XENA
- with extras -

For this week's work we go online. Having spent the past three weeks reading about different sorts of web experiences and engaging with different ways of writing 'the web'; and having dipped our virtual toes into MOO texts, now it's time to immerse ourselves in a piece of online writing.

I have chosen as the key text a site about the TV cult character Xena, Warrior Princess. The work is a doctoral dissertation about the 'Xenaverse' fan web sites. It is written and designed by Christine Boese who uses web-writing techniques to help her analyse online cultures. Alongside (re)introducing you to Xena and her fans, Boese's pages offer a journey into theories that are useful for assessing electronic writing.

The work was first published in 1998, and although new media is a fast moving field, the thesis offers a moment when many of the techniques and the theories were transparent and your expedition will, I hope, offer you a particular, almost palpable engagement with theory.

Christine Boese, The Ballad of the Internet Nutball: Chaining Rhetorical Visions from the Margins of the Margins to the Mainstream in the Xenaverse, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, New York, 1998 (Site opens in a new browser; I recommend that you view it on 'full screen' :: menu - < view > < full screen > )

Approaching The Xenaverse in Cyberspace:

This week, I would like you to concentrate on reading/ viewing/ playing with/ visiting the Xenaverse site.

Bringing out your responses to this text:

• Write down your first thoughts, however banal or confused - or even sophisticated! Do you feel lost, excited, annoyed, bored, fascinated? ..? Try to scrutinize your responses. How long did it take to begin to find your way around?
• Which links do you find yourself following?
• Does the site remind you of other texts, perhaps in a different medium?
• Are you familiar with any of the theories from work in contemporary cultural or literary studies?
• Write down your second, third thoughts...

Pursuing ideas generated by the site:
• READING: If you would like to think about media-specific reading Experiments in the Future of Reading is a good place to start - it was an amazing project and art installation that questioned the way we read now as well as speculating, intelligently, as to what reading may become.
• THEORIES OF WEB WRITING: see the 'theory' section in module bibliography and if you haven't done so already, make a start. Browse the Aarseth, Guertin, Hayles, Murray and Sheffield Sanford and begin your detailed study with the text you find most appealing.
• ONLINE COMMUNITIES: Nina Wakeford: Networks of Desire: Gender, Sexuality and Computing Culture Highly recommeded research on San Francisco net cultures, but unfortunately out of print, so use ILL. See also her article in Web Studies (David Gauntlett, ed) and The Cybercultures Reader (David Bell and Barbara Kennedy, eds).

• FAN SITES: these are innumerable, so start with your own passions and then try something obscure. Research a defined area - say, UK TV sitcoms, or punk rock sites. Or a popular celebrity such as David Beckham or the (now historic) Spice Girls.