The Daily Bulletin Archive

The A & AAS Studies Unit (SNSS) Unit invites the BSC community to a lecture by Marc Ruppel, Univ of Maryland at College Park, on Wed, April 30, 2008, in Ketchum Hall 328, 4:30-5: 45 pm. The process of cultural and medial convergence has led to the nascent development of startling new modes of narrative expression. While waiting for Nicholas Negroponte’s “black box” to arrive and collapse all media into an all-encompassing digital bitstream, there has been an opposite push, a divergence, in which narrative meaning is increasingly becoming cross-sited, where a storyworld is developed across two or more media, rather than in one single medium. This lecture will address cross-siting as a social, cultural and corporate construct with vast interdisciplinary reach. But who really controls these stories? What impact might the poorly labeled “digital divide” have on our access to them? What role does ethnicity play in the potential stratification of understanding that such narrative dispersion inevitably creates? These and other questions will be addressed as we start to theorize a potential paradigm-shifting narrative form and begin to question exactly what it means to be literate today.