A Glimpse Into Our Future
I took a different approach to the semester project. My historical narrative is the present (2020), viewed from the future. Essentially, I'm analyzing the present as history and digging into our perception of reality. Now more than ever before, our understanding of reality is extremely fragile and being tested. Why not play around with that?
I struggle with how much to give away here, but I also know that my project might need a bit of explaining. So if you just want to dive in right now, I encourage it. But if you don't mind a few spoilers, read on.
My story takes place in the year 2080, though the specific year doesn't matter too much. The idea that the world is a simulation is front and center in a disturbing way, since every person on Earth now exists solely as a line of code in a program simulating some parts of physical life. They don't understand physical existence, so the concepts of going places or doing things don't entirely make sense to them. It's a bit dystopian in nature due to the situation that caused the digitization of the human race: the COVID-19 pandemic.
The entire story is told in Zoom chat format, for which I both applaud myself for and apologize to you for. It's kind of difficult to read, which is why I apologize. But at the same time, I think it's the best medium to tell a story like this in: the characters are literally lines of code, so the only thing they can really do is "talk." There's not any action to narrate. It also allowed me to write in some actual "code" detailing things happening behind the scenes.
There's also some hyperlinks throughout the story. You don't really need to read most of them if you don't want to: the first three are just links to recent online articles, and reading them isn't totally necessary to your understanding of the story. I'd recommend the first one, but the two after that are understandable from the title alone, I think. But I would strongly encourage you to read the last hyperlink. It leads to a fake PDF I created as part of the story, and I will admit I am quite proud of it -- I'm feeling very postmodern with my fake documents. That being said, it's also a bit more crucial to understanding the story than the other links are. And please let me know if that link (and the other links) don't work.
So, without further ado, here is a link to the Google Doc containing my project, because there's no way I'm going to put the entire thing into Blogger formatting.
I struggle with how much to give away here, but I also know that my project might need a bit of explaining. So if you just want to dive in right now, I encourage it. But if you don't mind a few spoilers, read on.
My story takes place in the year 2080, though the specific year doesn't matter too much. The idea that the world is a simulation is front and center in a disturbing way, since every person on Earth now exists solely as a line of code in a program simulating some parts of physical life. They don't understand physical existence, so the concepts of going places or doing things don't entirely make sense to them. It's a bit dystopian in nature due to the situation that caused the digitization of the human race: the COVID-19 pandemic.
The entire story is told in Zoom chat format, for which I both applaud myself for and apologize to you for. It's kind of difficult to read, which is why I apologize. But at the same time, I think it's the best medium to tell a story like this in: the characters are literally lines of code, so the only thing they can really do is "talk." There's not any action to narrate. It also allowed me to write in some actual "code" detailing things happening behind the scenes.
There's also some hyperlinks throughout the story. You don't really need to read most of them if you don't want to: the first three are just links to recent online articles, and reading them isn't totally necessary to your understanding of the story. I'd recommend the first one, but the two after that are understandable from the title alone, I think. But I would strongly encourage you to read the last hyperlink. It leads to a fake PDF I created as part of the story, and I will admit I am quite proud of it -- I'm feeling very postmodern with my fake documents. That being said, it's also a bit more crucial to understanding the story than the other links are. And please let me know if that link (and the other links) don't work.
So, without further ado, here is a link to the Google Doc containing my project, because there's no way I'm going to put the entire thing into Blogger formatting.
I love how your story looks at our daily life and the mundane things that are so normal to us and completely flips them and looks at them from an outside perspective. A lot of things that we do in our society don't really make sense except that we're used to them and don't know any different. I loved watching the characters put together the puzzle pieces to try to understand our society when we already have all the answers. Hopefully this isn't what our future looks like but I loved the story and idea!
ReplyDeleteI'm impressed by your attention to detail. Like the time stamps on every line, font, works cited, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe format made the story very engaging to read. I think it is hard to tell a story through only dialogue so I applaud you for that. Furthermore, I like all the implications that are strewn throughout your story, there are so many rabbit holes for my brain to go down thinking about it. 100% would recommend. Thanks for the unique take!
ReplyDeleteYour story made me have a little bit of an existential crisis, which I guess from a purely critical standpoint is a good thing. I think science and society (as well as distopian lit) have been predicting the digitization of human lives for so long that we never really questioned if we WANTED that digitization. Quarantine and this story have made me fairly terrified of such a future.
ReplyDeleteYour attention to detail really immersed me in your story. I particularly liked the little "virus protection" language confusion, that was really neat. It made me laugh while making me slightly uncomfortable, which I think is a great achievement for any metafiction. Nice job!
Dang that ending really had me shook, the way she just deleted those people!! This was so much fun to read and I really liked how it was a conversation between people. Also, the timestamps was a unique and cool idea--it was fun to see someone say I'll be back in a minute and see the time jump a minute and half until they returned. I also like how the story said "log onto stores" and just other certain things that the characters said and how casually they said it really shows it's set in the future. Great job!
ReplyDelete