discussion new media, circa 2000, social media wasn’t a thing. There was blogging, but, if someone wanted to reach a lot of people, they had to go through the newspager (c.f. Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski). Now, virtually (pun intended) anyone can reach millions of people through social media; however, as our previous reading (Curran, Fenton, Freedman) explained, not everyone has the same reach, number of followers, or popularity.

Let’s start by listing social media sites and commenting on their purposes. After all, some are more useful for some activities/discussions than others: Facebook vs Pinterest vs eHarmony.

Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, pp. 1-118

We’ll most likely not get to this until Wednesday, 11/06, but I’d like to get you thinking about some questions:

  • Why is this novel relevant to this semester’s class?
  • Do you notice any of April’s personality traits that might signal a social media addiction?
    • What makes social media seem addictive? (I realize not all psychological professionals consider social media and video games addictions)
  • Gender/sexuality anyone?
  • How might this book fit our discussion of postmodern texts?

Random quotes from the first third of the book:

  • p. 11: “…fine art is like art that exists for its own sake….Design is art that does something else. It’s more like visual engineering.”
  • p. 50: “Like, the average middle-class person in the US is one of the 3 percent richest people in the world. Thus, they’re probably one of the most powerful people in the world.”
  • p. 71: “…in creating the April May brand, I was very much creating a new me. You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.”
  • p. 102: “I wanted my tweets to be as viral as my first video. I wanted to be in control of the story.”

Next Class

Keep up or finish reading Hank Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. We’ll discuss it and scifi in general.