Friends for The Fountainhead

For the past couple of days, I've been talking about what I've been up to in terms of social discovery. For me, social discovery has been an interesting journey. I've been up to 3 in the morning most nights this week, reading articles and blog posts and dissertations and writing hopeful messages to strangers, hoping that they'll take interest in my work. There were definitely some frustrated moments, especially by Wednesday night, when I had received word from only one of the many scholars that I had attempted to contact. But things are looking better now, and I am realizing more and more what kinds of things I need to do to get people involved in my work.


The scholars that responded to my emails were the ones whose research I had shared on my blog, and I wrote a personalized letter to each of them asking them to comment on my work. It was neat to hear back from them so soon after emailing them (one responded the next day, and the other the day after that). I was worried that because classes are out for the summer, professors would be away from their work or vacationing or otherwise indisposed, but things are turning out just fine.

For the next couple weeks, I'll be following up with some of the contacts that I've made and will be trying to distill my ideas into a more powerful and clear message that I can share as I seek more opinions on creativity in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. I hope to be able to branch out more into the realms of creativity and digital media in a general sense and hopefully get some experts and enthusiasts talking about The Fountainhead as a creative epic.

 Anyone, on to my list of potential interested parties, collaborators, and contacts:

Social Discovery: Scholarly Response

Yesterday, in my post, "Experiments with Social Discovery," I talked about my efforts to get friends, peers, and enthusiasts involved in my research project, focused on Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Today, I'd like to continue on in detailing my efforts to contact professors and scholars in fields pertinent to my area of research. It's been a rough road so far, but I'm hoping that I'll get some good responses sometime soon.

I've sent emails to a few pretty renowned Randian philosophers, and while I haven't received any response back, I'm still trusting that something good will come of it, and I'll have been glad to wait a little bit. Leonard Peikoff, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute and author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, uses a number of different digital resources to propagate Objectivist ideas, so I figured that he would be a good person to talk to about creativity, the Internet, and The Fountainhead. I left a message on his website, and now I wait.

I messaged Shoshana Milgram Knapp, a leading Randian scholar who presented a lecture series at the Smithsonian Institute on Ayn Rand in 2010 and who teaches The Fountainhead and others of Rand's writings as key works in her courses at Virginia Tech. She has a number of online resources, among them a great lecture investigating The Fountainhead as a modern classic and explaining how the novel can be used in contemporary learning. I'm still waiting for a response, but again, I have high hopes.

Experiments with Social Discovery

I've been trying my hand at this whole social discovery thing -- basically using the Internet as a resource to find people interested in the same things as you are interested in and then trying to get them involved in your learning and research process. I'll preface this by saying that this has been something completely foreign to me, but I guess actually doing the hard things is what makes them easier and/or natural in the end. Anyway, I've been trying to reach out to people in different online social settings to try to get feedback on my research, and honestly, I've had a tough time getting people to respond. That is really making me think more and more about my research topic, though, and I am thinking more and more that I would like to make it a more argumentative topic, one where there are definite diametric stances and where some people, on reading my research, would want to jump in and state their view of the matter.

I started my attempts at social discovery on Google+, and I managed to find a lot of people generally interested in Objectivism but not really any that expressed acute interest in The Fountainhead. I can't say that this was entirely unexpected, as people generally focus more on Rand's monumental work, Atlas Shrugged, the sort of pumped-up-on-steroids version 2.0 of The Fountainhead, this time based around an aspiring railroad tycoon among others. I didn't get any response from people that I had contacted personally, and those that I added to my circles in hopes of receiving a reciprocal add remained silent. One day, sort of in desperation, I wrote a call-out to Objectivists, and a day or two later, I got my first response, from a young man named Alexander. He had been searching for info on Ayn Rand and had stumbled upon my blog. We exchanged messages a little bit, and he seemed to be open to talking. It was something little in terms of the grand scheme, but it was something big in my process of social discovery.

I guess really my first response, though, was really a little bit before that, from a musician whose song I found on Youtube and shared a couple of weeks ago. He (Joseph) responded to a message that I sent through Youtube, telling me that he had written the song based on Atlas Shrugged. I was excited to find out, as I had had suspicions that was the case. Anyway, it was neat to connect with him and to see that people are creating media content based on Rand's works.

Quest Atlantis: Creative Voices

So, maybe I'm having a little bit of a nerd moment, but I'm really psyched about some research that I've been doing recently, and I wanted to share something that I found. One of the articles that I read through while researching The Fountainhead mentioned an online game-community called Quest Atlantis, which, from what I understood, was basically an online game world centered around the diametrically opposite architectural ideologies of Howard Roark and Peter Keating, two main characters in The Fountainhead. Well, I've come to find out that it's not just that -- it's like a whole community dedicated to teaching kids, age 9-16, important values and skills through a fun and engaging online world full of quests and adventures and all sorts of stuff. The architectural aspect is just one little part of it! This is the kids' schoolwork, to play games and build buildings and solve problems, and it is all really cool.

I was interested to find out on the official QA blog  that students have independently established hotels and shops and advertising companies and even a functioning stock market! Pretty unbelievable. Students are currently working on developing a legal system for this online world, as money and regulations have recently become more mainstream. Teachers are able to implement this amazing resource as a way to teach and reinforce a number of really positive lessons, listed in QA's mission statement:

• Creative Expression – "I Create"
• Diversity Affirmation – "Everyone Matters"
• Personal Agency – "I Have Voice"
• Social Responsibility – "We Can Make a Difference"
• Environmental Awareness – "Think Globally, Act Locally"
• Healthy Communities – "Live, Love, Grow"
• Compassionate Wisdom – "Be Kind"

I feel like these are the same lessons that I am still learning and relearning every day. I wanted to touch for just a moment on the architectural aspect on QA, because I feel like it, above all else, reflects the ideas that I'll be addressing in my research...

From Promethius to Nietzsche : A Research Bibliography for The Fountainhead

Tweethis Statement: In a world of conflicting values in the realms of expression and innovation, digital media has emerged as a powerful player in the creative process and has reignited the fires of creativity both for individuals and for the collective web-populace.

Branden, Nathaniel. My Years with Ayn Rand. Ed. Ayn Rand. 1st ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999. Print.

• Biography
• HBLL Bookshelves
• The revealing story of Branden and Rand, whose relationship began as student to teacher and progressed through friendship to lovers and finally to adversaries. A very personal account of Rand's character and persona from the perspective of someone once very close to her.

Cashman, Mark. "Does Information Technology make Us Smarter?: If so, how; if Not, Why Not?" ACM SIGCHI Bulletin 1995: 52-3. Print.

• Scholarly Article
• HBLL Online Database
• http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/580000/570125/p52-cashman.pdf?ip=128.187.73.9&acc=ACTIVE%20SERVICE&CFID=104423253&CFTOKEN=67093345&__acm__=1337606419_6e9d0f95476f635518842c599a8490b7
• Gives a psychological approach to information technology as applied to creativity, conceptualization, and consciousness. 

Fand, Roxanne J. "Reading the Fountainhead: The Missing Self in Ayn Rand's Ethical Individualism." College English 2009: 486-505. Print.

• Scholarly Article
• National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Database and MLA Bibliography
• http://www.ncte.org.erl.lib.byu.edu/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CE/0715-may09/VM0715Reading.pdf
• Discusses a professor's experiences in presenting The Fountainhead in her Literature and Popular Culture course and investigates the creative and controlling personality and ideology of Howard Roark.