Blog#5:Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Senior Project

The meaning behind the title of my blog is the similarities between the thesis of Janet Murray's book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, and the Communications & Information Technology (CIT) senior project. The thesis of Murray's book is to use the developments in digital technology as a way to create new forms of narrative. This is the same notion behind Macon State College(MSC) CIT senior project. Not so much in the same words, but the idea implied are the same. According to the Humanities Division website, the CIT senior project is "a bridge between the humanities curriculum and the information technology coursework"(1). The CIT senior project consists of three components: a paper, technology, and oral. The three components of the project go hand and hand, but for the purpose of this blog I want to focus on the paper and technology portion of the project in relation to Murray's thesis.

The CIT senior project allows students to come up with topics to analyze through research, using books or a computer, and in the end produce a paper and technology component that gives readers a form of storytelling that investigates and solves the topic in question. Is this not the same idea Murray is discussing in her book? In her novel she says the computer is "first and foremost a representational medium, a means for modeling the world that adds its own potent properties to the traditional media it has assimilated so quickly. As the most powerful representational medium yet invented, it should be put to the highest tasks of society" (284). This is exactly what the research for and technology portion of the CIT senior project does for the paper. The technology portion of the CIT senior project augments, illustrates, or complements in some way the research conducted. In other words it aides the paper in getting its point across to readers in a new way or a new medium.

Whether or not the point I am making is correct, I feel that the CIT senior project is somewhat related to the thesis of Murray's book of digital medium creating a new form of narrative. The point behind the CIT senior project is for students to come up with a way of telling and/or displaying their topic arguments through technology and writing. If this is so, is blogger a digital medium for creating a new form of narrative as Murray's books suggests?or is it not?

Works Cited

Humanities Division: CIT Senior Project. Ed. Amy Berke.Macon State College.2006.22 March 2007 http://humanities.maconstate.edu/cit-seniorproject.

Murray, Janet. Hamlet On the Holodeck. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997.