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100,000,000,000,000 Sports
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Well, not quite that many, but 10,000,000 isn’t too shabby…

In this adaptation of Raymond Queneau?s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems, the rules of 10 sports (football, polo, water polo, lacrosse, ice hockey, table tennis, basketball, rugby, the Kirkwall ba’ and beach volleyball) are divided into their constituant elements (duration, playing area, objective, players per team, attire, ball and method of play/restrictions) in such a way that they can be reassembled without contradicting each other.

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Utensils in a Landscape
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$\"Utensils$
Utensils in a Landscape, Chris Edwards, Stray Dog Editions, Vagabond Press, 2001

Searching for something suitably disruptive in the landscape of Australia, where Jacket is rooted, I found this. The first poem is made from sometimes misquoted bits of The Book of Common Prayer and Burroughs’s “The Cut-Up Method …” With technical and abstract language, folklore, Mallarmé, and guy-on-guy action, the book offers all sorts of utensil viewing. And later, in “but me,” this reflection:

My project, which began in
one room of the abyss, soon spread toward a perimeter
you can imagine, should you be inclined to do so.

I usually prefer projects in which sources are altered sparingly and systematically – Craig Dworkin’s “Legion” is a brilliant example. These approximate centos work, though. The invented language weaves with the appropriated, making it seem that Edwards could have done it all with his pen – or all with his scissors.
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Top Ten (10) Librarian Competencies in Evidence-Based Practice
'); document.write('With our student librarians, we\'ve been exploring evidence-based health care and librarian competencies in LIBR534 - Health information sources and services. We are teaching (and re-learning) the basic principles and frameworks for EBP. In that spirit, here is a resurrected and slightly modified top ten competencies in EBP circa ... $\"\"$ '); document.write('
Rudiments of EBM concepts for librarians
'); document.write('I created this Jeopardy quiz on EBM searching at Jeopardylabs. Simple and fun - the website helps you build a Jeopardy game board without using Power Point. Search Jeopardy games created by others. You can?t edit them ? but you might find a game that fits your needs. To start my ... $\"\"$ '); document.write('
Try Hope Leman?s blog ?Significant Science?
'); document.write('?Before we begin, Dean, I?d like to give readers a bit of background as to who you are and why they should know about you. You are already well known and admired by medical and sci/tech librarians, by those in the Open Access community, and by those interested in the ... $\"\"$ '); document.write('
Here comes the ?UBC Medical Journal (UBCMJ)?
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Answering health & medical reference questions, part II
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BCLA Answering Health & Medical Questions ? Update
'); document.write('In an effort to share some of the teaching materials from the BCLA workshop on answering health and medical questions, here is one of the updated handouts which I will also share with LIBR534 student librarians. Have a good weekend ~Dean BCLA Answering Health & Medical Questions - Electronic Resources (ELN ... $\"\"$ '); document.write('
The intracacies of Embase, Cinahl & Medline
'); document.write('Searching EMBASE and CINAHL for health librariansView more presentations from Dean Giustini. $\"\"$ '); document.write('
Major biomedical research databases for health librarians
'); document.write('Note: download the handout in pdf to take advantage of the \'live\' embedded links. ~Dean Major biomedical research databases for health librariansView more documents from Dean Giustini. $\"\"$ '); document.write('
Evidence-based teaching (EBT) for health librarians [preprint]
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Data managing in academic libraries
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Interactive Storytelling of the Less-Virtual Variety
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$\"\"$ What do American Idol, lonelygirl15, and Invisible Children have in common?

They were all instituted to function based off of mass audience interactions and they all deliver strong and dramatically-compelling narratives. The idea of interactive preexists video games and virtual worlds, and it’s alway refreshing to go back and examine new ways that interactivity plays out in our world today.

American Idol is the most “house-hold” of the three, mostly because it is most accessible, simple, and easy to digest. The TV show draws you into the parallel narratives of all the contestants on the show. Of course, for a contest where individuals have the opportunity to go against the odds in order to live their greatest dream, American Idol pulls on some core intrinsic desires among all people. Overall, it benefits from this need to satiate a desire for the dramatically compelling and perhaps, affect the outcome of something that matters to somebody. Maybe to abstract even further, it’s to give people a sense of being part of something important or interesting (albeit, there’s not a whole lot of agency as an audience to American Idol).

Although lonelygirl15 is presented under the guise of some sort of reality entertainment, it’s actually an almost fully-scripted experience. I had the privilege to come across it right before it was revealed to be staged by filmmakers. On youtube, I watched the vlogs of a sheltered religious girl, both deep and yet simple, share about her struggles with emerging adulthood. The vlogs progress to reveal that she is in some sort of dangerous cult and in preparation to be a human sacrifice. Her and her friends go against the odds, break away from what is expected of them to change the world.

The narrative, for the first series, was absolutely compelling, creative, and unexpected. As these “actors” performed on their youtube channels, they also interacted with non-actor viewers in, what would be, typical internet conversation, as if the characters were real people. Throughout the series, other “viewers” would fall into the lime-light only to be revealed as other staged characters for the narrative. The lines between real and fabricated were able to be blurred by the power and culture around web 2.0.

In comparison, longelygirl15 wins for having far more agency (and creativity). American Idol, on the other hand, unifies the convergent stories of real life to form one emergently cohesive experience, as opposed to having it made up. Still, lonelygirl15 is an immersive space where anybody can interact as themselves or their own creation to fit the “reality” of the storyworld. User created content is commonly integrated and acknowledged by the staged actors, but also expected and accepted as expansions of the world. Thus, the lonelygirl15 community has created a universe where anyone can participate in this psuedo-reality youtube drama.

I believe that the most unlikely-acknowledged interactive experience is that of Invisible Children. Three film-makers go to Uganda to discover a story that’s changed the world and so many lives. I have a few friends who were roadies for the Invisible Children non-profit that emerged from the film, and their stories are more captivating than any reality TV show or modern fiction. The film-makers are indeed great storytellers, but they’ve given over authorial control and engineered their experience to be driven by interactivity. On one level, anyone can volunteer and be a prominent acting agent. In so many other ways, events and ideas are employed to gather as much participation as possible, all the while authoring the story as it unfolds. Invisible Children is the archetypal example of a modern-day interactive documentary that continues to make itself as a result of its “fan-base,” showing us that changing the world in observable and distinct ways is perhaps the greatest of all agency.

The overly-analytical side of me believes that mass media has disillusioned us to feel things only when they are made up. The truth is: our imagination is based off of those possibilities and even the desire to experience something so powerful for ourselves. Mass media makes it so easy that we forget to pay attention to those things in our own lives, and the agency we have in the world around us, such as what the Invisible Children narrative space is trying to do. Our creative media should be representing the reverence we have for the real things in our lives, not the replacement, because we are, in fact, able to live out the things that captivate us about fiction in our real lives. I believe that the beauty of fabricated experiences speak to us, because of how possible those situations actually are.

