WRIT Large 8.3: Media in Our Lives

WRITL ARGE RETROSPECTIVE

JULY 2019 VOLUME 8, ISSUE 3: MEDIA IN OUR LIVES

Š UNIVERSITY OF DENVER WRITING PROGRAM

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An Introduction to Issue 3 “Media in our Lives” In 1964, Marshall McLuhan declared that “the medium is the message,” by which he meant, for example, that the fact that people were getting their news through a TV was more significant than the news’ actual content. Media, in other words, had greater power to effect change in our attitudes than the news items that those media channeled. Three years later, McLuhan announced in a book title that The Medium is the Massage, by which he meant, maybe, that various kinds of media “massage” our senses. They can dull us to life. Sedate us.

Are these revelations true today, as we mosey and scroll our way through the Internet? Are we dulled to life by Facebook and Twitter? Are there alternative platforms that can excite our senses, or allow for meaningful points of connection with others? In this issue of WRIT Large Retrospective, three DU students provide insightful glimpses into the role of media in our lives.

— Blake Sanz Teaching Associate Professor University Writing Program

Contents pg. 5

Monica McFadden, “The Spinning of Yarns”

Originally published in WRIT Large Volume 5 (2016) pg. 13

Lena Kern, “A Quaker Student in the Age of Facebook”

Originally published in WRIT Large Volume 6 (2017) pg. 16

Matt Gotlin-Sheehan, “Egypt, Facebook & the Internet Revolution”

Originally published in WRIT Large Volume 1 (2012) pg. 21

Meet Our Authors

pg. 22

Call for Submissions

pg. 23

Acknowledgments

F o r S a l e : b a b y s h o e s, n e v e r w o r n .

Th e S p i n n i ng

of

Y a r ns

Monica McFadden

by WRIT 1633: The Creative Inquiry of Research | Professor LP Picard Originally published in WRIT Large Volume 5 (2016)

IN NOVEMBER OF 2006, SMITH MAGAZINE IGNITED THE six-word story craze. Inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s famous story, the magazine challenged writers to create their own six-word memoir. The legend goes that a few other writers bet Hemingway that he couldn’t tell a story in just six words. He wrote “for sale: baby shoes, never worn” and won the bet. It turns out this legend is not actually true; Hemingway didn’t pen this particular tale, and parts of this story have been discovered in sources that predate his era. That the origin of this craze is, in fact, a story itself only serves to fuel its impact. Many authors have attempted the six-word story, and the results are endless.1 They cover almost every genre, and there are even Twitter accounts for them (@sixwords and @sixwordstories). Some more comedic examples include Margaret Atwood’s “Starlet sex scandal. Giant squid involved” and David Brin’s “Bang postponed.

Not Big enough. Reboot.” This trend demonstrates the draw of a simple challenge: stripping down a story to its core and exploring what it truly means to create.

Stories come in an ever-increasing number of forms but lie at the core of human understanding; stories are how we relate to each other.

They allow us to live other lives and help others to live ours. Here, stories of all kinds will come together to take us back to our storytelling roots.

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IN WHICH PEOPLE BECOME WORDS In 2003, writer and artist Shelley Jackson penned a 2,095-word story called “Skin.” It was never published traditionally. Instead, the story exists only in the form of tattoos on the skin of over 2,000 volunteers: a single word inked onto various participants to create one strangely connected, living and breathing story. It’s impossible to assemble the story completely; not only are the participants disparate, but one of them has even died. The only people allowed to read the story are the participants themselves. They’re sworn to secrecy, so no one else will ever know the narrative. This story has a tangible existence, though only just; the project itself isn’t even complete. But it does exist, the words moving around through life, unread, living on the skin of thousands of people.

Jackson refers to the participants as “words,” writing in an e-mail to the LA Times: I usually call them words, or my words, as in, ‘I got an angry e-mail from one of my words,’ or ‘Two of my words just got married!’ […] Only the death of words effaces them from the text.

As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died.’ I am a word myself: the title, Skin.

To be part of an ever-changing story that no one will read screams “human!” in a singularly symbolic way. Jackson’s story is constantly evolving, just as our individual lives are, and very few can sit down and read the convoluted story that encompasses its many moving parts. It mirrors the messy way stories play out in our lives and the fact that we won’t ever be able to read the ways in which we are all connected.

Stories don’t have to be tangible to leave a mark on us.2 The mode by which a story is told says a lot about the story itself and its author. Jackson wrote a story that can never truly be read. In this unusual case, the mode is more widely known than the story’s plot. One could even argue that the mode is the story, and that’s the point of this whole experiment to begin with. The form eclipses the content and takes on a life of its own.

One of the “words” in this project, Jess Zimmerman (“away,”), has written about her experience 1

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for xoJane. While the project is a fascinating concept as a whole, Zimmerman also recognizes the significance of the words themselves: When I got my word, I had just decided to leave graduate school, and the man who’d been colonizing my brain for years was moving to another country. I had all the relief and vertigo that accompanies new freedom. That’s part of what ‘away,’ means to me, and thus what it means in the story. Every word we use has a story of its own, one that authors can make use of but that’s totally outside the realm of authorial control.

To think that each word we use has its own history, its own story outside of the one we’re telling, is exhilarating. These stories permeate our rhetoric in ways we rarely consider and give life to speech that usually only exists in fantasy. Suddenly, everyday language is elevated to magical incantations, but with the history and personality of individual people. In “The Magical Power of Words,” S.J. Tambiah explores the nature of words in ritual, sacred, and magical contexts and examines what gives these words their power. He argues that “sacred words are thought to possess a special kind of power not normally associated with ordinary language,” though he wonders how much this is “due to the fact that the sacred language as such may be exclusive and different from the secular or profane.” In the context of Skin, every word, no matter how ordinary, possesses this special kind of power due to the exclusive nature of the project.

Each word’s sacred quality is shaped by its many layers of connotations.

Zimmerman goes on to say: I turned out to know a “the” before I ever learned about the project, but only found out she was a word much later. I ran into “them” and “grows” on the Metro once. I got together with “memorious.” when I was giving a paper on “Skin” at a conference in grad school […]

In the original story, our words are nowhere near each other, but in the real story—the story of what words do, alone and together, when they’re set free—we appeared in each other’s texts for a while. […] It isn’t really that

There are best-selling books (including Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure), Tumblr pages, YouTube channels, Flickr image galleries, and more, all dedicated to these stories.

Pun intended once realized.

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[Jackson’s] turning people into her words; it’s that she’s turning her words into people.

