I chose to live tweet entries from Shadows on My Heart: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Rebecca Buck of Virginia for this assignment. Lucy was 19 at the time she wrote the entries that I covered. She was a member of the small planter class in Front Royal, Virginia where she lived at her family’s plantation, Bel Air. Since Lucy’s entries in her diary from exactly 150 to 153 years ago were too sparse for me to effectively cover given the time constraints, I decided to live tweet her entries from January 27 to February 5, 1862. This section of her diary provided me with close to a daily supply of entries.

I started with Lucy’s entry from January 27 because it provides a fascinating window into Lucy’s ambivalence towards gender standards. In this entry, Lucy was caught up in the tensions created by social understandings of gender.  Her two male guests hotly debated female education, which Lucy was a proponent of. As a hostess, Lucy chose to follow social conventions by changing the subject instead of defending female education and gaining a reputation as a free-thinking, unfeminine, young woman. The next two entries demonstrated the profound impact of a lack of accessible communication technology on Lucy. Both entries were filled with an undertone of anxiety because she had not heard from her brothers in the Confederate army. Writing letters was the only available form of communication between Lucy and her brothers. I especially enjoyed the juxtaposition of this protracted apprehension over a lack of communication with the instantaneousness  of Twitter as a modern communication technology. The next several entries revealed Lucy’s emotional ambivalence characteristic of those who remained on the home front during the war: she was overjoyed at having her brothers home while simultaneously feeling melancholy about them having to leave again. The final entry returns to Lucy’s feelings of anxiety for her brothers since she has no quick way of communicating with them to find out where they are or what they are doing –a feeling almost foreign to us today with Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, text messaging, etc.

I tried to capture the overall topics and emotions of Lucy’s diary entries. However, I chose to write the tweets using informal, contemporary language including hashtags. I also modernized Lucy’s spelling and tweeted using my account instead of creating one for Lucy. I included the dates of Lucy’s entries in my tweets to provide additional structure and clarification against the dates of my tweets on Twitter. I did these things as a creative exercise in an attempt to imagine myself as Lucy, tweeting about her American Civil War experiences in 2014.

Sources:

Buck, Lucy Rebecca. Shadows on My Heart: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Rebecca Buck of             Virginia. Southern Voices from the Past. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997.

“Lucy and Nellie Buck.” Photograph. Front Royal, Virginia: Warren Heritage Society, c 1860. From Head Quarters 13th Regt. Rifles, Mass. Vol. , To Front Royal and Back. http://www.13thmass.org/1862/front_royal.html (accessed October 15, 2014).

Other sources that have influenced my thinking about Lucy:

Clinton, Catherine. Tara Revisited: Women, War & the Plantation Legend. 1st ed. New York:   Abbeville Press, 1995.

Edwards, Laura F. Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Faust, Drew Gilpin, and NetLibrary, Inc. Mothers of Invention Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Groh, Mary Lou. “Maria “Belle” Boyd.” The Civil War Trust. http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/biographies/maria-belle-boyd.html (accessed April 16, 2014).

Ott, Victoria E. Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age During the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.

Rable, George C. Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Roberts, Giselle. The Confederate Belle. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.

Time for some more infoage14 therapy. I cringe at saying this, but I REALLY don’t like movies. I especially HATE going to movie theaters. I actually do not like the immersive experience of going to the movies. It might sound funny, but movies are too intense for me, even in home theaters. The sounds and the images just create too much emotion for me to enjoy watching movies. Add vibrations, a large screen, and a crowd of people silently watching in the dark, and going to the movie theater becomes a stressful experience for me. So I just don’t go to the movies. On occasion, my boyfriend can persuade me to watch a movie on Netflix. So what does this mean besides me being side-lined for class discussions about the cultural and social experiences of going to the movies?

I have incredibly large gaps in my cultural knowledge. I’d never seen any of the movies my group was given to act out in charades during class. But I’m not completely alone. Perhaps I’m the only one in class, but there is a significant minority of people in the United States who have gaps in their cultural knowledge because they don’t see movies for religious, cultural, economic, or personal reasons. I found it interesting how assumptions about common experiences dominated class discussion when the definition of such a mainstream experience as watching movies could be challenged demographically. Maybe the mostly white, female, middle-class infoage14 class shares common experiences and cultural knowledge, but are these experiences shared across the United States? -They certainly weren’t at my demographically diverse high school.

So what have I gained from not watching movies? I guess you could say a different perspective on both the films and the cultural experiences of watching them.

Table six decided to create a satire of apocalyptic culture for our radio broadcast project. Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” inspired us to explore fictional radio broadcasts in American history.  We borrowed some of the character-defining strategies used in “War of the  Worlds” such as the incorporation of music and sound effects in the creation of our broadcast. Similarly, our broadcast also used call-ins for a feel of authenticity. However, that is where the similarities between our broadcast and “War of the Worlds” ends. Because apocalyptic culture so often focuses on aliens or zombies, we instead chose to have American cities simply disappear in our catastrophic event. We also peppered the dialogues between the two radio hosts with references to contemporary social and cultural tensions to undermine the urgency of the broadcast. Furthermore, the unbelievable call-ins parodied conspiracy theories and paranoia. We chose the twist in the ending to reflect the ways in which apocalyptic culture has conditioned us to jump to wild conclusions, especially when the information is presented in an official manner.

We used Audacity to create this recording. Gwen and Jess played the radio hosts Karen and Jay, while Mary voiced the call-ins.

