This book is certainly the most challenging undertaking I’ve had during this course, but I am immensely proud of it now that all the work is put in, because it’s substantial and it’s achieving everything I hoped it would. With this book, I wanted to tell the story of the internet and media’s relationship in a sense, but the internet through a very American lens, and what, I ask, is a more quintessential meeting of both the internet and media than OJ Simpson?
Frenzy is the word I would use to connect the three cases depicted in the book, and I believe the medium reflects that nature. Hundreds of thousands of articles and blogposts were available at my fingertips for each case, some from as recent as a month ago, and some dating back twenty years. This project not only brought me to and understanding of the “web” as it stands, but of media archaeology’s connection to the modern internet.
Several articles I found hyperlinked to original articles from twenty years ago. The web connected eras, thoughts, passions about all of these cases and brought them together, and now so have I. I think this work continues the idea we’ve talked about of the internet being a force of connection, a link of accessibility between worlds. If you have the internet, you have everything, in some ways.
But the book also stands to point out flaws in this statement – if you cannot read, or access the internet – can you have nothing? This wouldn’t be a true statement to make, considering how long the world went without the internet, and how much is lost by saying connection is the internet.
This is not the argument of my piece nor I believe of the internet – the internet is merely a tool for connection, but it is humans that connect. This idea can also be seen in my work, because without my intervention, in the form of the choose your own adventure text, the articles contained in the book would just be a random triad of compilation. We make those connections.