I was thinking the same thing as I read David’s post.

A while back I read Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer (https://www.amazon.com/Under-Banner-Heaven-Story-Violent/dp/1400032806) It is a great book and for me living in Arizona at the time, very relevant to the news at the time. I don’t recall if there are other references to “Banner of Heaven” but thanks for sharing these posts and the history. Very interesting.

I think maybe masks and dressings of our human forms have long caused wonder, inspirations, and misinterpretations. The extensions of our forms through the internet is no different. As a poet, I know that no matter what I write it is always up to the reader to make sense of it. I think 🙂

I do things sometimes and call them semi-fictional narratives and if u know the (particular) real story behind the semi-fictional one, you will know what it is, but if u don’t i noticed that ppl take em literally. When I am clear they’re semi-fictional

I think pedagogically it’s so useful to ask students as they analyze and create digital stories what every choice and decision means for how we represent and interpret things/stories/lives.

Turned out there was a real family with that name and their own online presence. We had to think about how to present ourselves & our characters as if we were real while also showing somehow that we weren’t. We opted for an info box on the front page explaining what the site was about and that the characters were fictional.

Then there’s gif-a-chrome, that seems like it could be real: http://gifachrome.com We have a page there called “behind the curtain” that’s supposed to explain what the project is all about, but, fittingly, it kinda goes nowhere.

Such fun things in terms of collaborative storytelling that we know are just for fun & learning are suddenly taking on a bit more serious tone these days. Not that I think our ds106 story sites are going to lead to any trouble, but that the whole idea of fake stories intertwining with social&political events now feels much more important to think about.

Maybe there is some kind of uncanny valley we can avoid? By making characters that are far enough from ordinary people to make it obvious they are not real. Or can the experience be designed so that there is as small a chance of people believing the characters are real? or so there is no grief when the falseness is found?

I also have so naive wondering about the approaches we take when we want to create a safe online experience. The thing we all know is– it cannot be ironclad guaranteed without creating such a tightly bounded place (I love using Catherine Cronin’s vocabulary) that it looses all affordances of being online.

So can people learn to experience online through a safety buffer we help them design, learning how not to leave, or lease as little digital trace as possible? Again, I cannot be guaranteed considering tracking and sneaky cookies. But might we be doing better to help students learn to create their own nets rather than a false promise a system can?

I cannot think of a more surreal setting to try this out.