Jackson’s tangible story is a unique one, that’s for sure. But in reality, it’s simply bringing to light the infinite interactions between ordinary people.

Everyone is part of many overlapping stories, not just the one it seems they’ve been written into. People are messily bumping into one another, exchanging pasts and sharing futures. And when one dies, it does indeed affect many stories.

IN WHICH A BOY LOSES HIS STORY Serial, a popular podcast hosted and produced by Sarah Koenig, tells the true story of the murder of high school student Hae Min Lee in 1999. Hae’s ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was convicted of the crime and is now serving a life sentence. However, the conviction of Adnan3 sits on a rocky story, with many elements that don’t add up. Koenig released the episodes in weekly installments, sharing information while she was still investigating and making listeners wait on pins and needles for answers.

The mysterious nature of the story shot the podcast to fame.4 The popularity of the podcast 5 led to Adnan’s story being pulled apart and examined by amateur sleuths. Adnan’s life story, as well as the other people involved in the case, has been appropriated by the podcast. Koenig portrays him in a mostly positive light, but Adnan has little control over his own personal story. Adnan offers his voice through phone interviews with Koenig from prison, but ultimately, Koenig and the producers have control over his representation.

This begs the questions: Who has the right to tell your story? As soon as you tell your story, does 3

it belong to those who hear it? And do they have any commitment to the way you originally told it?

This question of agency has caused some controversy surrounding the podcast. The experiences of Adnan, a teenager from a Muslim family, and Hae, daughter to Korean immigrants, are filtered through Koenig’s flawed ethnographic interpretation. Sociologist John Van Maanen writes in Tales of the Field that ethnography “rests on the peculiar practice of representing the social reality of others through the analysis of one’s own experience in the world of these others.” Koenig tries, but ultimately fails, to get a full grasp on the cultures that Hae and Adnan come from and the nuances of their lives.6 After all, Koenig is a white reporter for This American Life, which isn’t exactly the ideal candidate for analyzing a racially nuanced situation. Jay Caspian Kang discusses this in his article “White Reporter Privilege,” noting that “the listener is asked to simply trust Koenig’s translation of two distinct immigrant cultures.” Koenig reacts to aspects of their lives with naïve surprise due to the internalized stereotypes she has. In the second episode, Koenig remarks, “[Hae’s] diary, by the way— well I’m not exactly sure what I expected her diary to be like but—it’s such a teenage girl’s diary,” as if Hae weren’t actually a typical teenage girl.

Koenig also blatantly skips over one of the most prominent parts of the narrative—that the Baltimore criminal justice system in the late 1990s didn’t favor Muslims or black men. She’s surprised to hear that prejudice and racism might play a role in the arrests and doesn’t fully delve into that impact. As innocent as these intentions might be, attempting to tell a story you don’t fully understand

I recognize that I should be referring to Adnan and Hae by their last names. I naturally call them by their first names in both writing and discussion, mostly because that’s how they are referred to in the podcast, which prompts an interesting question about using their first names. It makes them both more relatable to the audience, but at the same time it perpetuates the idea that they are simply characters in a story. I’m sticking with the first names here because I’ve become familiar with them, and “Lee” and “Syed” feel too distant now. However, the implications do create some food for thought.

Trust me, this story is addicting. I listened to the entire podcast, all twelve episodes, within about 24 hours. As a heads up, to spare anyone the disappointment I felt, the podcast doesn’t come to a definitive conclusion as to Adnan’s guilt (although he certainly doesn’t appear so). The podcast’s popularity inspired a group of lawyers, led by Rabia Chaundry (who appears in Serial), to return to the case. To follow this story, listen to the new podcast Undisclosed.

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In an article about Serial ’s success, CNN estimated that the podcast was downloaded 40 million times during its first 13 weeks.

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Koenig makes a number of assumptions about Hae and Adnan’s upbringing throughout the podcast. She puts words in Adnan’s mouth about the struggles of his cultural upbringing; he uses the term “parameters” when talking about the constraints of his family life, and Koenig interprets this as “immigrant parents,” a term Adnan never uses. As Julia Carrie Wong argues in her article “The Problem with ‘Serial’ and the Model Minority Myth,” “every positive detail is surprising, while the potentially negative details are assumed.”

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is dangerous; it can severely warp listeners’ understanding of situations and cultures.

While Adnan is certainly the face of a case that is now being picked apart by the masses, this “story” didn’t just happen to him. It affected a whole group of people involved in the case, and their stories are also pulled into the podcast. Guardian journalist Jon Ronson spoke with Adnan’s family about their reactions to Serial. Ronson says that “Yusuf [Adnan’s younger brother] spends a lot of time online, lurking on Reddit, although he knows ‘it’s just toxic.’ [Ronson asks:] ‘Toxic because five million detectives are all studying Adnan’s voice for clues as to whether he’s a psychopath?’” This treatment of Adnan’s life as some kind of crime show plot to be solved by the public is exactly what’s making the strange fame so difficult, both for him and his family. Each member of Adnan’s family grapples with the stress of the coverage from the podcast in different ways; his father even suffers from depression but won’t address it. It’s not just a story for them; it’s their lives.

So are your experiences solely your own? Well, in Adnan’s case, apparently not. His story also belongs to his community, to Koenig, and now to the audience.

The problem with agency in storytelling is that what’s portrayed as truth becomes fact when it’s the only version heard. Koenig’s interpretation of the story isn’t all bad or necessarily incorrect, but it is what shot Adnan’s story to fame and is largely the only version that has been heard. When specific stories become the narrative for entire groups without their consent, the true understanding of people’s experiences can be completely lost. Adnan’s story may only affect a relatively small group of people, but how much of our history—our world’s history—is told through the warped interpretations of others?

IN WHICH THE TROLLS ON MY SHELF COME TO LIFE AT NIGHT When I was young and falling asleep in my lilacpainted bedroom, my parents would sit on my bed 7

Fifty percent of the time, she’d just fall asleep. I inherited my atrocious sleep schedule from her, so now I understand where she was coming from.

This was a McFadden tradition, coming from my Dad’s side of the family. My grandparents had a whole shelf of trolls in their old house, and my cousins and I would play with them when we were young. Only looking back on it now do I realize how vaguely creepy they were.

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and tell me stories. My mom always crawled in next to me, regardless of the fact that there was little room in my twin bed with me and my battalion of stuffed animals.7 She would tell me “Amy” stories about a girl who loved to climb, the Empire State Building being one of her many conquered destinations. Sometimes we would do “fill-in-the-blank” stories in which I would excitedly start off, “Once upon a time there was a—” and anxiously await her sleepy reply.

