In an effort to make students think about their lives through fortunes, a creative writing class will venture onto campus Friday with their weapon of choice - the cell phone.
This project, which sends fortunes out through text messaging to various students on Miami University's campus, is known as Projekt 4-2N and is part of a class taught by William Howe, a Miami English assistant professor.
While preparing for Projekt 4-2N, students obtained 1,621 fortunes from random proverbs found online and from various students in the class.
From Nov. 10 through Nov. 24, fortunes that integrate slang and common abbreviations will be sent via text message to students who have contributed their phone numbers to the project. The class also consulted Facebook profiles to obtain phone numbers from profiles that provided them.
According to sophomore Monica Nenni, who is part of the class, the goal is to give the ideal fortune that can impact student's lives.
"We're trying to give the fortunes we'd like to receive and see how it can affect people's lives," Nenni said. "It's our gift of language to the Miami community."
The idea for the project began when sophomore Suzanne Augsburger brought an incomplete fortune to class that read "… nothing, be nothing." This short phrase sparked the idea to experiment with how technology can influence student life.
"We're taking proverbs, making quotes and incorporating slang and seeing how technology can affect the text we use," said first-year Tyler Manley, a student in the class.
In addition to horoscope-style fortunes, which give a glimpse into the future, many of the other fortunes provide statements.
The class believes fortunes can impact an individual's life regardless of whether or not it gives a prediction or provides a statement.
Representatives from the class have created several mediums for participating students to respond to the fortunes. Junior Lucy MacDonald, another student in the class, developed a Facebook group called Projekt 4-2N, which allows students to contribute their phone number and provide feedback. An additional Web site, www.cas.muohio.edu/The42NProject, was created by sophomore student Robert Dolan which allows students to read about the project, give further input and subscribe or unsubscribe to the project. Students are also given the opportunity to respond to the text messages and post how the message impacted their life.
"It seems like in creative writing classes you don't really do projects, so it's kind of like taking creative writing outside the classroom," said Andrew Nichols, graduate assistant in the class.
Although Howe's class hopes the Miami community will respond in a positive way, several in the class voiced concern that students will not take the project seriously. Sophomore Anthony Jiannetti said people may not think the project is worth their time until they open the fortune.
Another concern is the cost per text message, which was considered when the project began. Several classmates felt that some students would not open the fortune because text messaging may not be a part of their contract with their cellular provider.
"I have a lot of friends who won't even read text messages because they don't want to pay the 10 or 15 cents," Jiannetti said. "I don't think people will look at it as a fortune to take a minute and look at their life."
However, Howe said that because text messaging is tagged onto many cell phone plans, he expects that students will not ignore the fortune because of a text fee. He also noted that he believes the project will interest students because the class is engaging in creative and unconventional digital writing practices.
During the course of writing and searching for fortunes, students from the class outlined a series of rules to decide what types of fortunes were appropriate.
"We collectively came up with some rules about the project because this is a public project so rules were needed," Howe said.
Because the group hopes to impact participants in a positive way, fortunes are forbidden to include the following: overtly sexual or religious content, anything offensive targeted to an individual, specific names of individuals, insults of any kind, language written in a stalking manner and promotion of harmful substances.
"We outlined a series of rules because we wanted to reach people, but we certainly didn't want to scare them," said sophomore classmate Rebecca Waesch. "We didn't want them to receive one message and then turn away from the entire project. This project is about reaching out people through language."
Waesch also noted that creating a series of rules is a common courtesy.
"Just give it a chance and read the fortunes," Waesch said.
