Final Paper Proposal: Distraction and Action

In our discussions throughout the semester it has struck me how often there seems to simply be too much information to form coherent sentences or even arguments. This has demonstrated itself in section, but also in the readings themselves as they take on the subject of reconciling global and local relationships and, in a certain way, try to resolve the problem of too much information. Moreover, it is interesting to think through the ways multiple theorists have written about this excess of information and the way it engages with people through new media such as facebook and twitter. For many of them, and as seems to be the case in our discussions, distraction seems to be a recurring motif in the information age. For much of the semester I had been thinking about distraction caused by networks to be an unfortunate consequences of networked culture, although our most recent reading has made me rethink this. Particularly I am interested in Tsing's political use of "gaps" and the way in which she almost writes for a distracted reader.

For my final paper then, I would like to engage with new social media like twitter and facebook, and explore their role in creating/accessing distraction. In doing so I would like to explore distraction as a potentially political mode/moment of concousness and what it is exactly that we are being distracted from.