On the other hand, my dad—often the more alert and willing one—would tell Troll Stories.

They documented the nighttime escapades of the trolls (those squat, wispy-haired dolls from the 1990s) who lined my windowsill.8 Each episode starred Monica, who woke up in the middle of the night to discover that the trolls were missing.

She would go downstairs to the kitchen and help them get food and supplies before bringing them back upstairs to the windowsill. Each morning, she would wake up to find them exactly as they were before, not knowing if it was real or a dream.

These stories have left lasting impacts on my understanding of the world. Amy was adventurous and fearless, and went after her goals with determination. In the troll stories, Monica blurred the line between dreams and reality, and used creativity to help her friends. These stories stressed values that I still hold dear today, values that are important to my whole family.

Many people have similar memories and will be able to recall a popular bedtime story from their childhood, a favorite book beloved by the whole family, or a classic family event that grows more dramatic each time it’s retold. These stories lie at the core of human connection and help to build our ideas of who we are.

As a matter of fact, this act of oral storytelling is likely one of the oldest and most extensive traditions to date. As educator and author Dr. Michael Lockett discusses in The Basics of Storytelling, this practice has existed since the dawn of humankind.

He identifies one of the oldest records of oral storytelling from Egypt (sometime between 2000–1300

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BCE), where three sons entertained their father Khufu with spoken-word stories. Telling stories is an intimate way of establishing strong familial bonds with someone and has brought grandparents, parents, and children together for centuries.

Oral storytelling hasn’t been used strictly for entertainment. It has been used to preserve the narratives of entire peoples. The biblical tales of Abraham and Moses were the defining stories of the Hebrew people, helping them understand who they were at their core. For centuries, they’ve told the stories of their people, stories of perseverance and loyalty, history mingled with myth, tying each person together through a common narrative.

A common narrative can define thousands of people for generations on end or tell the simple story of a single family. The common narrative of my family is found through a past in Indonesia. My dad spent part of his childhood as a missionary kid living in Tomohon while my grandpa was a doctor. My siblings, my cousins, and I have all grown up hearing stories about our parents’ time there— climbing up the volcano behind their house, the pet monkey they had in their backyard, the giant beetles they would tie strings to and play with. All of these little windows into the past connect us to this distant place with which none of us have firsthand experience. Our parents’ and grandparents’ past in Indonesia is a way we all construct our self image; it helps us understand what it means to be a McFadden.

IN WHICH SHIPS ARE NOT BOATS Readers have always manipulated and adapted stories, but the modern practice of fan fiction is a new take on this. Entire sites are dedicated to fan stories set in the universes of fans’ favorite books, films, and television shows. Modern technology has made it easier than ever to create and distribute fan fiction.

This subculture includes everything from horribly written stories in which the characters are nothing like the originals to brilliant writing that explores aspects of a story previously left unexamined. Fans write in alternate universes (AUs), set classic stories 9

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in modern times, or “ship” 9 characters.

While digital technology has made it easier to produce and distribute fan fiction, the practice is not exclusive to this millennium. The Brontë children, including Charlotte of Jane Eyre fame, wrote fiction about the real-life 1st Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, and his two sons, Arthur and Charles. Charlotte and Branwell, the only Brontë brother, wrote in a fantasy world called Angria. In 1833, at age 17, Charlotte wrote a tale called “Something About Arthur,” the hand-stitched book measuring just three and a half inches tall and 25 pages long. Rebecca Onion, of Slate’s history blog The Vault, reports that, in typical Brontë fashion, “its plot follows two aristocratic brothers, one of whom narrates the story of the other’s romantic encounter with a poor, but worthy, peasant girl.” There’s no doubt that the Brontë siblings would have fared quite well in the world of Tumblr fan fiction, given that they so enjoyed documenting fictional tales of their aristocratic heroes.10 Classical fan fiction also includes E. Nesbit’s work The Magic World, part of which is heavily influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Furthermore, elements of E. Nesbit’s The Magic World directly inspired works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. One story in The Magic World, “The Aunt and Amabel,” follows a little girl who travels to another world through a wardrobe. It’s clear that the audience’s need to add their own voice to a story and to interact with those worlds isn’t a new desire. So why has this desire been a strong motivation for so long?

This deep interaction with stories can give the reader a sense of ownership over the story once they begin to create within it. This is completely different from simply reading a favorite book; fans change integral parts of characters and settings. As a reader of fan fiction, not a writer myself, my perception of these manipulations is that the writers are interested in changing the atmosphere around a character to see how they react. The interpretation of these characters depends on the author, and each

“Ship” or “shipping,” short for “relationship,” is a term used when fans pair certain characters in romantic relationships. While this can be a relationship depicted in the story itself, it’s often with characters who are not canonically together, such as Harry/ Draco (the Harry Potter series) or Eponine/Enjolras (Les Miserables). These ships can also occur across fandoms, and, yes, can be as ridiculous as Anne Frank/Goku (Dragonball Z). A real person thought that was a good idea.

What I would give to see what the Brontë siblings would post on fanfiction.net these days. Do I sense a coffee shop AU?

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one inserts a little of themselves into their fan fiction. Fans can also help a story continue after the film, books, or episodes end.

Until recently, fan fiction existed independently of the canon.11 Today, a web series called Kissing in the Rain has its own unusual twist on fan fiction. After each episode is released, any fan fiction reblogged by the creators on the official Tumblr of the series becomes canon. This is what makes Kissing in the Rain so innovative: fans become an integral part of the creation process. This turns the creator/audience relationship on its head and gives the fans a great deal of agency. Now, their headcanons12 and wishes for the story aren’t just buried in the depths of a fan fiction site; they’re laced into the actual narrative itself.

After going through a distinct Les Miserables phase in high school, I read a decent amount of Les Mis fan fiction. The interesting thing about the world of Les Miserables fan fiction is that it exists almost entirely in modern AUs. This is mainly due to the fact that roughly 98% of the characters are dead at the end.13 Modern alternate universes allow the fans to fully explore the characters in different situations.14 Enjolras, the fierce revolutionary leader, might be fighting for racial equality and LGBT rights instead of for the freedom of France.

Les Amis de l’ABC15 could be high school or university students ablaze with the passion of revolution all the same, regardless of the century-and-ahalf time gap.

