Reading Class: the Online Game+Blog that Explores Class in America
Reading Class is what Joseph Beuys called "social sculpture"- engagement with the intangible elements that shape our lives. Reading Class uses social software to explore the social question of class. Specifically, Reading Class is a multimedia game built inside an Internet blog; a blog being a set of standards and software used for online personal journals or conversation. Reading Class explores the idea of class as an semi-emergent taxonomy, a self-organizing system, by taking participants on a journey of cultural choices and values where their own class identity is measured against fixed scholastic markers and against the relativistic play and perception of other participants as measured in real-time (the taste culture choices you make while you play affect the final class score of other players during this project, and vice versa). Reading Class strives to be journal and discussion forum - a cultural engine for revealing, exploring and critiquing social class.