class highlights (weakly tied)

"I wonder if she plans on making strong ties with any of these individuals that she meets."

"You told me to write you a missed connection if I thought it was neat. I haven't heard anyone say neat since I was in kindergarten. So, that's pretty cool. Although you may be a psycho killer, who knows. Anyway, now you can email me and weird me out to your heart's content."

"The operator has to listen, it is a law. Also, the postman is not allowed to go inside your house, but you can talk to him on public property for up to four minutes or until he wants to go, whichever comes first."

"The inherently presupposed contractual agreements that support all forms of participation are nothing new. The plot thickens though when the metaphorical handshake between participants becomes even more tenuous, that is, when social contracts are mediated, like now more than ever before, by lines of code; when meaning and fact are free form and aimless—accountability leading back only as far as the history of your browser’s activity."

"Spam messages about free ringtones and gift cards are scattered between heartfelt messages to the dead soldiers."

"Digital correspondence is broken down into a stream of on and off switches that are entirely useless as a means of communication without reassembly."

"Hosting is both gracious and controlling."

"The Y in DIY would have to be relatively determined or technically skilled to DI."

"It is about customizing your own transportation the same way you'd customize your outfit, or put stickers on your laptop."

"Relics of resistance, not harbingers of revolution."

"The anarchical consumer talks back to corporations, doesn't obey. These are highly specialized consumers."

"The everyday paradoxically seems to function like the exotic."

"Their respective projects roughly read as, 'We did this, and it was art,' and follow from an understanding of Relational Aesthetics as an exaggeration of sensitivity to signification(s)."


also check out:

1. The appropriation of the rainbow colors of unselfconscious, innocent child's play to give anonymous public expression to the morose fears haunting young adulthood: dying young, STDs, mediocrity, drowning, falling, ending up...., becoming my mother.

2. A concise critique of knowledge-economy propaganda that portrays information as neutral and equates communication with community (or that romantically imagines how, in the words of a classmate, "an anonymous object, an errant missive, will create friendship").

Finally, congrats to the undergrads in the class for coming up with what are, on the average, far more complicated, thoughtful final projects than your graduate counterparts.