These characters have been entirely removed from their original setting and situation, and yet the writers still pull integral elements of their personalities from the book to flavor their actions.

While it may be a very different story, I often find myself thinking that Victor Hugo might not be too opposed.16 Taking a narrative from the past and connecting it to the present is an important way 11

IN WHICH STORIES DON’T CHECK THEIR WATCHES The oldest surviving story is The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Carved into a clay tablet by the Mesopotamians in about 2100 BCE, it is likely a written version of tales that had been previously told by word of mouth for ages. This ancient story follows Gilgamesh— part man, part god—through his encounters with many gods, monsters, and heroes. One major part of the story recounts a great flood sent by the gods to wipe out humankind. However, the god of wisdom warns one man of the plan and instructs him to build a boat to save his family and all living creatures. After the flood, the gods regret what they’ve done and promise never to do it again.

Sound familiar? Many would recognize this as the story of Noah’s Ark, but all major world religions have great flood stories. The oldest surviving story continues to appear in modern culture thousands of years later. Although under a vague guise, it’s still being adapted into cartoony children’s

The “canon” of a story is what’s actually part of the narrative written by the author. Fan fiction can be canonically correct (occur alongside the storyline) or go against canon (deviate from what’s published).

“Headcanon” refers to a particular belief or idea which is not part of a story’s canon, but makes sense to an individual fan. It is an individual’s “personal canon.”

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A personal estimation on my part, though quite accurate, I think.

Like ones in which they’re not all dead.

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for us to understand events and people in history.

Our history is largely told through stories, and the ones that stick with us help us to see famous artists, revolutionary politicians, and even ordinary people from the past as clearly as we see ourselves.

Often, people’s perception of fan fiction is that it’s juvenile and strange and not real writing. But all writers are heavily influenced by their favorite works; fan fiction is just up front about it. Originality is somewhat of an illusion; many works are amalgamations of influences and previous ideas morphed into different forms and drawing new connections. We have a constant need to take our favorite things and adapt them to make them our own; we can’t just be passive readers but instead want to be co-creators and participate fully in the story-making process.

The Friends of the ABC, or the Barricade Boys. The “ABC” is a pun—the French “abaissés,” meaning “lowly” or “abased,” is pronounced “a-be-se.”

This is partly due to the sheer amount of Enjolras/Grantaire fan fiction that exists, a pairing that cheeky Victor Hugo blatantly supported in the book. After all, the two die hand in hand.

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books and movies with Russell Crowe and Emma Watson.

Storyteller Joe Sabia explains in his TED talk, “The art of storytelling has remained unchanged.

And for the most part, the stories are recycled. But the way that humans tell the stories has always evolved with pure, consistent novelty.” While the heart of the story may remain the same, the shifting elements and its form are always changing. This sentiment doesn’t only belong to Sabia.

Christopher Booker explores this idea in his masterpiece The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.

Booker argues that we’ve been telling the same stories throughout history, from our oral storytelling roots to TV shows and movies today. While there are theories for why we gravitate toward these story arcs, nobody is completely sure.17 Joseph Campbell’s famous work on the “Hero’s Journey” illustrates this same idea—the same narrative of the hero archetype has been told throughout all of history, whether in Beowulf or Star Wars.18 It seems as though these stories are rooted in cultures around the world throughout the centuries because they’re rooted in human nature. Stories are a current running through all of humanity that can connect us to our past, present, and future.

Arthur A. Brown muses in his essay “Storytelling, the Meaning of Life, and The Epic of Gilgamesh”: We read The Epic of Gilgamesh, four thousand years after it was written […] because we want to know the meaning of life. […] There is an infinite continuity of meaning that can be comprehended only by seeing again, for ourselves. We read stories—and reading is a kind of re-telling—not to learn what is known but to know what cannot be known, for it is ongo-

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ing and we are in the middle of it.

This can all sound very philosophical and abstract, but what he’s saying is that reading old stories from history, like the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, tells us something about ourselves, something inherent in us as humans.

Sarah Kay is a spoken-word poet who often works with youth to help them find their version of this meaning of life through workshops and lectures. In her TED Talk, “If I Should Have a Daughter…,” she describes her first experience with spoken word poetry at age 14: My first spoken-word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. […]

The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off the stage, I was shaking. I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd. She was maybe eight feet tall and looked like she could beat me up with one hand, but instead she just nodded at me and said, “Hey, I really felt that.

Thanks.”

That’s what this whole storytelling thing is about.

It’s the reason we, as humans, rely so much on narratives in every aspect of our lives. Telling stories reveals something innate in us as humans, tugging at our need to relate and understand. It allows us to connect on a basic level with people from all different backgrounds and find a personal truth in the tales that have been told for generations. It’s about putting convoluted human experiences into words, a fuzzy mingling of truth and fiction, and having someone, somewhere, say, “Hey, I really felt that.”

One theory explored in Booker’s work, shared by many late 19th century writers, is that these stories simply served to explain and act as metaphors for natural phenomena that people didn’t understand. For instance, dragons and monsters in stories would stem from the discovery of dinosaur bones. Now, scholars tend to agree that there’s no one answer for why certain stories keep cropping up throughout history.

Campbell fully explores and details the Hero’s Journey in his revolutionary book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

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WORKS CONSULTED Anderson, Douglas A., ed. Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Del Ray / Ballantine, 2008. Print.

Anderson, Douglas A., ed. Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy. New York: Del Ray / Ballantine, 2003. Print.

Berg, Pete. Six Word Stories. Pete Berg, 2009. Web. 2 June 2015.

Booker, Christopher. The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006. Print.

Brown, Arthur A. “Storytelling, the Meaning of Life, and The Epic of Gilgamesh.” Exploring Ancient World Cultures. University of Evansville, 1996. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.

Bricken, Rob. “Fan Fiction Friday: Goku and Anne Frank in ‘Until the End of Time.’” The Robot’s Voice. Voice Media Group Inc., 19 Dec. 2008. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3rd ed. Novato: New World Library, 2008. Print.

Fershleiser, Rachel and Larry Smith, eds. Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Print.

“Headcanon.” Urban Dictionary. Urban Dictionary, 12 July 2012. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

Jackson, Shelley. “Skin Guidelines.” Shelley Jackson’s Ineradicable Stain. Shelley Jackson. n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.

Kang, Jay Caspian. “White Reporter Privilege.” The Awl. The AWL, 13 Nov. 2014. Web. 23 Oct. 2015.

Kay, Sarah. “If I Should Have a Daughter…” TED2011. TED Conferences LLC. Long Beach, CA, 3 Mar. 2011. Lecture.