So, if your life is boring and you need to be entertained, why not join and be entertained by the meaningful narrative that is around you?
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Humanities as Steam Engine
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From Information Age Without Humanities = Industrial Revolution Without Steam Engine:

The World Wide Web is the steam engine of the Information Age. And without the humanities, virtually everything about the World Wide Web is a muddle. All of the key issues of how knowledge is exchanged, how it is created, what its role is in the world, how it functions and changes, how one kind of idea influences another, how knowledge travels, leads to a complex History of Ideas the likes of which we have not seen before. We need the equivalent of all of the resources of histoire du livre–history of the book–to understand all of the relations of producers, consumers, distributors, systems of literacy and education, access, divide, and on and on. The World Wide Web both redefines and reinforces ideas such as “nation” and poses new problems for concepts of social groups, racial and gender boundaries, censorship, privilege, and the larger issues of mediation. These are not “add on” issues. They are the powering features of the Web. They are definitional in the protocol of creating the WWW and part of the governing issues of the W3C, the informal consortium that sets policy but does not really govern, the Web–a structure also singular in the history of political thought and political theory.

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Up Above Once Again
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$\"\"$ I’m back from a nice slice of summer in Sydney, Australia. I spoke at the University of New South Wales when I was there, gave two talks at the Powerhouse Museum in connection with their “The 80s Are Back” exhibit, and was one of the three judges of the Global Game Jam Sydney. The people who participated in that event did some incredible work – congratulations to all. Here’s some video of me, at the Powerhouse Museum, on interactive fiction and on indie and 80s videogames.
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Kevin Brooks, Scott McCloud, and the Structure of The Medium is the Massage
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McLuhan once again. Or, more specifically, The Medium is the Massage, around which I am yet again centering multiple courses. (What can I say? The book rewards rereading.) I’ve just read Kevin Brooks’ “More ‘Seriously Visible’ Reading: McCloud, McLuhan, and the Visual Language of The Medium is the Massage,”¹ available for download from http://www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc/issues/v61-1. As I’ve blogged before, I’ve had some fruitful discussions with Kevin about the book, and his essay is quite helpful. I’ve read Scott McCloud’s trilogy of comics theory² and have used passages from them in digital/new media theory classes. Kevin’s now got me thinking about including sections in the first-year composition course to help us think about The Medium is the Massage. I’m also considering adding one to the book list for Advanced Composition: Image, Sound, Text, which I teaching in March as an accelerated half-semester course.

As interesting and useful as Kevin’s application of McCloud to McLuhan’s text is, this post is not about Kevin’s application of McCloud but his brief discussion of the structure of The Medium is the Massage. Kevin divides the book into seven scenes:³
1. An introduction: pp. 1-7
2. The Mechanical Bride reworked, pp. 8-24
3. A visual inter-chapter, pp. 25-43
4. The Gutenberg Galaxy reworked, pp. 44-75
5. Another visual inter-chapter, pp. 76-91
6. Understanding Media reworked, pp. 92-149
7. A conclusion, pp. 150-60.
As the book is often described as “Understanding Media lite” or “reworked,” I like that Kevin finds sections in the book that correspond to The Mechanical Bride and The Gutenberg Galaxy as well, making the book more of a summary/reworking of McLuhan’s work to date and especially The Mechanical Bride. McLuhan?and through him Walter Ong?were deeply influenced by I. A. Richards’ Practical Criticism, which precedes Leavis’ New Criticism. (As Rob Pope notes in The English Studies Book, Richards was much more interested in describing reactions to literature than professing judgments of value as Leavis and his predecessors, and Richards was also much more interested in a text’s rhetorical effects (84-85). Ong used to say that McLuhan brought with him to Saint Louis University the New Criticism of Cambridge and their Richardsonian focus on analysis as description of effect is a unifying methodology through much of their work. The Mechanical Bride is an excellent example of this approach.⁴ It’s my sense that far too few people are aware of the Richardsonian underpinnings to Ong and McLuhan’s methodology.

While I’m still ruminating on Kevin’s seven scene structure, I’m contrasting it with the structure I present as I teach the book. My found structure is as follows:
1. Introduction, pp. 1-41, that is the “Good Morning” page which has the egg on the plate through the page which explains that by altering the environment, media “evoke in us unique rations of sense perceptions.” It is in this section that McLuhan presents his argument and teaches us how to read the book, which he does on page 10 and to a lesser extent pp. 8-9. In the context of the transition that follows, we can call this section the “sentence.”
2. Transition, pp. 42-43. The paraphrase of the trial scene from Alice in Wonderland. The focus here is the question of whether evidence should come before the sentence or the sentence before the evidence.⁵ (I discuss the importance of this transition below.)
3. Evidence, pp. 44-151, in which McLuhan both supports and elaborates on his argument.
4. Transition, pp. 152-55. Here again McLuhan and Fiore return to Alice, framed by the crowd portrait with numbers instead of faces. Here we find the caterpillar asking Alice who she is and with her responding that she isn’t sure, having gone through several transformations since she got up that morning. This itself invokes page 1 of the book with it’s “Good Morning!” and egg on a plate. This use of Alice’s Adventures here is intended to signify our new awareness of the effects of media and how they change “practically every thought, every action, and every institution taken for granted” (8).
5. Conclusion, pp. 156-60. This section begins with a The New Yorker cartoon of a son explaining McLuhan to his father, takes us through the photo credits, and ends with a final A. N. Whitehead quote, “The business of the future is to be dangerous;” a final reminder that we must be willing to contemplate what is happening if we, like Poe’s mariner, are to successfully navigate our environment.⁶
I probably spend too much time on the transition of pp. 42-43, but I find it’s debate over the order of presenting the evidence and sentence (judgment) as a discussion over when we present a thesis and when we present the supporting evidence. The evidence then sentence model of Angl0-American trials, which is premised on the idea of innocent until proven guilty, is a hold over from Anglo-Saxon legal practices, that is from an oral/oral-literate transitional culture. We also find this structure in scribal culture and early print culture.⁷ As we interiorized the ideology of print, our evidence the sentence model reversed itself to give us our present structure in writing, including the structure of McLuhan’s book which presents the sentence (thesis) and then supports that sentence with evidence.⁸ That McLuhan and Fiore use the trial scene from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground is critical to understanding the function of the break. Having just given us his sentence and just about to give us his evidence?which begins with Western culture’s transition from the oral to the phonetic?McLuhan and Fiore foreground for us that even the conventions of reading a printed book are predicated upon the medium itself.
1. CCC 61.1 (September 2009): W217-37.
2. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art; Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology are Revolutionizing an Art Form; and and Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels
3. See pp. W225-27 for a fuller explanation of Kevin’s reasons for dividing the book up as he does.
4. Ong, by the way, was one of three people to review The Mechanical Bride. (See item 67 in Thomas Walsh’s Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006 for the full bibliographic record of Ong’s review.)
5. The text and the picture of Alice and the Queen of Hearts used on pp. 42-43 actually come from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the original mss. from which is derived Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (( See the Project Gutenberg HTML version, pp. 88-89.
6. I could just as easily posit the start of the conclusion at page 150 as does Kevin, and have indeed done so with some past classes, I can’t ignore the return to Alice and Wonderland and its position right before The New Yorker cartoon. As I place so much emphasis on the importance of first transition, I need to think of this as a transition as well. And, of course, transitions are medial spaces, verges that resist being one or the other.
7. I ask students to think here of Thomas Aquinas?their Jesuit education comes in handy!?and I give a mini-lecture of Montaigne and the origins of the essay, doubly relevant as Montaigne is quoted in The Medium is the Massage and understanding the origins of the essay as exploration through writing helps foreground the idea of writing to learn. Also important is the fact that McLuhan gives us a means of understanding why “the essay” has gone from an exploration through writing to a demonstration of mastery through writing.
8. Note that print culture’s reversal of evidence and sentence is predicted in McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects. The hot medium of print reverses the order in which evidence and sentence are presented.
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Videogame Timeline
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Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga has completed a beta version of his extensive and well-designed Videogame Timeline. He’s also written a blog post about the project, in Spanish. The timeline contains people, technologies, businesses, platforms, accessories, and games and has a mode that shows connections between these items.

