Essay 4

Book Groups: The book group discussions provided an atmosphere for communication that I found much different than lecture, blogging and plurking. One aspect that set it aside is the material that we all commented on. My group read Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a science fiction book that I thought was more straightforward in its story telling than the other books we have read for the class. It dealt with the trope of the small in a much more literal fashion, being directly about nanotechnology and how it affects cultures of the future and employed less metaphor to convey ideas of how the nano can or will change human life. Abstract concepts were definitely discussed within the group, but because of the way The Diamond Age was written and because of the tendencies of the rest of the members, a lot of focus was directed towards characters which gave the book a more personal feel. This is not necessarily the way that I usually read into books so I think I may have gotten more of a character study out of it than if I had read the book alone and posted a blog. It was nice to have a small group of fellow students to bounce interpretations off of, within a few weeks I had a good idea of what each individual was like and felt like I knew them a little more intimately than from reading blogs. The posts were all fairly formal, more so than on plurk, but the way group members wrote on the thread had distinctively more verbal patterns than blog posts. This made talking about The Diamond Age very conversational, probably even more than a lecture because everyone was involved. The book groups facilitated the possibility of getting fairly immediate feedback on what you were mulling over within short intervals, so if there was any confusion about an event or topic it could be clarified early on and less time was wasted when reading alone and trying to sort out misinterpretations. Everyone was forced to participate and speak up, but the format is pretty anonymous with only a name displayed and members can respond at their leisure which I think brings ideas out into a discussion that are unique to this type of group. Everyone almost immediately seemed like they were comfortable. This setting was not as conducive to longer rants and complex arguments though, if there was a more complex argument it would have to be split up into several posts and before it could be completed group discussion would unavoidably change topic mid way through which is understandable. The more rapid pace of a conversation in person makes it easier to present a bigger idea, branch off, come back to the original topic, and branch off again, return to the topic and so on. Because posts on book discussion threads take longer we just tend to move from one topic to the next because there is not enough time to continuously comment on everyone’s full ideas.