{"id":100,"date":"2015-03-30T03:43:01","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T07:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/?page_id=100"},"modified":"2015-03-30T03:45:50","modified_gmt":"2015-03-30T07:45:50","slug":"13-ways-of-looking-at-a-watchbird","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/assignments\/13-ways-of-looking-at-a-watchbird\/","title":{"rendered":"13 ways of looking at a watchbird"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With a tip of the hat to <a title=\"wikipedia: &quot;Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird&quot; (Wallace Stevens poem)\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Thirteen_Ways_of_Looking_at_a_Blackbird\">Wallace Stevens and his blackbird<\/a>, our second major assignment will aim to shed light on surveillance and surveillance culture through a prism of multiple perspectives. \u00a0Specifically, you should produce each of the following thirteen pieces as a way of articulating what surveillance culture is and does, arranged in whatever order you see fit:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>a <strong>tweet-length<\/strong>\u00a0<strong>definition\u00a0<\/strong>(<em>exactly 140 characters<\/em>, counting the course hashtag) of either <em>surveillance<\/em> or <em>surveillance culture\u00a0<\/em>\u2014I tweeted <a title=\"&quot;Surveillance: the systematic imposition of nonconsensual visibility, stemming from and producing power dynamics\u2014seen, heard, known? #ENGL262&quot;\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/noendofneon\/status\/560380444337008640\">an example<\/a> a little over two months ago<\/li>\n<li>a <strong>haiku<\/strong>\u00a0that embodies or illustrates surveillance or surveillance culture in some way\u00a0(note not only the standard line\/syllable counts but <a title=\"Wikipedia:  haiku in English\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Haiku_in_English#Typical_features\">the other characteristics listed here<\/a>, especially the impressionistic orientation and the notes about tone, language, and syntax)<\/li>\n<li>a <strong>recipe <\/strong>for surveillance or surveillance culture, specifying\u00a0both ingredients and process<\/li>\n<li>a <strong>two-sentence short story\u00a0<\/strong>that embodies or illustrates surveillance or surveillance culture in some way (<a title=\"20 terrifying two-sentence horror stories\" href=\"http:\/\/www.mandatory.com\/2014\/02\/21\/20-terrifying-two-sentence-horror-stories\/\">these two-sentence horror stories<\/a> should give you some ideas for how this might be done)<\/li>\n<li>an <strong>essay of exactly 50 words<\/strong> on the effects of surveillance and surveillance culture <em>on the surveilled<\/em><\/li>\n<li>another\u00a0<strong>essay of exactly 50 words<\/strong> on the effects of surveillance and surveillance culture <em>on the surveillers\u00a0<\/em>(<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">note<\/span>: \u00a0<em>by &#8220;essay&#8221; in these two items, I mean that even though these are obviously both microscopically short pieces of writing, they should\u00a0make and demonstrate some specific claim, however briefly\/efficiently; they should begin and end, and they should have some unity as pieces of writing<\/em>)<\/li>\n<li>a <strong>dramatic monologue or diary entry of roughly 150 words<\/strong> from the point of view of surveillance personified\u2014so if surveillance were a person, and it were expressing its internal monologue aloud or in writing, what would it say? (<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">note<\/span>: \u00a0<em>this might be in either written or recorded audio form\u2014if the latter, <a title=\"Soundcloud - upload\" href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/upload\">Soundcloud<\/a> is a free and easy way of posting audio, and it is easily embeddable within Storify [click on the plus sign to the right of all of the source icons on the right sidebar and drag Soundcloud from available sources to selected sources], WordPress, and more or less any other frequently-used blogging or aggregation platform<\/em>)<\/li>\n<li>an <strong>obituary of roughly 100 words<\/strong> for surveillance or surveillance culture, in the imagined scenario of it ending or dying<\/li>\n<li>a <strong>sentence<\/strong> beginning with either &#8220;Surveillance wants . . .&#8221; or &#8220;Surveillance culture wants . . .&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>a <strong>sentence<\/strong> beginning with either &#8220;Surveillance can&#8217;t . . .&#8221; or &#8220;Surveillance culture can&#8217;t . . .&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>a <strong>five-senses description<\/strong>, in either list form or complete sentences: \u00a0what surveillance\/surveillance culture <em>looks<\/em> like, <em>sounds<\/em> like, <em>feels<\/em> like, <em>smells<\/em> like, and <em>tastes<\/em> like<\/li>\n<li>a <strong>visual, but not photographic, depiction<\/strong>\u00a0of surveillance or surveillance culture that you draw or assemble yourself; examples might include a map, a portrait, a one- or two-panel comic, an abstract drawing, etc.