$\"Timeline\"$

$\"Timeline$

$\"Timeline$
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Dr. Thomas Walsh
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My discussion of E. O. Wilson and Walter Ong reminded me that I’ve neglected this post for far too long. On 19 October 2009, Dr. Thomas Walsh died. He was an Associate Professor at Saint Louis University, the compiler of the definitive bibliography of Walter J. Ong’s works. Both a former student and close friend of Ong’s, Dr. Walsh was also a mentor and friend to me. Dr. Walsh shared with me an interest in the arts of memory (with Dr. Thomas Zlatic, he published “Mark Twain and the Art of Memory,” which won the 1981 Norman Foerster Prize for the best article published in American Literature and had returned to studying renaissance memory) and provided a wealth of information about Fr. Ong as I worked on the collection.

He was a careful and deliberate scholar who spent most of his career teaching for the Saint Louis University Parks College of Engineering, Aviation, and Technology, which meant that most of his career was spent teaching in a trimester system with 4 courses/term at the Cahokia, IL campus. With the merging of Parks College and its faculty into SLU proper, Dr. Walsh returned to research, gained Graduate Faculty status, and was working on a number of projects involving renaissance memory, renaissance rhetoric and literature, and Ong’s work on Milton. (I pulled everything I could find in the Ong collection relating to Milton for Dr. Walsh to work with during a semester sabbatical.) I’ll note here, now that he is no longer with us, that Fr. Ong had asked Dr. Walsh to work on an update of the Ramus and Talon Inventory, the companion volume to Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, a testament to the kind of scholar Ong believed Dr. Walsh to be. And witnessing first hand the care and rigor Dr. Walsh approached the Ong Bibliography, I understand why Fr. Ong believed Dr. Walsh was up for the task of updating the Inventory.

He was far too young and his death came as a surprise. While losing a dissertation committee member is hard enough, I have lost a friend and I don’t think he knew just how much he meant to me.

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New Journal: The Evolutionary Review
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Making the rounds in twitter is a link to a new journal, The Evolutionary Review, with comments calling the concept cool but questioning starting a new print journal. As a member of the editorial board of a born-digital journal some 14-years old, I can understand the sentiment. For me, the print vs. digital debate for new journals is far overshadowed by the concept and focus, which is described as such:

An annual publication that uniquely and forcefully elucidates the intersections of evolutionary science, the humanities, arts, and popular culture.

The Evolutionary Review offers a forum for evolutionary critiques in all the fields of the arts, human sciences, and culture: essays and reviews on film, fiction, theater, visual art, music, dance, and popular culture; essays and reviews of books, articles, and theories related to evolution and evolutionary psychology; and essays and reviews on science, society, and the environment. Essays in The Evolutionary Review implicitly affirm E. O. Wilson?s vision of ?consilience,? that is, the unity of knowledge. They also give evidence that an evolutionary perspective can yield a richer, more complete understanding of the world and ourselves.

The idea of an interdisciplinary journal of this kind is exciting in and of itself, but what caught my attention is that the journal is meant to “affirm E. O. Wilson?s vision of ‘consilience’.” E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was a key text for what became Ong’s Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness and related works. Thomas Farrell, rightly, identifies Fighting for Life as a sociobiological work as E. O. Wilson himself defined the field “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior” (Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies, 169) while Ong himself identified the text as noobiology, “the study of the biological setting of mental activity” (Fighting for Life, 11).

Fr. Ong, I’ve been told by the late Dr. Thomas Walsh, former graduate student, SLU colleague, and close friend of Ong, that Ong was fascinated by Wilson’s Sociobiology when it came out in the mid-70s and spent much time studying it and talking about it. (I want to say that the Ong’s copy is heavily marked up, but I can’t check to confirm this. The book is, however, part of the Ong Collection. I do remember that.) I don’t think most people in the humanities realized that Ong consciously understood himself bridging the gap between the humanities and biology. In a letter to Thomas Farrell, I want to say written during the time Farrell was working on his book on Ong, Ong wrote the following, which I blogged about early on during my work with the collection: “I’ve always been a biologist at heart, in study and hobbies.” Likewise, as I reported in my M/MLA 2004 presentation “The Walter J. Ong Archive: A Preliminary Report” the Ong collection includes a number of sketches of flora and fauna and some field notes listing the flora and fauna he observed in some places he visited.

Consilience is an idea that both Wilson and Ong share, and it’s a vision of knowledge our world needs.

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Help Heather Over the Finish Line
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Heather Logas only has through tomorrow to make the crowdsourced funding goal for her indie storygame — or all the funding pledged so far is lost. Heather describes the game by saying:

Remember those Choose your own Adventure books you used to love as a kid? The game is a bit like that, if it was the fevered brain child of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and H.P Lovecraft.

Like a number of you, I’ve talked with Heather at places like GDC (she also worked with Michael at GA Tech way back when). You may have also played games she worked on at places like Telltale. I’d love to see what she’ll create if the funding comes through. She’s more than 2/3 of the way there, as of this writing, with close to 100 backers. So, if you can, take a moment to make a pledge!
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Playable Fictions MFA deadline nears
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At UC Santa Cruz, the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program is organized around collaborative research groups. For those applying this year (deadline February 15th) I’ll be leading a group on the theme “Playable Fictions.” This is a great way for writers, game designers, and related sorts of digital media artists to get an MFA while working in the midst of groups dedicated to pushing the boundaries of this field: the EIS lab in particular and also the larger interdisciplinary DANM cohort. We have a great list of faculty to work with here, including Michael Mateas, Warren Sack, Sharon Daniel, Marilyn Walker, Jim Whitehead, Arnav Jhala, yours truly (Noah Wardrip-Fruin), and many more. While most EIS members are CS PhD students, DANM has been a fruitful entry point for artists like Aaron Reed and Mike Treanor. If you’re interested, feel free to contact me with questions about the work we do and/or contact DANM for admissions questions.
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Help Us Bring Deeper Characters to Kodu
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$\"Kodu$ EIS PhD student Teale Fristoe spent last summer at Microsoft Research working on Kodu, the exciting new platform for game creation. Now we’re developing a proposal to extend Kodu with support for deeper characters, social situations, and dynamic stories — providing the first high-level computational support for the kinds of games that research shows girls want to create. We’re looking for your input!

Specifically, we’re seeking seed funding through the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. They’ve just opened the first phase of the competition, which involves public comments on very short (300 word) summaries of the ideas. There are hundreds of them. If you comment on our proposal now you can help us make it better — and also help it stand out from the crowd.
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D&D banned in prison
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In our director Mary Flanagan’s home state (coincidentally also home to D&D creator Gary Gygax and GenCon), Dungeons & Dragons is not allowed to be played in prison. In a recent New York Times article, prison officials were noted as saying that Dungeons & Dragons could “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping” his or her incarceration situation. Another great discussion on this situation by Professor Ilya Somin at George Mason at this legal blog.