Kellogg, Carolyn. “Shelley Jackson’s Skin Project 2.0.” LA Times Blog. Los Angeles Times, 1 Mar. 2011. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.

Koenig, Sarah. “Episode 2: The Breakup.” Audio blog post. Serial Podcast. This American Life, Oct. 2014. Web. 6 Apr. 2015.

Lockett, Michael. “History of Storytelling,” The Basics of Storytelling. Taipei: Caves Educational Technology Company, 2008. Digital. 2 June 2015.

Onion, Rebecca. “A Teenaged Charlotte Brontë’s Tiny Little Romance.” Web blog post. The Vault. The Slate Group LLC, 13 Mar. 2013. Web. 2 June 2015.

Roberts, Amy. “The ‘Serial’ Podcast: By the numbers.” CNN.com. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., 23 Dec. 2014. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

Ronson, Jon. “Serial: The Syed Family on Their Pain and the ‘Five Million Detectives Trying to Work Out if Adnan is a Psychopath.’” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited, 7 Dec. 2014. Web. 6 Apr. 2015.

Sabia, Joe. “The Technology of Storytelling.” Full Spectrum Auditions. TED Conferences LLC. New York, 24 May 2011. Lecture.

Six Words, LLC. “Six Words.” SMITH Magazine, 2005. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

Tambiah, S.J. “The Magical Power of Words.” Man 3.2 (1968): 175–208. Web. 2 June 2015.

Van Maanen, John. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. 2nd ed. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2011. Print.

Wong, Julia Carrie. “The Problem with ‘Serial’ and the Model Minority Myth.” Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed, Inc., 16 Nov. 2014.

Web. 23 Oct. 2015.

Zimmerman, Jess. “My Life as a Word: How I Became Part of the ‘Skin’ Short Story Project.” xoJane. Time Inc. Style Network, 10 Nov. 2011. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.

Opening Image on Page 5 © David Alonso | Flickr.com

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by

Lena Kern

WRIT 1122 Rhetoric & Academic Writing | Professor Blake Sanz

Originally published in WRIT Large Volume 6 (2017)

I NEVER KNEW I WAS RAISED QUAKER. ACTUALLY, I WAS formally raised Presbyterian. I went to a Presbyterian preschool attached to my Presbyterian church. My parents taught Sunday school, and we sang Sunday school songs at bedtime. I drank grape juice at communion and prayed to God every night. I knew that Grandpa was up in Heaven, that Jesus loved me, and that Pastor Brett was Dad’s brother.

I was three when Mom brought salamander eggs from the local pond to my preschool show-and-tell. I was four when I went to my first summer camp, rustic and Quaker-influenced, in the Maryland foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. I was five when I first vouched for the life of a caterpillar. Around the same age, I learned to make fire. Before long, I also learned to catch salamanders, raise tadpoles, pick edible berries, and carve twig pens. At home, I didn’t want Grandma to babysit because she couldn’t fathom that my parents didn’t make me wear shoes.

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The summer after I turned ten, I went to my first sleep-away camp, where I fell in love with being Quaker. Every morning as we raised the flag, we held hands in a circle and sang: “God has created a new day / Silver and green and gold. / Live that the sunset may find us / Worthy his gifts to hold.” Circles were important in other ways, too.

We sat in circles when resolving a conflict. Around a campfire, we sang Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.” For the same reason, the infinity symbol was chosen to represent the camp. Years later, my friends and I completed our own loop by returning to work as counselors.

Every day at that first sleep-away, we chose our activities, and every night, our counselor kissed us goodnight. I remember thinking that I’d never been in a place where I felt I belonged more. On Sundays, we would bring blankets into the woods, listen to the birds, and look at the light through the trees. Some kids would sleep, some would write or strum a guitar, and then silence would fall again.

This was the only kind of Sunday service that I ever felt within me, and through it I bound myself to the lifestyle.

And this truth defines Quakerism: it devotes itself more to a lifestyle than to a deity. Some Quakers are theist, some are nontheist, and some do not define themselves by a belief in a conventional god but find spirituality within their relationships, their inner selves, and nature. Worship happens in a meetinghouse, without the guidance of any authority. Members sit in silence until someone is moved to speak to the room, to offer a perspective, an experience, a reflection. At those summer camps, we had cell service—maybe—if we stood on top of a rock. Enough to call an ambulance if we needed one. But most nights, I would make a fire while my co-counselor, the camp nurse, and her children cooked dinner in the dining hall.

These friendships, they weren’t based on compatibility. They were based on a lifestyle.

Quakerism doesn’t choose you. You choose it. No one comes knocking on your door saying, “Please consider joining the Society of Friends or you’re going to Hell.” I chose it because of our Sunday summer meetings in the woods. I found myself, as a ten-year-old child, and I found myself every summer after that.

When I tell people that I am Quaker, I frequently get asked, “Do Quakers reject technology?”

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I think that it is less that they reject technology and more that they—we—are wary of its influence.

In Stranger Things, the Netflix original series, the main characters discover an alternative world called “The Upside Down.” It mirrors the real world, but in a way that reflects the antithesis of the real world. Its ugly side. And unfortunately, the way I use Facebook reflects The Upside Down of the Quaker ideals I have come to love: presence in the moment, conscientiousness in my relationships.

When I write (when I actually write, which is not often nowadays), I write until I am satisfied.

My thoughts have a certain rhythm. But I don’t feel my writing anymore. When I open my copy of The Essential Rumi, I remember how I used to read it at camp, but that has changed, too. Once, my friend and I sat on a bridge above a small stream, surrounded by the green forests of beech, birch, and sassafras. There, we talked about our lives, and I read from Khalil Gibran’s “On Joy and Sorrow.” In that time of my life, reading, writing, talking, and making art were meditative. Now, when I am on Facebook, everything is noise. The memes demand a smirk, the Vines replay without prompt, and the dramatic headlines shamelessly offer click bait.

Everything is screaming, “Look at me!” There is no silence in Facebook.

When two Quakers sit together, the silence is so present that you can feel it open awareness between them. It’s a holistic type of being together. I used to sit at Red Emma’s, a coffee shop on North Avenue, to have a cup of tea with a friend. Our conversations could last for hours. But the conversation didn’t define those afternoons. Rather, it was the idleness between the anecdotes. The sunlight through the glass panes. The way the steam rose between us.

