Hi! My name is Benjy Cannon, and I’m a sophomore government and politics major. My interest in digital storytelling actually started with a project I helped with at Spark Media, a film studio that was working on a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Spark had produced a documentary, Soul of a People, which told the story of the Federal Writers Project, a subset of FDR’s Federal works project. I helped them design a game, which put the player in the shoes of one of the writers in an interactive forum which sought to recreate the guidebooks written by FDR’s crew through the Internet.
I’m super passionate about memes and their potential for bringing people together. It strikes me as incredible that a supposed “inside” joke can be shared by so many people.
As my major may imply, I’m totally obsessed with everything political (aka everything at all, because everything is kind of political), and I absolutely love literature. I sometimes joke to myself that I would have been an English major in an ideal world, usually before realizing that my government degree won’t help me get much more of a job.
I used to own a copy of Microsoft’s 3D Movie Maker, which was a really cool tool for telling digital stories. It was definitely geared at kids, but it had some really fantastic creative uses. It fed my need for creativity for the longest time, until it became incompatible with my OS (it was originally designed for Windows 95). Since then, I’ve been searching for a piece of software/a method to continue to apply that outlet, and am eagerly anticipating getting it out of this class.
Also I chose a cannon as my Avatar, not because I endorse violent imagry, but because my name is Benjy Cannon and tend to jump on the opportunity to utilize visual representations of my surname.