It is difficult to imagine anything but D&D as a wholesome family activity after this commercial:

Perhaps this old classic Tom Hanks movie
Mazes and Monsters, may have had more influence than one would have imagined.
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Global Game Jam Featuring Awesome Speakers
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The second annual global game jam at UCSC is coming up, kicking off on Friday, January 29th. But even if you aren’t participating in the jam, you should still come by the Simularium at 4:00 pm on Friday to check out the great speakers we have lined up. This year, you’ll get to hear from:

$\"A$ Edmund McMillen (http://edmundm.com/), renown indie game designer

$\"Technical$ Kate Compton, EA/Maxis technical artist and avid indie game jammer

$\"Founder$ Alex Neuse, founder of local Santa Cruz game studio Gaijin Games (http://www.gaijingames.com/)

All of the talks should be great, so I hope you can make it!
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Aviary Tools
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Yesterday, I stumbled upon this suite of browser-based creative tools. From their intro:

Aviary Tools
Aviary is a suite of powerful creative applications that you can use right in your web browser. We’re on a mission to make creation accessible to artists of all genres, from graphic design to audio editing. Sign up for an account today to start creating, sharing, and collaborating with our community of artists.

I’ve found that some students are hesitant to download free, open source programs like GIMP and Audacity. Since the image editor, Phoenix, allows one to work in layers, and the audio editor, Myna, can mix multiple tracks, this might be a useful alternative.

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3 McLuhan Videos
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The first is “The Medium is the Message” from the Canadian Heritage Minute series:

and the other two are mashups by John Zimmerman:

“The Medium is the Message”

“The Medium is the Message: Extensions”

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Typesetting the old fashion way!
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etec540\'s photos posted a photo:

$\"Typesetting$

What fun to set lead type while smoking a pipe!
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Academic Error: On the Dangers of Relying Upon Others
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The perpetuation academic error fascinates me. One of my favorite discussions of academic error is Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. Long-time readers, however, will know that my particular axe to grind is with misreadings of Walter J. Ong’s work. Sarah H. Leslie’s article “Emerging Towards Convergence,” published in the July/August 2009 issue of Discernment Ministries is an excellent example of the dangers of relying upon reports of scholarship rather than upon the original source. Relying upon Samuel Blumenfeld’s misreading of Ong. Not only do we get the typical “Ong wants to get back to an primitive, oral world,” we “learn,” according to Blumenfeld, that Ong is a relativist, a proponent of deconstruction, uses consciousness to refer to Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, is an advocate of pagan spirituality, and, in the coup de grâce, is the father of a branch of heretical thought. This last charge is fascinating as Ong, as a Jesuit, had to get Church approval for everything he published. Having processed Ong’s scholarship, I have seen the official documents declaring that Ong’s work does not violate Church teaching. And, of course, because the article attacks deconstruction, it gets that wrong too. I’ve placed the misrepresentations of Ong’s work in bold:

Deconstruction

Pastor DeWaay does an excellent job of scouring the Emergent chronicles for evidences of ?deconstruction.? ?Deconstruction? is a philosophy that de-emphasizes the Word of God, and claims that no one can really know the Truth. It fits hand-in-glove with mysticism.

An excellent analysis of ?deconstruction? was written by Samuel Blumenfeld in 1995, as part of his scholarly refutation of the ?whole language? style of teaching reading that resulted in illiteracy. Blumenfeld explained how ?deconstruction? obliterates the fact that words have meaning, de-emphasizes written language by claiming that there is no ?truth? in it, and declares ?the impossibility of determining absolute meaning? 15 in a text. He wrote:

But not only do the whole-language deconstructionists reject the concept of the absolute word?the logos?but they reject the very system of logical thinking that made Western civilization possible. They not only reject the Bible, they reject Aristotle?s A is A. Their new formula is A can be anything you want it to be, which can only be the basis of a pre-literate or non-literate culture in which subjectivism, emotion and superstition prevail as the means of knowing.

That, of course, is simply a form of insanity?the inability not only to deal with objective reality but to recognize and admit that it exists. A mind so inclined is a mind that will lead its owner to destruction.

The Emergent Church is at the vanguard of this type of deconstructionism. It discounts the Word of God, mocks exegetical preaching and teaching, and emphasizes dialogue (?conversation?), mysticism, symbology, community (?relationships?), and various ?spiritual disciplines.? A recent, related fad in the evangelical mission world is ?orality,? which is telling stories about the Bible instead of teaching Scripture itself. This cheats the listener out of the precious ability to hear or read God?s Word.

The foundation of this new heresy is said to originate from Walter J. Ong, who wrote a book entitled Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1982)?. The premise behind this book is that humans need to return to their earlier (evolutionary) primitive heritage of myth, fable, story, image, symbols, icons, etc. The written word is degraded. The spoken word and image are said to be more closely connected to the human “consciousness.” This author means “consciousness” in the sense of Carl Jung’s pagan pseudo-science of “collective unconscious.” Story, myth and image are therefore seen as closer to pagan spirituality. The author notes the “magic power” inherent in the written word and states that “Literacy can be restricted to special groups such as the clergy.”

Actually, I probably shouldn’t have bothered with the bolding. Everything other than the fact Ong wrote Orality and Literacy is wrong. Even the direct quote from the book, “Literacy can be restricted to special groups such as the clergy,” fails to represent the context of the quote. In this particular case, Ong was discussing the historical emergence of literacy in the West during the medieval period, when, in fact, literacy was largely restricted to special groups such as the clergy.

Obviously, Blumenfeld gets Ong wrong. Unfortunately, because Leslie relies upon Blumenfeld’s misreading of Ong rather than Ong himself?a quick read of Ong’s short section on deconstruction would have been enough to discover Blumenfeld has no idea what he’s talking about?leads Leslie to compile error upon error

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The Speed of Light Reading: A New Introduction to Print is Dead
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?Listen; there’s a hell of a good universe next door: let’s go.?

? e.e. cummings

1.

I was a teenager when I first discovered the word solipsism. The instant I learned of its meaning I loved the word for its poetic simplicity, silky alliteration, and the fact that a collection of just a few letters could encompass such a big idea. Ever since then, while hopefully never suffering from solipsism (if anything, I usually experience the opposite), I?ve thought of the word from time to time. It also occasionally surfaces in print or conversation, or else a character in a movie will say it. But while we can all hope to eradicate solipsism?so that no one person thinks that they?re the center of the universe?that doesn?t settle the question of the universe itself. After all, what kind of universe has none of us at its center?

2.

It?s been over a year since Print is Dead was first published in paper and electronic formats, and it?s been more three years since I first wrote the original essay that led to the writing of the full-length book. A lot has happened in that time.

Since I wrote the essay, Sony has introduced the first (and then second) version of its eBook reader. In December 2008, Sony reported they?d sold over 300,000 eReader devices, and work continues on yet another version (this time incorporating wireless connectivity). Apple has similarly introduced the iPhone, touted by many in the press as the ?God device.? Its sales are already well into the millions and, as of April 2009, more than a billion applications have been download to iPhones around the world. In fact, they?re now so ubiquitous on the streets and on busses and commuter trains that, whenever someone?s cell phone rings, the chances are pretty good that they?re going to pull out an iPhone. In addition to this, Apple has introduced a half-dozen new iPod models (all of them smaller, cheaper, and with larger memories than their predecessors), not to mention Apple has begun selling TV shows, movies, and audiobooks from iTunes. Electronic books?for reading on an iPhone?also appear in iTunes, but so far only clumsily, as stand-alone apps in the app store. Rather than being seen truly as content, books are sold alongside gimmicky fare like video games.