\u2014but not a photograph (<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">note<\/span>: \u00a0<em>I&#8217;m not expecting you to be phenomenally gifted visual artists\u2014I&#8217;m not judging these on visual-artistic skill, but on how clever and insightful you manage to be in a visual form<\/em>)<\/li>\n<li>a <strong>scan or photo of <em>one<\/em> page from one of the fictional texts we&#8217;ve read, annotated by you<\/strong>\u2014so with key words, moments, or phrasings marked or highlighted, with comments written in the margins, with arrows connecting words or phrases that connect to or comment upon one another in interesting ways, and so on (<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">note<\/span>: \u00a0<em>these annotations should not just document your immediate reactions, such as whether you like or dislike a particular line or character, but rather should be a way of processing and making sense of the text, putting it into conversation with itself<\/em>)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So.<\/p>\n<p><strong>1<\/strong> tweet + <strong>1<\/strong> haiku + <strong>1<\/strong> recipe + <strong>1<\/strong> short story + <strong>2<\/strong> essays (surveilled, surveillers) + <strong>1<\/strong> diary\/monologue + <strong>1<\/strong> obituary + <strong>2<\/strong> sentences (surveillance wants, surveillance can&#8217;t) + <strong>1<\/strong> description + <strong>1<\/strong> visual + <strong>1<\/strong> annotated page = <strong>13<\/strong> ways of looking at a watchbird<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* \u00a0 \u00a0 * \u00a0 \u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>Probably the easiest way to put this together\u2014especially since you&#8217;re now more or less familiar with how it works\u2014would be <a title=\"Storify\" href=\"http:\/\/storify.com\/\">Storify<\/a>\u00a0(though you&#8217;re welcome to do it another way if you prefer). \u00a0You can assemble and arrange the items in whatever order and whatever fashion you like, provided they&#8217;re all there. \u00a0You might or might not have text between some of the items, weaving them together. \u00a0You might or might not have an intro and\/or conclusion of some sort. \u00a0For the textual items, you might either type them in the Storify story itself (by clicking in a blank space to start a text field), or you might embed them as other kinds of objects (e.g. a tweet, or a screen-captured image of the text written by hand, or an audio recording of the text embedded via Soundcloud, or a video of you reading or scrolling through the text embedded via YouTube, etc.). \u00a0You should, as always, feel free to be creative with this, even beyond the creativity the assignment more or less forces you into; again, as long as you&#8217;re including each of the specified items, any further embellishment or alteration is entirely up to you.<\/p>\n<p>The goal here is to generate some traction on surveillance and surveillance culture by looking at them from a number\u00a0of different perspectives, articulating them in a number\u00a0of different ways, zooming in on different parts and presenting them in different lights. \u00a0One thing we&#8217;ve discovered over the course of the semester is that surveillance culture is a difficult thing to see, identify, and understand if we&#8217;re looking at it head-on; attempting to tackle it in total is like staring at the sun, or like tracking the movement of some object that&#8217;s always in our peripheral vision. \u00a0The hope here is that even if it&#8217;s prohibitively difficult to articulate clearly and directly what surveillance culture is and how it works\u2014the staring at the sun model\u2014then we can at least assemble some incisive sense of it from these various partial, peripheral-vision perspectives.<\/p>\n<p>In other words: \u00a0maybe this haphazard assemblage of a bunch of weird little objects is really the only way to pin down surveillance culture, to delineate and articulate and analyze it, to poke and prod at its workings.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With a tip of the hat to Wallace Stevens and his blackbird, our second major assignment will aim to shed light on surveillance and surveillance culture through a prism of multiple perspectives. \u00a0Specifically, you should produce each of the following thirteen pieces as a way of articulating what surveillance culture is and does, arranged in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57,"parent":20,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-100","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/100\/revisions\/106"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/20"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}