final presentation blog post

I had a bunch of problems uploading my document to blogger so I had to post it to google documents, minus the picures... I'll try to fix in in a couple of hours.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc4hr3j6_2cnt39m

A Ditigal Life

Within the technology to chronicle daily life comes the theory that we as a society and individually will be able to work harder, live faster and generally improve to the point of living, breathing, emotionalizing machines. We as people will be able to remember and self analyze every portion of our day with ease and without time restriction. I would like to point out though the idea of the computer as a crutch that holds up our lifestyles. While we record every second of our life we easily slip into a process of dependence of a system that runs our lives for us. Our enterprising self gets lost upon the need reanalyze an image or sound and the dumbing down of modern society, who needs to stay witty and sharp when you can rely on a computer to always back you up?
Take a look at this article.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20071126/sc_livescience/fakephotosalterrealmemories

While this only hints at one of the problems that were presented in the text, secured information and alteration of info, it gives the idea that with a single computer glitch our crutch can become a self deflating and misleading system.

Niklas Vollmer

I am interesting in discussing the idea of human reaction to being faced with a video camera in general. While the idea of autobiography has traditionally been thought of as a writing of memories and thoughts for general distribution, the use of a camera , a large portion of this classes informative criteria, to document life is considered voyeuristic and too prying to be comfortable with. While his film Happy Crying Nursing Home touches this subject more than Reading the Water there still exists an element of documenting someone else to describe one's self and history. With in the family, how easily did his wife or father cope with the idea of constantly being filmed. I believe I have seen a clip of HCNH that touches on the idea of men or women who may have felt the same emotions as he has felt on the issue, within both groups there was a sense of unease to express their own feelings. Did any of this have to do with the intimidation of being filmed and the negative connotations of confessing or experiencing reality within such an immediate and reflective medium.

Family Secrets

I found Annette Kuhn's analysis of the use of pictures and images through the course of family history quite amusing as well as true to the form that I have seen of the treatment of family photographs. From a single person point of view these photos are part of a historical autobiography as well as very telling about a single individual and their life during that moment. I've clipped put a couple of samples both written and noted that reflect the ideas of the use of photographs being so important to our families and ourselves.

Autobiography as De-facement

Paul De Man's piece is an interesting text based on the fact that he takes the time to extravagantly point out several of the problems that I have noticed over the past few months. I'm not saying that I agree with his observations, as I tend to mostly disagree his arguments. Since it's publishing in 1979 I figure that things have changed a bit over the years but to put things into context for modern times, and as we have seen over and over again the definition of autobiography is as such:

[f. AUTO-¹ + BIOGRAPHY n. Neither this nor any of its derivatives are in Todd 1818; only Autobiography in Craig 1847.] The writing of one's own history; the story of one's life written by himself.

We may have to take this "writing" in the most literal sense to mean a novel or book form, seeing as how de Man has applied blinders to the ideals of applying the autobiographic process to all types of medium. That aside, he states blatantly that the form of autobiography does not fit into any category , genre or mode, but merely a contract or sharing of knowledge that what is written is, in fact, a true story about one's history.
De Man rejects the idea of autobiography as a genre, in somewhat of a ridiculous notion to me, due to the idea that we could mistake all stories told as true stories. This only being caused by the fact that authors of autobiographies would abuse the use of figurative language and produce something that parallels a fake story, thereby, later in time, blurring the borders between fiction and non.
Looking to the reverse though, does not something that can be as obscure as fiction also be reduced to the idea of requiring a contract of mutual understanding that the text is not real... "so don't go out and try to jump off a building because you think you can fly."

To close I'd like to look briefly at the paragraph on pg. 922 which cites Genette and the idea that an interest in autobiography demonstrates the impossibility of allowing textual systems made up of tropological, metaphorical, substitutions to come into being. Well, to me this brings to mind an idea of a senile person writing an autobiography; within their dreams, which they tend to write about, everything appears as a metaphor. Do we have to take what is written as the truth. Maybe I've missed my point... why must autobiography stray from or deny the existence of metaphor? Can we as a culture not embrace the idea that not every word is truth and as an autobiography, written by man, must in some way always be wrong. It is only human to err...
I think I missed it again.