Weekly Response Nine

“This situation would present no problem if no generational shift from deep to hyper attention were taking place. But with the shift, serious incompatibilities arise between the expectations of educators, who are trained in deep attention and saturated with assumptions about its inherent superiority, and the preferred cognitive mode of young people, who squirm in the procrustean beds outfitted for them by their elders. We would expect a crisis, which would necessitate a reevaluation of the relative merits of hyper versus deep attention, serious reflection about how a constructive synthesis of the two might be achieved, and a thoroughgoing revision of educational methods.”

            – Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes – N. Katherine Hayles Page 188

Question: Does transforming something from a work of literature to a movie or video form, going from deep to hyper attention, ultimately enhance the learning that a student may do when studying that specific work?

When doing the digital media treasure hunt, I found an online series called The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (http://www.lizziebennet.com). It’s an online adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, narrated by Lizzie. It takes the characters and plotline of Pride and Prejudice and brings it to a more modern-day setting.

Lizzie does video blogs every couple of days, and in between those videos the audience gets to see social network updates from the different characters in order to further the story. Like twitter conversations between characters, or even something as simple as Bingley and Jane beginning to follow each other on twitter.

I think people who have read Pride and Prejudice would appreciate video blogs like this much more than those who haven’t. Being able to see and understand the transformation from Austen’s work to Lizzie’s videos allows readers to see more of the humor in the way everything in the video blogs is portrayed. It’s much like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith; an audience unaccustomed to Austen’s original work would be able to understand the plot of the story, but someone with knowledge of the work being parodied would better see the wit being revealed.