Even in just the last year or so there have been immense changes. Amazon?s Kindle has appeared (with a sleeker 2.0 version already available, as well as a deluxe model with a larger screen), and Google has settled its lawsuit with authors. Meanwhile, more and more people are engaged in the delivery and consumption of electronic content and online participation, getting their news and entertainment from blogs or websites. Recent studies have shown that people spend more time on Facebook than with email, and Twitter is so popular that Ashton Kutcher has more people ?following? him than CNN does. Think about that: he?s one person; they?re a news network. In a lot of ways, it?s a pretty amazing time.

However, while digital media continues to proliferate, physical formats are becoming more and more rare. As newspaper circulations continue to shrink, along with advertising income, many American papers are going out of business (to list them all would be too depressing). In addition, a number of magazines?from Domino to Portfolio?have also ceased publication. In the music world, Atlantic Records announced that in November 2008?for the first time?digital sales exceeded physical sales. Everywhere you look, people are creating and consuming electronic content. And, to add insult to injury, the publishing industry experienced a major contraction when the financial system and stock markets collapsed in late 2008. Many prominent New York publishers had layoffs, closed divisions, fired entire departments, and shuttered imprints.

And yet, despite all of this activity, and all of the good and bad news, the universe of publishing?the way that it does business?has not changed all that much in the past year or so. Big books and authors?the James Pattersons and Stephen Kings of the world?continue to rake in big bucks and keep their numerous fans happy. Celebrity authors are still given huge advances (even in these tough financial times), the bestseller lists are filled with the usual suspects, and Twilight has become?more or less?the new Harry Potter. At the same time, publishers in both America and Europe have continued to expand their various digital efforts, digitizing their backlists and embracing new software and reading devices (including the iPhone). But most of this digital activity is happening at the edges of the larger publishing galaxy; eBooks are still only a miniscule profit center, a tiny star against a backdrop of big names and paper formats.

But if publishing is indeed a universe, what kind of universe is it?

3.

For a majority of the twentieth century, there was a debate about what kind of universe we lived in. Was it dynamic and expanding, or static and eternal? Had space always existed, or had it been?at some point in time?created?

Those who feel that the universe is dynamic and expanding believe in the theory of the Big Bang. In this theory, the entire universe was created from a single ?primeval atom,? and ever since that initial explosion the universe has continued to grow and expand in all directions (with the galaxies farthest away from our own traveling the fastest).

The other theory, in which the universe is static and eternal, is known as the Steady State Model. According to the proponents of this idea, the universe is infinite in scope; it has always existed, and always will exist.

The difference between the two theories centers, mainly, around the idea of expansion.

Anytime there?s an explosion, debris is hurled in all directions. In the case of our universe, the matter?all of those elements and all of that energy?that burst forth almost 14 billion years ago is still traveling as aftermath of that first blast. Everywhere we look in the night sky, we can see stars and nebulae moving away from us. And while the proponents of a Steady State Model admit that galaxies are indeed moving, they claim this simply means that we?re doubling and tripling our size within infinity (like adding chairs to a table that never ends; there?s room for everyone, no matter how many people show up). Proponents of the Big Bang are sure that this evidence points to a universe being slowly stretched, like taffy; one day, it will snap.

I think that a mini-version of this debate is happening today in publishing. Some people in the industry think that?like the Steady State Model of the universe?publishing is eternal and infinite. No matter what happens at a consumer, business, or even a technological level, publishing will withstand each and every challenge. Indeed, this group believes that?in the future?publishing will continue to exist (and even thrive), looking much the same way that it does now. In this scenario, the dogs bark but the caravan stays right where it is.

At the same time, many others think the opposite: that the publishing universe is expanding; growing in size and venturing into unknown territory. They believe that new business models and ways to sell and experience content are created all of the time, like stars and galaxies born deep inside a fiery nebula. We could call this the Big ?Berg theory, since Johannes Gutenberg created the publishing industry with his invention of the printing press in 1492. Plus, the fact that the first words ever printed with moveable type happened to be In the beginning makes for a nicely poetic touch.

What makes many people uncomfortable with the Big ?Berg scenario is that it means that the industry?like the universe?is finite. There?s going to come a time when even James Patterson and Stephen King will supernovae themselves out of existence. When this happens, the entire publishing universe?and everything in it?will cease to exist (except for, probably, Oprah).

However, it?s not quite time to panic. As Alvy Singer?s mom told a young Woody Allen in Annie Hall after he?d been taken to the doctor because of his paralyzing fear of an expanding universe: ?You?re here in Brooklyn; Brooklyn is not expanding.? So to just admit that the publishing universe is expanding and changing does not mean that you?re declaring for it an immediate death sentence.

4.

Of course, as persuasive as publishing?s Big ?Berg theory may be, many people cling to the idea of a Steady State Model for the industry.

They want to believe that publishing has always existed, and always will; that all of the digital activity we?ve witnessed in the last couple of years has been merely a distraction, if not a smokescreen. Yes, people download music, listen to their iPods, and have stopped buying CDs (not to mention magazines and newspapers). The New York Times may be physically shrinking, along with its circulation, but that doesn?t mean anything. It?s a blip, a market correction; a bad spell, a downturn. We?ve had bad times before, seen dark days, but have always bounced back. The shanty towns and Hoovervilles of the ?20s and ?30s gave way to the sprawling suburban tract housing of the ?50s and ?60s. So why wouldn?t what we?re seeing now, in terms of what?s happening with publishing, be any different?

And just as brilliant scientists like Fred Hoyle had to keep twisting and tuning their Steady State theory to make it comply with the various revelations that were emerging from the realms of physics and astronomy, some publishing pundits continue to resolutely insist on the sanctity of the page, the brilliance of the book. They explain away any digital revolution as mere child?s play. That, they say, could never compete with this. And they come up with various ideas to back up their claim.

For instance, when Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008 and everyone rushed out the next day to buy a newspaper so that they could hang on to it as a keepsake, dozens of articles and blog posts were written from the angle of ?See all of this interest in newspapers? That proves that print?s not dead!? And yet, the very opposite was true. People were collecting the newspapers purely as a memento; everyone heard about the election results from either their TV or computer. The newspapers weren?t carrying or relaying news; instead, the newspapers were telling us what we already knew. Collecting them was like bronzing baby shoes straight from the box: an instant keepsake (and a wonderful revenue generator for the newspapers), but hardly a sign that newspapers have a future.

5.

I wrote Print is Dead, at first, just for myself. As someone who had once written novels, but now worked in publishing, I had more than a casual interest in what would happen to books. I was also curious because publishing is what I?d chosen as a career. But I also loved books and wanted to know?even though I was no longer actively trying to create them (it?d been years since I?d written fiction)?what was going to happen to them; were they going to survive all of this craziness surrounding the Web and the iPod? I wrote Print is Dead to answer that question.

Having been an author in the past, I was aware of the various stages of publication: editing the manuscript, correcting the galleys, getting a few good reviews, getting some bad ones (not getting any reviews). But what was different this time from any other time I?d published a book was the presence of the blogosphere. Before the Web, whenever anyone?s book appeared, it was the critics and the mainstream media who had the power to make or break an author or a book. But now, there?s a whole new online world that has the power to either amplify a book?s message or else an author?s profile.

