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Assignment 4:
New Media Writing: Personal History / Public Experience

• Assigned: Monday, November 4
• Essay due: Monday, November 25
• Site Posted to the Web: December 9
• Print outs (of Web pages) and commentaries due: December 9

The Essay:

Write a three-to-five page essay or account that describes your individual history with a public experience. A "public experience" is something that a public experienced and remembers together: a television series, a local event, the career of a musical group, a forest fire, a news event, etc. The "public" may be a local (a town or region), national or global.

The purpose of the essay is to place the public experience in the context of your personal history--to "situate" that experience--in a way that makes the reader see the public experience differently from how it appears in purely in public terms.

Examples

Movies make this personal/public move all the time:

Think about how the movie Titanic attached new meaning to the famous, public disaster by placing it in the context of a personal story.

Almost Famous gives us a history of 1970s rock-and-roll culture in one kid's coming-of-age story.

In The Perfect Storm, a meteorological event meets a group of fishermen

Muriel's Wedding-- The Abba-obsessed daughter of a dysfunctional family in Porpoise Spit, Australia, Muriel runs away to the big city (Sydney) where she finds her future with the help of her music addiction.

Then, the Web Site:

After you've written, turned in, and received feedback on the essay, create a Web site about the same "public experience" using information and materials from your essay. What content can you repurpose, what must you lose, and what additional material must go out and find? Experiment with maintaining the personal perspective and tone--to distinguish your site from large, corporate-style sites on the topic already out there on the Web--while still creating a publicly useful site. Look for organizing principles other than straight-line narrative, which works best in print, not hypertext.

Commentary and Print out

You will write, print and hand in a 2-3 page (double-spaced) self-commentary. Please see the complete Self Commentary Guidelines before writing it.

Also, print out a copy of the Web page and hand it in by the due date specified above.