To Spring Quarter and Beyond!
Jacob asked Renee and me to think about the possible directions that wordtoys.net could take once its use for English 260 has been accomplished. In other words, thinking about the site in terms of "Virtual Darwinism," which of our sections will "win out" or become the dominant element? I think that this site will continue, in some manifestation of its current state; each of its three creative/functional aspects of the site (everything but the blog) is the respective brainchild of each one of us, and we all have a vested interest in theoretically seeing our own feature blossom into something larger. In the form of www.wordtoys.net, however, the future, as the site's name suggests, belongs to Jacob: Renee and I may go on in collaboration (or separately) to develop a creative/educational poetry site (or sites), but despite the interesting conceptual connections this current collaboration has allowed us to make, the central thrust has developed into textual manipulation through (Flash, etc.) Toys. In this specific case, this likely inevitable transition into a text game/program site is logical, given that even the poetic and educational elements came to encompass some degree of visual textual manipulation (e.g., the integration of the poetic workshop with the refrigerator magnets Toy). Generally, though, if we couch this transition in "survival of the fittest" terms, it elucidates a governing principle of internet economics: those who know code are more equipped for success than those who don't. This seems self-evident, but it highlights an axiom (that I just made up) regarding presence in the virtual--and therefore, by extension, the physical--world: get busy developing, or get busy frying. As in, working the fry machine at McDonald's. Business and intellectual arenas must adapt to incorporate new media capabilities into their core functions, or risk rapidly falling into obsolescence: poetry, poetics and literary studies are no exceptions.
WordToys is a collaborative project aimed at exploring the limits of creative originality. It was formed in 2008.
- Instruction
- Fridge Magnets