Bibliography

Audio Productions. “White Noise Sound Effect.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3FtM9M94SI (accessed September 26, 2014).

Blue Swede. “Hooked on a  Feeling.” YouTube. 1974. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m86nMHfvl7s (accessed September 26, 2014).

Cavendish, Richard. “Oct 30, 1938: Martians Invade New Jersey.” History Today, 58 (October 2008): 13. http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.umw.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=14&sid=558735b3-c34a-4bd7-874e-25fde5ea4c38%40sessionmgr4005&hid=4214&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=ofm&AN=504198075 (accessed September 29, 2014).

Chiaroscuro, Aural. “The Emergency Radio Broadcast in Orson Welles’s ‘The War of the Worlds.’” English Language Notes, 46 (2008): 193-197. http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.umw.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=4&sid=558735b3-c34a-4bd7-874e-25fde5ea4c38%40sessionmgr4005&hid=4214&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=a9h&AN=34045597 (accessed September 29, 2014).

Hayes, Joy Elizabeth and Kathleen Battles. “Exchange and Interconnection in US Network Radio: A Reinterpretation of the 1938 War of the Worlds Broadcast.” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, 9 (2011): 51-62. http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.umw.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=558735b3-c34a-4bd7-874e-25fde5ea4c38%40sessionmgr4005&hid=4214&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=ofm&AN=82571430 (accessed September 29, 2014).

“O Canada.”YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwDvF0NtgdU (accessed September 26, 2014).

“The Purge Emergency Broadcasting System.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7GMcgL2nro (accessed September 26, 2014).

R.E.M. “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” YouTube. 1987. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIdPPVkkHYs (accessed September 26, 2014).

Our group came up with fifteen ideas for representations of information/communication technology. We have yet to determine which group member will cover each topic.

1. Telephone ads -Image
2. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. -video clips screenshot, or GIF
3. 1984 -Image or Infographic
4. Iron Man -video clips screenshot, or GIF
5. Spider-Man -video clips screenshot, or GIF
6. The Avengers -video clips screenshot, or GIF
7. C.S.I  -video clips screenshot, or GIF
8. An early fax or telephone ad from a Fredericksburg newspaper -Image
9. The Crying of Lot 49 -Image or infographic
10. Game of Thrones -Infographic, video clips screenshot, or GIF
11. One of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories -Image or infographic
12. Seinfeld -video clips screenshot, or GIF
13. Balto -video clips screenshot, or GIF
14. “If Google was a Guy” -video clips screenshot, or GIF
15. “The Phone Song (Vibrating)” -Infographic or audio clip

While I enjoyed Tuesday’s class activity, I also found it slightly problematic because the class shared a common cultural knowledge on fairy tales. I think the exercise would have been more effective if each group had been required to draw a more obscure scenario that the class would have had to interpret. Cave paintings were often abstract and early people likely only shared a common knowledge of the animal figures, not the geometric designs.

Timeline/Database – 5%

Cave Painting (individual) – 10%

Radio Broadcast (group) – 5%

Live Tweeting Historical Events (individual) – 10%

Propaganda Campaign (group)- 15%

End of Semester project (either – depends on project)- 5%

Paper, Printing, and Publishing

• 1600s -Printing dominated by governments, merchants, and churches
• Early 1800s -Most books still imported from England
• 1830s -Domestic publishing industry emerges. Production technology and railroad reduced prices and spread books across the nation

Newspapers

• Rise of newspapers between 1820-1850. This gave way to more objective newspapers. This process was helped along by better technology (penny press). People were able to develop their own identity through newspaper.

Illustration

• By the mid 1850s, photography began to rise with the daguerreotype photographic process. Photography became more common and required less skill. Because of this, photographs became more prominent in newspapers.

Moving Print

• Post offices facilitated the spread of newspapers and pamphlets.

1. Creating a sample of an ancient form of communication (cave paintings, hieroglyphics, cuneiform, etc) and compiling a class collection on the Knight Lab mapper. We could take high quality pictures or scan our work using the equipment at the ITCC. I like the cave finger painting idea, but I feel like it has too narrow a focus given the number of other forms of early communication and the size of the class.

2. A project featuring a traditional form of story/history/creation myth-telling that could be filmed, recorded, or acted out at the ITCC and then posted to the UMW media hub and Known.

3. Making an infographic or video about ethics in the Digital Age using the equipment and design programs at the ITCC. The finished product could be displayed on the screens at the ITCC and posted through the UMW media hub and Known.

I’m taking this class because I don’t know very much about about the spread of information and people’s perceptions of information. I also hope to learn how to use more forms of technology in the creation of class projects since I do not consider myself very tech-savvy. Additionally, I think this class will help me develop my skills as a class discussion leader and encourage me to find creative and innovative ways to represent my academic research.

Some of the topics that I would like to cover this semester include:

• Wartime photography (Especially the American Civil War)
• Various forms of art
• The postal service
• Propaganda
• Film
• Identity in the Digital Age
• Ethics
• The Digital Divide

Since this is an honors class, I would like to do interdisciplinary projects where I can bring in my additional skills and knowledge from historic preservation, English, and music and combine them with resources available at the ITCC. Some of these projects include:

• A project featuring a traditional form of story/history/creation myth-telling
• Conveying a message through an early form of communication such as cave paintings, cuneiform, hieroglyphics, old Norse runes, smoke signals, Chinese calligraphy, etc.
• Making an infographic or video to display in the ITCC on ethics in the Digital Age