No, but I play one on TV . . .

According to ancient theories of mimesis, art imitates life -- is the converse true? Specifically, I am thinking about two TV shows that depict American Presidents.

On The West Wing, Jimmy Smits plays Matt Santos, a Latino candidate for president.

On the new series, Commander in Chief, Geena Davis plays a female vice-president who assumes the presidency when the elected white guy dies. If you take a look at the Commander in Chief website, you will see plenty of evidence of art imitating life: the TV show website has a fake blog about a the first female president and everything! (At least I hope it is a fake blog, or these viewers are getting way too involved in a fictional plot!).

So, what of this? Is America getting ready to elect a president of color or a female president? Are these shows pushing middle-America to open up their minds to electing a president who would come to the job with a different lived experience from the average president?

Do the creators of these shows (and the writer, directors, actors) hope that they are subtly prepping the country to bust out of the uniform model for presidents (rich, white guys)? Or is this just entertainment -- just a stab at what sells?

I believe that artistic expression (and I'm even willing to put some TV shows in that category) does often and certainly should push us reconsider the patterns, events, and reigning theories in our lives. But do the creators of fictional presidents feel this way? And does it matter? If watching these shows is causing audiences to contemplate voting for an "Other" candidate, then art is pushing life regardless of the writer/director/creator's intent.

Blog on that!

Text of Personality

It's almost midterm, and my class has been blogging for about a month. I wondered what I would find most striking about my students' blogs: an interactive discussion of ideas; an intellectual use of the linking feature to tap into the resources of the internet; superkewl use of graphics . . .

Of course, there has been plenty of that, but what I have found most earth-shattering is the students' construction of their own identities: their personalities and personal details and trials and tribulations all laid out before me. I do not think I would have ever known about Brandi's mugging or Sonya's father's illness or Nicol's car accident or Christina's girlpower trip to Mexico if I had not assigned my students to write blogs.

For all of the lip service about computers are an impersonalizing force, my students have largely used them to disclose much more than they have in our face to face environments. I want to know why. I'll ask them why. If they read this post, maybe they post a reply. One student started to get at how and why she puts herself out there on her blog. I invite more commentary like this - I am honored, fascinated, stimulated, and encouraged by the student blogs!

What New Innovation in Text?

I've been rereading Steven Johnson's Interface Culture, a book about computers, writing, culture, and meaning-making that came out in 1997 -- that's old for a book about technology. So some of his examples are outdated, but his philosophy of the way in which interface design and conception impacts writing is still right on the money, in my book.

He makes a prediction on page 145 that I am wrestling with:

We may, in fact, be on the cusp of a textual paradigm shift as profound as
the one ushered in by the rise of the word processor. All the elements are
in place for such a revolution; we just need the breakthrough software to bind
the elements together in a coherent whole.

It's been almost 10 years since he claimed this, and I'm not sure what he's talking about (to be fair, neither was he when he wrote this -- it was a prediction after all). But I have been thinking hard about this passage (and posting it into comments on several of my students' blogs to see what they make of it).

He claims that visual software has taken off (and it certainly has!), but I don't see things like Flash and Dreamweaver as making up the textual revolution that he was talking about. New writing tools have made concrete some ideas about the instability of authorship that have been floating around for the past 35 years, but that does not seem to be a textual revolution either -- so I don't think he'd point to something like Myka Vielstimmig's work and say, "Hey, look, it's the textual revolution!"

I'm really stumped . . .readers, how do you react to his prediction?