You would think that, with the Quaker emphasis on personal connection, social media would allow me to feel more connected than ever, but I don’t. I have begun to realize that in my online world—reading about activism rather than enacting change, messaging my friends rather than reading with them—my connections are fleeting, shallow, and deceptively lonely.

When people ask me if I’m a Quaker, I say yes.

But then I think, Am I? Two years ago, I was. I felt like one. Last summer I sat in a meetinghouse in Burlington, Vermont, and I felt wholly Quaker.

After one meeting, an elderly woman shared her son’s heartbreaking battle with Leukemia, similar

to one my sister has fought. I didn’t know this woman, but she wrote down her number. “Call me any time,” she said. That was the kind of community I was a part of.

But am I still? Can I be a Quaker without a community? Can I be a Quaker when I would rather watch The Young Turks call out Donald Trump’s psychopathy than venture into the living room to share that space with my roommate? Can I be a Quaker when I make more eye contact with my laptop screen than the girl I’ve lived with for the past two years?

One night, I heard my roommate crying. I looked up from my BuzzFeed video in alarm. But then I remembered her words from the previous night: “You’re being overdramatic.” I’d come to her to confide something, and she’d shut me down. I hovered my finger above the button to pause the video, but her betrayal the night before filled me up like smoke, and I returned my eyes to my screen. I was not proud of myself. Forgiving is a virtue, giving is essential, and I felt in that moment like I had forgotten how to do both. As children in Maryland, my friends and I would take pens and a pocketknife and carve our names into drawings that looked like trees, under quotes from Rumi. Back then, I used Rumi’s words to reflect how I lived, not to remind

me how I should.

Joni Mitchell sings, “We can’t return we can only look / Behind from where we came / And go round and round and round / In the circle game.”

Nowadays, I am less bothered by the fluctuations of who I am and who I’m not. And yet, throughout the years since those summer camps, there have been times when I felt like I was cupping my hands, trying to hold some form of myself in my fingers, only to watch it slip away. I thought that if I let it out, it would be gone forever. It would mean that I was fundamentally changed. But every time that worry emerges, something in my environment shifts—my friends, my city, my memories—and I find that part of myself again.

Today, I don’t see the changes in me as linear. I am all that I have ever been. As contexts change, I will meet parts of myself over and over.

I am Quaker today in an imperfect way. I think Joni Mitchell’s song applies to me: my life is a circle game. There will always be seasons in which I feel close to Quakerism and others when I will feel more detached. And like circles, change is infinite.

Nothing is permanently left behind. Some days, at my lowest, I still feel like Quakerism evades me.

But maybe it’s not crouching in exile. Maybe it’s just waiting patiently for me to come home.

Opening images on page 13 © Fotovika / Shutterstock.com & © JaysonPhotography / Shutterstock.com

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Egypt, Facebook, & The Internet Revolution

DISTANCING OURSELVES FROM “SLACKTIVISM” & OVERTHROWING REGIMES

Matt Gotlin-Sheehan

by WRIT 1622: Advanced Writing Seminar | Professor Douglas Hesse Originally published in WRIT Large Volume 1 (2012)

SPENDING AN EVENING AT HOME BROWSING THE NOOKS and crannies of Facebook, one can expect to encounter many things: there are the obvious (and often redundant) status updates from friends, colleagues, and the cute girl in my Psych class. There are notes that range from the dull and unnecessary personal surveys, filled out in a fit of boredom, to critiques of music and art, to editorial pieces that conceivably touch on every subject imaginable. There are photos that let me see exactly how much of a fool my friend made of himself at a party last weekend. There is a plethora of simple, easy and addictive games hell-bent on destroying my grade point average.

Then, there are the fan pages and “groups,” where Facebook users can congregate to discuss how much they enjoy the latest Lady Gaga song and revel in how wonderful it is to flip one’s pillow over to sleep on its cold side. Underneath this veil of banality, though, lies a more focused and serious atmosphere. Though the casual Facebook user may be content whiling away the hours looking at photos and interacting with friends, the site is increasingly becoming a launch pad for features that certainly aren’t described in the “About Facebook” section of the homepage.

Much has been made of the somewhat recent trend of “slacktivism,” what Urbandictionary.com calls, “the act of participating in pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to 16

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solve a problem,” that has begun to sweep through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

I count myself among the many annoyed every October when my News Feed becomes clogged with ambiguous status updates from my female “friends” about where they like to keep their purses or what color underwear they wear in an admirable yet hopelessly misguided attempt to “raise awareness” for breast cancer research; or, as it seems to me with each passing year, to raise awareness for breast cancer awareness month. In the same vein, I simply cannot fathom how changing my profile picture to Daffy Duck for a week could possibly put a stop to child abuse, and joining a Facebook group “dedicated” to supporting the homeless just doesn’t seem like a good use of my time, when I could just as easily volunteer at a local homeless shelter if I really wanted to make a difference.

Maybe I just wasn’t getting the big picture – at the time, I thought activism was worthless if it didn’t involve considerable effort, and that this Facebook activism trend was just a way for lazy Internet users to make themselves appear to be good, worldly, or more involved people without having to expend any effort. I thought Internet activism’s contribution to the fight at hand (whatever it may be) was negligible at best, nonexistent at worst. I didn’t sign online petitions, I didn’t join activist Facebook groups, and I didn’t jump on the breast cancer awareness status update bandwagon, because I thought that it was absurd, pointless, and ridiculous. However, in a developing country 6,800 miles to the east, the very same Internet activism that I so despised was feeding the flames of revolution.

On June 6, 2010, 28-year-old Khaled Mohamed Said sat in a cybercafé in Alexandria, Egypt, perhaps doing some work or chatting with friends, when two police officers stormed the building and seized him, dragging him outside and into the street. Eyewitnesses reported the two police officers beat Said repeatedly, bashed his head against walls and staircases despite his pleas for mercy. Evidently, the officers continued their beating until he lay motionless, dead at their feet. The official Khaled Said memorial website quotes the Associated Press as reporting that “Khaled was killed ‘after he posted a video on the Internet of officers sharing the spoils from a drug bust among themselves.’” Egyptians began to ask questions about this horrific event, and as the police and government continued to skirt the

issue, dissent grew and grew. Shortly after Said’s death, Egyptians decided that they’d had enough: that police brutality, government corruption, and the lack of free elections and free speech under 30 year president Hosni Mubarak would not stand.

