Performance Studies

Met today with John and Gideon about my prospectus: both had a lot of helpful feedback.

Gideon was a little shocked at the sheer amount of different forms and ideas I'm playing with in the project and raised questions about how to keep it manageable. The end product of our discussion was a resolution to limit the critical introduction: instead of trying to explain everything I'm doing in the blogs, I'll focus specifically on performance theory and how the blogs are performative. Within that concept, there's room to discuss what it means to be in character in each blog, how the separate of the blogs is somewhat analogous to seeking out separate performance space, how revision has more to do with response to audience (and to an evolving sense of self) than with classical-model rewriting.

From now on, I'll try to frame my thoughts here in terms of performance theory, though I may take an occasional detour into whatever else I find interesting at the moment.

Article on Religion and Hyperlinks

Interesting thoughts in this article from '96 on the early days of the Internet and religion.

The author complains at one point about how hyperlinks interrupt ordinary texts and annoy hom, but may be appropriate to religious texts which ask for detailed study and not simply reading. Words in sacred texts, he observe, already have multiple layers of meaning and bring different things together "a text is considered sacred partly because it succeeds in creating connections, unifying experience."

While I agree with the creating connections aspect, I don't think hyperlinks can do anything like what sacred text can do yet. A hyperlink can only go one place. A single sacred word may go thousands of places.