Yes, this video serves my purposes well:
Sam, an audience participant from Yale, engages critically, forcefully, and even aggressively with me, my ideas, and my materials by making a video, with Alexandra’s hand, that I place again here. Purposes served:
- interaction
- movement from reception to production
- using the vernaculars and forms of digital culture to critique them
- addition of content to this site
However, Sam (and Alexandra’s) intelligent provocation begs many of the larger underlying troubles of this work on the internet, which does again serve my purpose (in that I am crowd-sourcing my thinking) but then again does not, in that their work points to how the weak ties of our internet bonds (try as my contacts at Yale do, they can’t seem to locate Sam or Alexandra, even simply to credit them fully for their work) indicate the futility of community-sans-place, not to mention my hubris in setting forth a feminist-community-building project founded in my own needs, travels, and work. Sam’s loss—and my many uses of his video without being able to save, find, or connect to him—begs us to think about how power, intimacy, longing, and rupture drive and destroy community, whether online or off.
