My local library has this beautiful outdoor section that combines the best things for writing - sunshine, fresh air and the ambiance of 50-100 people doing the same thing I am.
It also is surrounded by a few coffee shops and a couple of nice parks, so when a break is necessary there are places to sit and enjoy the coffee.
It's really important for me to get up and move around, and a lot of my best ideas come in transit. But it's quite hard to write them down as I'm walking so to have a variety of pleasant places to sit and watch the world go by is great, because I sit and put paragraphs of thought into Evernote, then prop my Evernotes up next to me when I get back to writing.
I used to just walk around and repeat the ideas to myself in my head in the hope they would become -ingrained, but because so many ideas come flooding through at once it's important for me to get them all down.
For instance, I was writing the 'Immediacy' section in the first chapter yesterday, and realised that immediacy itself is a cultural theory, more focussed on the transfer of the content and the general desire of the people, but as soon as the focus lands on the media object, hypermediacy presents.
It seems like a pretty straightforward realisation but I've been treating the two ideas as distinct entities. However, when I read some McLuhan and Foucault, I got a better understanding of why I saw them as separate - and how they fit together.
This also had a great effect on my actual chapter, as I pulled a whole bunch out of the initial 'Remediation' section and stuffed it into where it should be - Immediacy and Hypermediacy.
The chapter now resembles this a little more:
New Media
Understanding New Media
Immediacy
Hypermediacy
Remediation
- New Media sets up the context, explaining what new media is (participatory interactive digital stuff), and a series (well, three) approaches - leading to Genealogy as (to quote Ed) the horse I'll back.
- Understanding is the introduction of Bolter and Grusin and how their theory is derived from the multiple NM approaches, functioning as cyclical rather than linear.
- Immediacy explains transparency and the cultural/linear desire that operates from then until now.
- Hypermediacy explains opacity, and the object based perspective that functions more from now until then.
- Remediation explains the overall theory as a genealogical concept, based on the archaeology of the object (THE INTERFACE). In this way, Remediation can be seen as a somewhat unified approach to both archaeology and cultural theory. It also sets up my interface for investigation (theatre's fourth-wall) as well as offering terminology with which to do so.
So Chapter One works as a mini-essay, but also a stepping stone into Chapter Two.
The thing about the next two chapters is that I'm thinking Two is Arch-focused and Three is Gene-focused. This means that chapter two will tell a linear story from the point of the fourth-wall, from inception to rise and to fall. Basically, it will be the tale of immediacy in theatre.
Three will work backwards, but not exactly in linear fashion as Hypermediacy exists both prior to and after the Wall. It is a fractured tale but that's what genealogy is all about.
Still undecided exactly which way to handle the last two chapters but I'll knock out Numero Uno and go from there.
Off to the Library!
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