Print is Dead received very few reviews (a couple appeared in England, the majority of which were derisive). Needless to say, the bad reviews seem to have come from those who believe in the Steady State Model of publishing; all of this digital noise is just that: noise. Computers are for kids; books are amazing technology, they?ll never be replaced. No one I know reads electronic books. Blah blah blah.

There was also scant notice of my book in any mainstream publications, and when The Los Angeles Times recommended Print is Dead as a fall book, I could only be bemused since they mentioned it as a fall book for 2008 (even though the book came out in the fall of 2007; better late than never, I guess). Of course, every author has these gripes. But still, I would have thought that print publications would have been interested in the subject matter, if only to defend their honor and denounce me and my ideas. Instead, there was mostly silence. Even within the publishing industry itself, there was mostly indifference; Publisher?s Weekly invited me to write something for their Soap Box column, but never wrote a review of the book itself.

The blogosphere was a different story. Dozens of bloggers wrote about Print is Dead, and for months after the book came out my RSS feed was filled with various mentions and links. Plus, people from all over the world reached out to me, asking questions, wanting clarification on a point, or just to say that they?d liked it. Also, the fact that I continued to blog about the book and the topic helped increase exposure for me and my book.

Because of this?the dearth of reviews, and lack of any marketing?I was pleasantly surprised when the book actually sold, and went into a second edition. That being said, the book wasn?t successful enough that my publisher is allowing me to update or correct the text, not to mention add a new introduction (which is why this essay is appearing here, and not there). I would have loved to have updated the text, if only to fix the numerous typos that appeared due to the fact that the book was rushed into publication (the fact that I managed to misspell schadenfreude is a shame I won?t ever live down, even though it seems like a dare to someone to point it out). Somehow, my little book managed to do okay, and I?m pleased and surprised to see it getting a second life in paperback.

Of course, what?s also happened since the release of Print is Dead is that there have been another dozen or so breathless odes on the greatness of books, appearing in various magazines and publications, with writers once again pining for pages and denigrating digital. These kinds of articles go back at least a decade, if not to E. Annie Proulx?s original proclamation in 1994 that, ?Nobody is going to sit down and read a book on a twitchy little screen. Ever.?

One of the more recent articles?and one that attracted a lot of attention?was an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Faster author James Gleick. Entitled, ?How to Publish Without Perishing,? it offered up yet more advice to publishers on how they can survive in a digital world. However, Gleick?s ideas are counterintuitive if not downright archaic. Instead of pushing publishers to digitize their backlists, or explore new business models, he exhorts them to, ?Go back to an old-fashioned idea.? The idea being to, well, publish books. Why? Because, as Gleick states, ?We?ve reached a shining moment for this ancient technology.? (I think the glare from that ?shining moment? has gotten into his eyes and is obscuring his vision.)

The artwork that appeared alongside Gleick?s story said a lot about the mistake of his argument. In the illustration a man, standing in a library amidst stacks and shelves of bound volumes, is intently reading a book. Meanwhile, a glowing computer screen sits impotently on a desk, slowly loading information (as if desperately trying to catch up to all of the knowledge already accumulated in the room). In the picture?as in Gleick?s article?books are a superior technology to computers. This idea is the familiar twisting of Orwell?s words that I find commentators come to time and time again (whether they?re conscious of the connection or not): computers good, books better.

What?s so silly about that picture, and arguments like the one Gleick is making in his op-ed, is that it frames the debate over reading to be a steal-cage death match between a laptop and a paperback. Sure, when faced with a choice between the page or a computer screen, most would rather read something on paper (even something as quotidian as e-mail; I know plenty of people who print out e-mails and read them like memos). But most consumers aren?t faced with that either/or decision. Instead, what we talk about when we talk about electronic reading is, in most cases, the screen as a substitution for nothing at all.

6.

When I?m at home, I rarely listen to my iPod. Instead, I load up my CD player with various discs, choosing from a spindle that holds about fifty or so and permanently lives inside the cabinet that houses my stereo, cable box, and DVD player. That stack of CDs encompasses recent purchases, longtime favorites, and a selection of moods I?m liable to find myself in (jazz for reading, electronica for quiet contemplation, singer-songwriters for Sunday mornings, etc.). And if I get a particular craving to hear a certain record?because a fellow commuter was talking about Blur that morning on the bus, or ?Maps? was seeping through a co-worker?s white earbud headphones on the elevator in my office building?then I?ll dig that specific CD out of my stacks.

But it?d be ridiculous to extrapolate from this behavior, and say that a physical format is better than an electronic format because I don?t listen to my iPod when I?m surrounded at home by my CDs. Instead, that?s simply my behavior when I?m at home, under those conditions. When I have the time and chance (and luxury) to utilize a physical format, I do. But that?s hardly a victory for physical formats since there are plenty of times?even while I?m at home?when I eschew the physical for the ether of digital.

And, of course, whenever I?m not at home?whether it?s on a long trip or just during my daily commute, or when I?m at the gym or even going to the store for a carton of milk?I?m listening to my iPod. Why? Well, because carrying one iPod that holds over 20,000 songs is much more handy than being followed around with a U-Haul carrying a stereo and thousands of my CDs. And yet, in terms of the digital versus analog debate, it?s still not an either/or proposition. Instead, one format fills in when it makes sense for it to do so. We need to stop positioning this argument?with apologies to the ghost of William Styron?as Sophie?s Choice, and treat it more like tag-team wrestling.

The same goes for books and general online reading. Give someone a print edition of The New York Times, along with a Kindle loaded with the same stories, and most people would prefer to read the physical newspaper. That preference is practically hardwired in our brains; the Kindle is a gadget, a newspaper is gospel.

However, give someone a choice between a laptop with an Internet connection or a physical copy of The New York Times. Most people would choose the laptop. They would choose the computer because, with it, they would get not only the Times but also the entirety of the Web: e-mail, Youtube, Google, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter. (Plus, the online version of The New York Times has audio, video, up-to-the-minute news, and reader?s comments). Not only is that a win for the laptop, but it can hardly be considered a fair fight.

True, many people?since it?s not an either/or decision?choose to read both the newspaper and the screen (opting for the paper at home, over breakfast, and then surfing the Web at the office). But for many, many more?people who either do not have access to printed material or physical formats?they spend their time solely with digital content. Therefore, that illustration for Gleick?s op-ed would only be credible if everyone?s home, office, dorm, car, or escalator at the mall, were lined with all of those books. But, of course, we don?t live in a world where we?re tripping over free books every step that we walk. However, electronic content is indeed reaching us at all of those points where books cannot.

At the center of all this media?of all of this content?we stand with our various screens: laptops, iPhones, PDAs, etc. These devices can call up any nugget of the world?s vast store of knowledge, or else just flash your favorite photo. They are portals to the past, and windows into the future. Satellites (almost like planets) orbit each of us in order to beam into our hands headlines, music, movies, and?yes?even books. The potential now exists to have, at your fingertips (and at your request), almost anything you?d want to know, have or experience. In an instant. It?s enough to make someone feel a little, well, solipsistic.

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McLuhan Remix: A Video Essay
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McLuhan Remix is three-part video essay with supporting web site created by Jamie O’Neil aka Kurt Weibers, a video/performance artist and assistant professor of digital media arts at Canisius College in Buffalo. Below I include the McLuhan Remix: Prologue and first paragraph of the web site intro.

