Essay 1: The importance of Literature in understanding digital culture

A literary work like Moby Dick can be very effective in helping us make sense of the Digital world. The novel is very large and daunting, much like the digital realm. One way in particular that this novel  distills itself onto a pre-digital mind in useful ways is by functioning as a metaphor for the digital realm. For example ,  my teammate Melody wrote a blog post entitled “The Moby Dick Metaphor” talking about how Ishmaels going to sea is similar to our going to see in learning about the digital world. I built off of this post by proffering one of my own entitled “The (never ending) moby dick metaphor.” In this post I talk about how Moby Dick can help us understand the digital by looking at how a continual cycle of always having to hunt down another whale represents the need to always hunt down another digital concept/idea. The need to continually learn and understand the new concepts and things that come up in the digital sea.

Another approach that some of my teammates took was looking at Moby Dick as a platform that will prepare us for curating and building identity. That is, the novel presents its ideas in a way that help us understand the identity of the person telling the story, (and telling the story changes the narrator as well) similarly, when we go onto youtube or soundcloud, the music that we like and choose to curate will show our audience things about our identity, as well as help us construct our identity.

And finally, one of my teammates looked (Derrick) at how Moby Dick represents “deep blogging” in the sense that by looking very deeply into specific subjects we learn more about them and gain a fuller understanding. Just as the whole novel is done under the subject of the sea and whaling, so too can a blog be composed around a specific set of themes or subjects (such as the early-returned missionary blog being done by one of my classmates, or my music blogging).