These are questions that you will answer based on the writing/designing that you do in this class, not abstract feelings and opinions about the internet and technology.  It’s like Janie tells her best friend in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: “ya gotta go there to know there.”  

Machines are an extension of their inventor-creators… 
~Amiri Baraka

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Technology Can’t Do Ev’rythang…

Though new technologies will drive the focus of this class, remember that technology can’t do ev’rythang.  The expression that I use here is quite intentional in its African American cultural meanings.  The deliberate, alternative pronunciation is intended to emphasize the impossibility and inanity of a false, trumped-up expectation.  Technology does not RUN YOU!  You run it!  It is created and sustained by us to better fulfill some of our needs and goals.  

So here’s an example.  Fantasia’s performance in After Midnight, a Broadway musical that celebrates Duke Ellington and Harlem’s 1932 world, is simply amazing.  I have always known that girl can sang (this means something different from the more mortal word--- sing), have seen her on American Idol, and have listened to her music, but none of that comes close to experiencing what she does LIVE when she performs Cab Calloway’s “Zaz Zuh Zaz.” There is no video or recording that can capture what Fantasia and Wynton Marsalis’s 17-piece Jazz Orchestra do with sound.  On the one hand, they have taken music/aesthetic technologies and made it their own. On the other hand, that talent, culture, sound, and human energy simply defy the reproduction capabilities of current technology. You just have to see it live! You have to be there in body, mind, and spirit and not in front of a screen or with ear phones on your head.

So, no, the technologies that we work with in this class won’t be able to capture all of the depth of our image, sound, thought, vision, and desire, but we can certainly work to bring it a little closer to us!

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