The Medium is the Mix
Remixing is the most important aesthetic and epistemological outcome of the technologies of digital media and the Internet. This video-essay is intended for today’s students (digital natives) who are studying McLuhan’s words on paper. McLuhan knew how to mix concepts to create a powerful reaction. He utilized electronic communication channels (audio and video) in his time, and he spoke through them with incredible fluency. Today, YouTube mash-ups are an emerging form of literacy, rarely used for scholarly purposes. This is because the digital era of “cut&paste” has mostly been problematical for traditional academics (it is unacceptable to remix a term paper). But networked, digital authoring also greatly expands the range of expressivity… How then would McLuhan expect an essay to be composed today, nearly a half-century after his time? [Read more.]

Since I keep introducing The Medium is the Massage to students as an exemplar of electronic composition in the print medium as well as a theoretical text, it’s been my intent to rework the FYC Annotating McLuhan project into a video project remixing the book (both the print and audio versions), research, and video and audio recordings of McLuhan. For the time being, I’m going to use the video essay as a supplementary text in the current FYC course and plan on using it as a theoretical text and exemplar in next fall’s Advanced Composition: Image, Sound, Text course.

Via Lance Strate.

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Computers and Writing Online 2009: Ubiquitous and Sustainable Computing (Feb. 17 ? March 1)
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Via Carl Whithaus, Computers and Writing 2009 Conference Chair:

The online portion of Computers and Writing 2009 begins next Tuesday (Feb. 17) and runs through Sunday March 1. The online version begins with an opening session in Adobe Connect (accessible via any web browser) 2/17 at noon PST. A variety of synchronous sessions in Second Life and Adobe Connect and asynchronous sessions in SmartSite (Sakai) follow 2/18-3/1. The finale on Sunday 3/1 is three hours of Second Life sessions as a closing to the online portion of Computers and Writing 2009. Training for new Second Life users will be provided. The sessions promise to be engaging and interactive explorations of what ubiquitous and sustainable computing means for the future of writing.

To see the session schedule and to register for the online portion, go to http://writingprogram.ucdavis.edu/cw2009/.

Registration for the online conference is free. Registration fees for the onsite conference, to be held at UC-Davis June 18-21, 2009, will be $175 for faculty and $125 for graduate students, adjuncts, and k-12 teachers.

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The Things We Blog About
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Neil Gaiman’s metacommentary about the post in which he notes the 8th anniversary of his blog:

And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea?

And I thought, yup. Sounds about right. Happy Eighth birthday, blog.

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Paperback Writer
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Print is Dead will be coming out early next year in a paperback edition. The new cover is pictured above. While there wonâ??t be any new material included, I will be writing a new introduction that I’ll post to this blog when the paperback appears. I will also make this material available for download.

Thanks.

–Jeff
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Relying on the Kindles of Strangers: Pics of new model
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The website Boy Genius Report has shots of the new version of Amazonâ??s Kindle eBook reader. And while the device continues to look sleek and cool (though itâ??s still not quite in iPod territory), the screen is remains black and white; or rather, slate-grey and dirty-ivory. It also doesnâ??t seem to be a touch-screen, which — if they couldnâ??t do color, they should have offered — the newly announced Sony device will indeed have.

I find it a little strange that the Kindle seems to have gotten bigger, rather than smaller. I guess Amazonâ??s trying not to compete with the smaller form-factor of things like iPhones and Android phones. Instead, with its magazine and newspaper subscriptions (not to mention the ability to read blogs), Amazon’s going more for a tablet experience than the stick-it-in-your-pocket convenience of a paperback.

More photos here.
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Thatâ??s Not the Doors Song I Would Have Chosen
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Thereâ??s a long cover story this week in New York Magazine about publishing. Rather than leave any doubt as to the future of the book industry, the article is called â??The End.â? And while movies in the thirties and forties were never complete without those two words appearing in the final reel — those six letters giving cathartic closure and making us eager for yet more stories — what writer Boris Kachka seems to be saying with his piece is that not only is our movie over, but there wonâ??t be a sequel. Time to leave the theater. Go home. Stick a fork in publishing; itâ??s done. Donâ??t believe me? Hereâ??s the subheadline:

The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.

And yet, even though I wrote a book called Print is Dead, even I donâ??t think that publishing is over. Rather, it just needs to change and be willing to embrace new ideas and business models. And while the challenges the industry faces are indeed difficult, theyâ??re hardly insurmountable. Kachka himself points to a few hopeful enterprises (HarperStudio, the Kindle) but, for the most part, the article is more of the usual.
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Headlines Go Online: Google now scanning newspapers
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The New York Times reported today on Googleâ??s newspaper scanning efforts:

Google has begun scanning microfilm from some newspapersâ?? historic archives to make them searchable online, first through Google News and eventually on the papersâ?? own Web sites…

Google will then serve up scans of newspapers either via Google, or on the site of the originating newspapers, which provides income for Google (in the first example) and/or traffic and visitors (and potentially income from advertising) for the original newspapers (in the second example).

And while Google got in hot water with its book-scanning program a few years ago, touching on raw nerves and igniting a debate about copyright, the newspaper initiative seems like a better idea. Because a July 21st issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1969 is a different kind of content from the novel The Godfather (which was published that same year). The novel is available from retailers, and is making money for its publisher and author. Whereas the newspaper is a quietly fading artifact, an orphaned antique not likely to find a foster home.Â And that’s a shame since, in terms of being a sort of fossil record of our national identity, newspapers can be more valuable than books: a great novel has the ability to reflect our common hopes and dreams, but almost any old newspaper is an indispensable record of the quotidian details that make up our everyday lives.
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New films coming online
'); document.write('For most of the year we\'ve been promising that we\'d upload 500 new films to our collection at the Internet Archive. This has taken longer than we anticipated, and we\'re sorry to have dangled this possibility in front of our archival fan community for such a long time. The reason for the delay has been that this year we started our \"tapelessness\" project ? a project to convert all of our material presently living on Digital Beta and Beta SP videotape to high-bitrate digital files ? and wanted to make the digital files for the Archive at the same time we were making our own. This is a complex workflow and we\'re still experimenting with getting it right, but I\'m delighted to say that new films are starting to trickle onto the Archive site. It\'s going to be a diverse bunch of material with many items that haven\'t been seen in quite a few years.

Watch this link for new items as they appear.
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You Say Itâ??s Your Birthday (Itâ??s my birthday two)
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Two years ago I posted the first entry to the Print is Dead blog; Iâ??m not sure if that makes today a birthday or an anniversary (itâ??s probably neither and a bit of both). But as you can see from the above I went with candles as a graphic, so letâ??s call it a birthday.

I created the blog in the summer of 2006, just as I was finalizing a deal to write the book Print is Dead (which was itself an expansion of a 50 page essay Iâ??d written and distributed privately to a few friends and colleagues that winter and spring). Initially I just wanted the blog to be a place where I could post, and thus have record of, articles that Iâ??d read or come across concerning the future of the book debate. Because, at that point, I was still just sort of getting my head around the subject: compiling books to read, printing out articles for research, trying to learn everything I could.

It also seemed that every other day I was coming across something that was relevant to the topic and my argument, items and ideas that I was going to want to include somehow in the text. So rather than just printing out Web pages and sticking them in a folder, or even bookmarking the sites so I could visit them later, I wanted to post them as blog entries with links and a bit of commentary (mainly as a way of putting the link into some sort of context). Plus, it forced me think about my topic on a daily basis.

