Storytelling -- Nic Mooney

Primarily drawing upon Anna Tsing's Friction, Jon Kleinberg's The Structure of the Web, and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, I'm interested in exploring how the virtual world not only projects popular (il)literacy on a mass scale, but also contributes to a culture of storytelling, not only in the more classic style of blog posts, but also in Facebook and Twitter updates, a lens that many peers freely admit they have begun to think of their days through. The awareness of an audience causes a narrativization of the everyday, a way of the virtual leaking into the physical. I want to tie this into the allegorical Bre-X story, namely the establishment of mythos as a form of self-promotion, thus relating back to websites' (and in Snow Crash, rafts') constant need to re-link and re-connect to stay afloat -- a perpetual need to assert identity. If one's storytelling is subpar, they receive little attention, and if their storytelling is sporadic or totally absent, they cease to exist in the virtual world -- Facebook even helpfully suggests you write on the walls of the inactive or unpopular, to see how they're doing. To stay alive in the virtual world, one cannot ever put both feet in the physical world.