In what I formerly would have called a laughable move, a Facebook page was created to memorialize the death of Khaled Said to call attention to the despicable circumstances surrounding his murder, as well as to the current political, economic, and ideological conditions in Egypt. As the page gained hundreds of thousands of “fans,” the movement’s momentum began to swell, eventually reaching its zenith in mid-January. In an eerie allusion to events in Tunisia barely a month earlier, a man set himself on fire near the Egyptian parliament building, officially sparking what would become one of the most influential revolutionary events in modern history. Many point to the Khaled Said Facebook page, “We Are All Khaled Said,” as the catalyst for the events that followed, culminating in the ousting of Mubarak from his office in mid-February.

Deemed by some as an “Internet Revolution,” the Egyptian protests of early 2011 stand as a testament to the unifying power of the Internet, in particular social networking, that few seem to comprehend, and most would never expect. Indeed, these protests, fueled by Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, demonstrated how powerful the World Wide Web can be in trumpeting the ideals of democracy and human rights.

There are those, however, in the blogosphere and elsewhere who seem all too eager to discredit the uniting forces of the Internet and social networks, downplaying their key roles in momentous occasions as this. Malcolm Gladwell, for example, writes in his New Yorker blog that “[w]here activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change.” Gladwell essentially asserts that the Internet is actually weakening the potential power of political revolution, due to the ease with which a Facebook or Twitter user can spread information to a large audience. The ease with which users can post online about a cause they believe in essentially dilutes or weakens the overall message, much in the same way as a Facebook user might wish one of her “friends” (who, in actuality, might just be a casual acquaintance) a happy birthday; social networks, Gladwell writes, VOLUME 8, ISSUE 3

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[a]re effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires…In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.

He suggests that “platforms of social media are built around weak ties…Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with…but weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.”

Gladwell recalls a scene from Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, when four young, black college students staged a sit in for racial equality at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. Gladwell describes how the young men endured racial slurs, physical intimidation, an appearance by a local KKK Klansman, and even a bomb threat in their efforts to call attention to what they believed was a true injustice.

He connects this sit-in to the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, a campaign to register black voters in the Deep South. These efforts were undoubtedly met with violence, as four civil rights workers were killed, thirty-seven churches were bombed or burned, and over one thousand people were arrested. “Activism that challenges the status quo,” Gladwell writes, “is not for the faint of heart.” To consider oneself a true activist, according to Gladwell’s standards, an individual must be prepared to put his life and the lives of his family and friends on the line.

Gladwell cements his argument against this so-called “low risk” social activism in another blog post months later, this time in the midst of the Egyptian uprising. “‘High risk’ social activism requires deep roots and strong ties. But surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another…people brought down governments before Facebook… before the Internet…” He seems to suggest here that not only did social media play a minor role in the revolution, but also the political strife in Egypt and in the rest of the Middle East is in some way less important or less effective because “tools of the new media” were used to help organize a political movement. What Gladwell forgets, however, 18

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is that political organization through the Internet can carry very high risk indeed. In fact, in developing countries like Egypt or Libya, it can be just as risky (or even more so) than a first-person method of activism.

Such nations as Egypt and Libya, in the midst of their revolutions, lie under the veil of oppressive authoritarian regimes that limit citizens’ rights to free speech and demonstration and widespread censorship of content, from newspapers to websites. Surely being a party to the collective voice of dissent carries ample risk. For example, in an article published in The Denver Post, reporter Bruce Finley wrote of Libyan students in Colorado faced with threats to their scholarships and tuition money from Muammar Gaddafi’s government, in addition to equally frightening threats against friends, family members, and even employment. If this is the case in Libya, why would it be any different in Egypt, a nation where a man was beaten to death over a protest video he posted on the Internet? Clearly, serious Internet activism is quite a bit more “risky” than Malcolm Gladwell is willing to acknowledge.

Of course, as Gladwell mentions, revolutions have been staged, and governments have been toppled, without the Internet, cell phones, or even television (a medium oft overlooked due to the “I want it now” attitude of the digital age). But the fact that the students of Greensboro in 1964 and the French proletariat in the late sixteenth century didn’t have a tool like the Internet can’t possibly discredit the incredible powers of assembly, organization, networking, and ease of communication that have had critical and demonstrable effect in the Middle East of early 2011. However, it is worth pondering whether the French Revolution would have taken ten years to resolve had a tool like the Internet existed at the time (and whether or not it would have been so gruesome), or whether the American Civil Rights movement would have taken less than its estimated thirteen years to run its course. Although it’s absurd to make hypothetical statements about historical events, it seems a reasonable enough assumption; had the French citizens or American Civil Rights protesters had access to such useful tools as Facebook, Twitter, and cell phones for the purpose of organizing their respective movements, they might have used these tools to their greatest extent, perhaps altering the

course of history. As a responder to Gladwell’s blog wrote in a comment, “The French may not have had Twitter, but they would have used it if they had. There are over twenty million people in Cairo alone. How many lived in Paris?”

The data about Internet usage in the Middle East, and Egypt in particular, are surprising to say the least. As of December 2009, Egypt had close to 16.5 million Internet users. Accounting for population growth, as well as the Internet’s ever-increasing popularity, that number has surely eclipsed that 17 million mark in just over a year. As of July 2010, Facebook users in Egypt ranked 23rd in the world, with over 3.5 million members. As for Twitter, there are at least 14,000 Egyptians using the site on a regular basis; in one of the site’s fastest growing regions, that number is surely increasing at a rapid pace. That’s close to four million people (if we assume, for the sake of argument, that Facebook and Twitter users are mutually exclusive) with the potential to organize enormous political events in a matter of hours. These statistics are surprising to say the least, considering Egypt’s role as a developing nation and the current economic climate of the Middle East and North Africa in particular.

Internet use in Egypt is so significant, in fact, that in the midst of the uprising, the government disabled the web nationwide on January 27, just two days after the protests had “officially” begun, in an effort to prevent communication between members of the revolution (Egypt’s mobile phone and SMS networks were disabled as well). As the commenter from Gladwell’s blog put it, “If the Internet were of no consequence, the [government] would not have shut it down.” In a nation with a rapidly growing number of Internet users, to say that it had little to no effect on the protests would be foolish, to say the least.

Blogger Annie Paul takes a different approach in order to refute Gladwell’s claims and support this point of view. She states, The celebrated revolutions of yesteryear all had heroic leaders around whom sustained acts of dissent, rebellion and revolt were mobilized. What is noteworthy about the recent wave of popular uprisings…is that they have been ‘leaderless revolutions’…the reasons for the shift are attributed to the speed with which information is collected and disseminated by groups of people using the new social networks. The era of the charismatic

leader may be over.

