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eBook details
- Title: Crowd-Sourcing Shakespeare: Screen Work and Screen Play in Second Life (Forum: After Shakespeare on Film) (Essay)
- Author : Katherine Rowe
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 75 KB
Description
ACADEMIC FILM STUDIES has dedicated many decades to establishing the principle that films are, in a deep intellectual sense, basically like books: richly historically situated, formally complex, inviting critical analysis and theoretical formulations. Understood in these ways, film texts could emerge as objects fitted to the structures of authority, oversight, and cultural value that organize academic practice. This process is contested and continuing, and reflection on its unevenness provokes speculation about the future. What opportunities and challenges to such institutional assimilation do new media offer academics--Shakespeareans in particular? To my mind the most compelling and urgent are those posed by the transformations colloquially known as "Web 2.0," less a term of technological change than of behavioral change. Web 2.0 denotes the collaborative, creative, socially networked behaviors of humans interacting with each other through shareable, dynamic content online. The labor and play that take place in this mode in virtual environments constitute an increasingly important kind of public engagement with Shakespeare. For literary scholars, closer attention to such engagements can expand our understanding of the public perceptions of value invested in Shakespeare specifically and the Renaissance generally. As important, Shakespeare environments online offer direct encounters with the core conflicts new modes of knowledge-making on the Web generate for scholars. * This essay explores those conflicts by focusing on the fictions of ownership governing three Shakespearean locations in Second Life[R], an online world that combines social networking, gaming, and 3-D design. The platform welcomes a growing number of academics as visitors and residents. Since it was launched, it has hosted five virtual Globe theaters, one with a regular acting company. In Second Life you may explore historical re-creations of sixteenth-century Europe inhabited by intentional communities, and you can enter simulations ("sims") of numerous literary works, including some remarkable multimedia installations. The client software's 3-D surround creates a powerful sense of proprioception and architectural space, making it attractive as a teaching space for theater studies. (1)