Why I created an Aly's Facebook profile?

I got terrified when Teresa mentioned, almost a month ago, that the activity for the reading week would be to continue a story in the wiki. I haven't any experience writing in an electronic format like a wiki, and, also, I feel insecure of my English academic and “creative” writing.

Given these reasons, my first decision was that I didn't want to write. Instead, I was thinking about doing something creative like posting a picture or a video that would be related to the story. What gave me the idea of making a Facebook profile was the reference to Borges in Hayles' article. In “The Don Quixote of Pierre Menard” (http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-quixote.html), the Argentinian author invents almost all the references that he is quoting, and questions the boundary between fiction and reality.

As we were supposed to write fiction, why I don't try to play with the notion of fiction and “reality” as well? That’s why I created someone that could be real but was fictional. I was trying, in some sense, to question the references that I was including. The character, which had been already created in the wiki, would have a profile in the social media to “connect” with the “reality” of the hyper-mediated world that we lived in.

I chose Facebook because of its huge popularity (I thought that almost everyone in the class would have a Facebook profile) and the simplicity of this platform. The name of the character was already on the wiki, so I had to create a new mail account and a last name. Firstly, I wanted to name it Aly “Sandbox”, but Facebook didn’t allow me to do this, so I tried with “Trots”, which was the last name of one of the fictional characters that my niece used to play with (so again, I was playing with fiction). I posted pictures in the profile that had creative commons license. Aly's preferences, like her favorite books, shows, movies, and so on, are the ones that we have included in the discussions of our class. Her posts were related to the problematic of what she would do in the future: study or travel? And, finally, I tried to update her status and profile as the wiki story was growing.

I don't know what I will do with the character now. Maybe we can use it to post new materials to teach literature theory on the classroom or maybe she will be the same forever. It depends on the contributions to her wall and weather or not she will make more friends.