What she is saying, of course, is ultimately true.

It’s difficult to think of a contemporary revolution, act of protest, or large-scale display of dissent that has been spearheaded by a single figure, or small group. In recent history, from the current unrest in the Middle East to Mexican protests of election results in 2008 and beyond, there have been few (if any) political figures widely recognized as spearheading massive social movements. But again, that the Egyptian Revolution can be classified as “leaderless” due to its reliance on the organizing power of the Internet doesn’t make it any less significant, especially considering what this supposed “leaderless” group has accomplished.

Thus far, the Internet has proven instrumental as a catalyst for popular uprisings throughout the Middle East, garnering attention from the worldwide media. Furthermore, if the murder of Khaled Said in Egypt and threats to Libyan students’ visas and scholarship money indicate anything, it’s that web-based activism certainly isn’t without hazards.

It seems the Internet (and social networking in particular) can have all of the characteristics Gladwell insists upon for it to be a driving force in the people’s struggle for democracy: a high-risk factor, a passionate sense of political power, and a population writhing to achieve a common goal.

The only question is whether the people will utilize these means to their full potential. As much as typical Facebook users may or may not be attached to whatever trendy “causes” they’re changing their profile pictures to support, the people of Egypt have demonstrated in textbook fashion how to make social networking work for them to achieve what was previously thought unattainable. Perhaps now when faced with the option to “like” a political effort or charity on Facebook, we can understand what it really takes to make a difference. Activism cannot and should not be defined by the tools its proponents use to organize and achieve their goals, much in the same way activism cannot be achieved by clicking a button on a web page to voice support or uploading a photo of a cartoon duck to a social media website. Activism, as shown by the citizens of Egypt and Libya, is not a website. Activism is not a profile picture, nor is it quantified by how many “likes” or “shares” a web page has, but rather, how these modern resources can be used in support of a completely obtainable goal.

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© Essam Sharaf / Flickr.com

WORKS CITED AliaThabit. “Re: News Desk: Does Egypt Need Twitter?” Web log comment. The New Yorker. 04 Feb. 2011.

Web. 27 Feb. 2011. <http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter. html#commentAnchor_nyr_2000000001154335>.

BentlyJokes. “Most Internet Users in MENA, by Country.” Web log post. Egyptian Stories. 29 Aug. 2010. Web. 2 Mar. 2011. <http://egyptianstories.blogspot.com/2010/08/most-internet-users-in-mena-by-country.html>.

Burcher, Nick. “Facebook Usage Statistics by Country - July 2010 Compared to July 2009 and July 2008.” Web log

post. Nick Burcher. 2 July 2010. Web. 2 Mar. 2011. <http://www.nickburcher.com/2010/07/facebook-usage-statistics-by-country.html>.

“Egypt Internet Market and Telecommunications Reports.” Internet World Stats - Usage and Population Statistics. Web. 2 Mar. 2011. <http://www.internetworldstats.com/af/eg.htm>.

Finley, Bruce. “Crackdown Appalls Libyan Students in U.S.” The Denver Post. 25 Feb. 2011. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. <http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_17478138>.

Gladwell, Malcolm. “News Desk: Does Egypt Need Twitter?” Web log post. The New Yorker. 02 Feb. 2011.

Web. 27 Feb. 2011. <http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter. html#ixzz1DBm3gPxP>.

Gladwell, Malcolm. “Twitter, Facebook, and Social Activism.” Web log post. The New Yorker. 04 Oct. 2010. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. <http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell>.

Malin, Carrington. “MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey.” Spot On PR. 10 Sept. 2009. Web. 2 Mar. 2011. <http://www.spotonpr.com/menatwittersurvey>.

Paul, Annie. “Egypt, Gladwell, and the Social Revolution.” Web log post. Active Voice. Wordpress.com, 06 Feb. 2011.

Web. 27 Feb. 2011. <http://anniepaulose.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/egypt-gladwell-and-the-social-revolution/>.

“Twitter, Facebook, and Social Activism.” The New Yorker. Ed. Malcolm Gladwell. 04 Oct. 2010. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. <http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell>.

“We Are All Khaled Said.” Facebook.com. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. <https://www.facebook.com/elshaheeed.co.uk>.

“We Are All Khaled Said Official Website.” We Are All Khaled Said. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. <http://www.elshaheeed. co.uk/>.by way of twilight.

Opening images on page 16 © gamal_inphotos / Flickr.com

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Meet Our Authors MONICA McFADDEN Monica McFadden was a second-year student when her essay appeared in WRIT Large. She graduated from DU in 2018 with a major in Art History and a minor in Political Science.

LENA KERN Lean Kern published in WRIT Large in 2017, the same year she graduated from DU with a major in International Studies and a minor in Psychology.

MATTHEW GOTLIN-SHEEHAN photograph provided by Linked In

Matthew Gotlin-Sheehan was a first-year student studying Jazz & Commercial Music at DU in the Spring of 2011 when he wrote “Egypt, Facebook, & the Internet Revolution,” for which he was the recipient of a Pioneer Award for Excellence in Writing.

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Submit Your Work

We welcome not only essays and research papers but also scientific and business reports, creative nonfiction, multimodal projects, and more. If accepted for publication, your work will appear in 2020’s Volume 9.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Texts may be submitted electronically (by students or by instructors on behalf of students, with their permission) to the Editorial Board at writlarge.du@gmail.com by June 15, 2019.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: • Submissions must be the original, previously unpublished work of the authors (group submissions are also accepted).

• Authors must assume full responsibility for the accuracy and documentation of their submission, and a bibliography must be included, when appropriate.

• Authors selected for publication must agree to work with an editorial team (of faculty and students) throughout the Fall 2019 quarter and to participate in all editorial activities.

• Please limit each submission to 20 double-spaced pages or fewer.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are very grateful to Doug Hesse and the DU University Writing Program for funding and supporting this project. We would like to thank all of our present and former colleagues who have generously contributed to WRIT Large over the past eight years.

FACULTY EDITORS For McFadden (vol. 5 / 2016): LP Picard For Kern (vol. 6 / 2017): Blake Sanz For Gotlin-Sheehan (vol. 1 / 2012): Juli Parrish

2018â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2019 EDITORIAL BOARD April Chapman-Ludwig, David Daniels, Megan Kelly, Heather Martin, Juli Parrish, & LP Picard

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WL RETROSPECTIVE (8.3)

MEDIA IN OUR LIVES

JULY 2019