Emerging Themes in Moby Dick and Digital Culture

I'm always pleased at the way students are able to latch onto key themes even very early into a semester. Here is an index to a few such ideas as we have begun to explore both Moby Dick the novel and Digital Culture the phenomenon. I've added my own thought questions connected to each idea, and hope that some of you will carry the conversation forward:

• Isolation
  In his "The Sea and Solitude" post, Greg Bayles comments that "Moby Dick is full of disconnected, discontented strangers." He links this to "connectivity and how modern technology is shrinking the gaps between individuals." Do you find technology increases or decreases the distance between you and others?
• Collaboration
  Mele related an experience in which a teacher, upset with how technology isolates, required students to do group work. The students ended up using online collaborative tools like Google Docs. How is digital culture changing the way that people work together?
• Categorizing
  Dr. Wickman's lecture, problematizing the genre of Moby Dick, illustrates how much we rely upon categories to make sense of things. Amber (in a response to a post by Kayla) claims that "novel" (meaning "new") is most appropriate for such an experimental piece of prose such as Moby Dick. Victoria devotes a thoughtful post to whether Moby Dick is a novel. She sounds a lot like Ishmael at the close of his Cetology chapter when she states "Perhaps we have gone down the wrong path with constantly trying to categorize everything." Her post led to a follow-up post by Brittany who explores the concept of the new and how both the form and content of Moby Dick take us into novelty. Amber in turn responds, suggesting that our classifications are in flux and we therefore ought to consider blogs to be a category of literature. How fitting is the novel as an art form in the digital age? Where do we see categorizing happening within Moby Dick? within digital culture? What is to be gained by being more inclusive in our literary categories? What lost?