Looking back, itâ??s interesting for me to see how the posts evolved; how they got longer, became a bit more involved and, hopefully, more thought-out and precise. For instance, hereâ??s a short post from 2006 about The Nation writing about newspapers. Hereâ??s a longer article about a similar Nation article written two years later.

Bill Griffith, the creator of Zippy the Pinhead, wrote that â??Comics is a language. Itâ??s a language most people understand intuitively.â? Blogs also have their own language, rhythm, and rules, and it certainly took me a while to discover that language. Plus, blogs have their own form.

A blog post is one long unraveling of prose; a digital version, almost, of Kerouacâ??s On the Road scroll. And so, the more I got into the language and format of blogging, the more I would write the posts with careful attention to the length of the paragraphs. I always kept in mind the fact that the reader would be reading my words in a continuous flow rather than divided into pages. This is similar to what musicians are up against; they now sequence records as one continuous program (for CD, if not download) instead of in two different halves for vinyl or cassette.

For a non-fiction book, the blog was a huge help in getting down, in a permanent way, my thoughts on my subject. Whatâ??s also interesting to me is that, because I was blogging as I wrote the book, some of the material I wrote as posts eventually made it into the finished draft. Of course, Iâ??m not the first author to do this; many others have done this already and, I suspect, lots of writers are doing this right now.

I remember reading, years ago, Martin Amis saying that the computer scared him, and that he liked to write in longhand because once something was written down he could always return to it. Whereas, once something digital is virtually erased or deleted, itâ??s long gone. However, a blog also allows you to sort through all of its entries, as well as tag entries by content or topic; a moleskin journal or yellow legal pad will never let you do that.

Also, getting comments and reader feedback was great. I was most happy when a discussion would start because of something I wrote. As a writer you can only hope that people read, or think critically, about your work. With a physical book, you know if they bought it but not if they read it (not mention whether or not itâ??s being discussed). But a blog gives you a real window into that process: people can interact with you and your material almost immediately. Sometimes thatâ??s a scary prospect, and sometimes itâ??s not fun, but itâ??s almost always worthwhile.

I think the most valuable lesson I learned from keeping this blog — and how it pertains to my subject — is that it indeed reinforced in me (or else reintroduced) the prejudice that people feel towards screens. We revere the page, but we take the screen for granted. As Jonathan Franzen recently said in an interview, â??If thereâ??s great fiction getting published online, I look forward to seeing it in print someday soon.â? E-mail, stock quotes and porn are displayed on screens; literature, love letters and ideas are printed on the page. And I fell into this trap myself.Â Because, at times, I would find myself — when trying to get a sentence or an argument right when writing up an entry — think to myself, â??Oh, hell, just post it; itâ??s only a blog.â?

So thereâ??s certainly something to the idea that the screen is not as permanent as the page. Or rather, itâ??s that a blog — or anything electronic, really — is not yet a final draft. Because if I know that I can log on later and make a change (apostrophe here, comma there), then why sweat every word now? People like Harold Brodkey labored over every word in their prose because they believed books were real and final things; he may have been writing on a typewriter, but in his mind he was chiseling words into stone for all eternity. Whereas today we see software — from Word to Wordpress — as being a mixture of training wheels and a safety net: thereâ??s always the ability to edit, undo, or â??revert to saved.â?

And yet, I would say that itâ??s actually the opposite. The screen can be much more permanent than the page ever was. Once somethingâ??s online itâ??s scooped, crawled, indexed, and cached, and from that point on it can be awfully hard to get rid of. After all, itâ??s easier to buy a portable hard drive with every single issue of The New Yorker on it than to try and collect — let alone store — all of the print editions (if you could even find them). One day entire libraries — both personal and public collections — will come on Flash drives that will fit on your key chain. And when we get to that point, with all of that content accessible by and available on an electronic device, weâ??ll finally see that screens can be both sandbox and concrete.

Anyway, my thanks to everyone who reads, writes about, or links to this blog.
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Mobi Dick: Sci-fi, the Internet and eBooks
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In Print is Dead, in the chapter about eBooks, I describe how we usually find fault with science fiction books and movies:

In every book or film or piece of art from the last century that has depicted the future â?? from Jules Verne to George Lucas â?? we usually fault it twice: first for the things that didnâ??t come true, and then for failing to see the myriad of changes that did take place.

But last week, as I read The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick, I was struck by a few passages that seemed to almost perfectly portray aspects of our current digital age.

Published in 1981, The Divine Invasion is part of Dickâ??s VALIS trilogy. Comprising the last three novels published before Dickâ??s untimely death at the age of 53, the books were based on a religious experience that Dick had in 1974 when he felt he was zapped by a pink laser that he believed was extraterrestrial in origin.

At one point in The Divine Invasion, a character named Emmanuel (who is actually God in the body of a child) is given an electronic device at his school. Called an â??information slate,â? the gadget sounds an awful lot like either an eBook device or a Tablet PC. Made by I.B.M. (which, in the future, is part of the government), Dick describes each slate as having a â??pale gray surfaceâ? and containing â??common microcircuitryâ? (which makes it sort of seem like a Kindle). Each student is given one, and each device is â??plugged into the schoolâ? (which sounds a lot like either an intranet if not the Internet). Plus, the fact that every child gets one reminded me of this story from last week in The New York Times about how colleges are handing out iPods to freshman. The slates quiz the students, answering questions and giving out information.

In the early â??80s — at the dawn of the computer revolution — this could have easily been imagined. The slates Dick describes sound a bit like an expansion of any number of gizmos that existed back then, even my beloved Dataman that I had in elementary school. The big difference is that none of those devices were networked with other devices (the closest I came to that was my Coleco Head-to-Head Football). More interesting than this is a description a few pages later about a holographic (and thus obviously electronic) version of the Bible:

â?¦the Bible expressed as layers at different depths within the hologram, each layer according to age. The total structure of Scripture formed, then, a three-dimensional cosmos that could be viewed from any angle and its contents read. According to the title of the axis of observation, different messages could be extracted. Thus Scripture yielded up an infinitude of knowledge that ceaselessly changed. It became a wondrous work of art, beautiful to the eye, and incredible in its pulsations of color.

This is a pretty wonderful description, and it kind of reminds me of the online version of Gamer Theory from last year where each paragraph had a graphical and color-coded representation on the screen. If that website were able to be portrayed in 3D, and was accessed on something like an iPhone, where you could flip through its layers and turn it over and around with your fingers, then youâ??d be close to experiencing what Dick had envisioned.

But even more interesting than even this is that, a decade before the birth of anything resembling the Internet that we know today, and twenty years before the birth of Wikipedia, Dick writes about a kind of Creative Commons online version of the Bible, a living document which anyone can add to.

As the narrator describes:

It was an open hologram. New information could be fed into it. Emmanuel wondered about that, but he said nothingâ?¦

What he could do, however, was type out on the keyboard linked to the hologram a few crucial words of Scripture, whereupon the hologram would align itself from the vantage point of the citation, along all its spacial axes. Thus the entire text of the Bible would be focused in a relationship to the typed-out information.

Emmanuel, being God, of course has a few things to add to the Bible. However, he resists the temptation:

He wanted to feed that into the hologram of the Bible, as an addendum, but he knew that he should not. How would it alter the total hologram? he wondered. To add to the Torah that God enjoys joyful sport â?¦ Strange, he thought, that I canâ??t add that. Someone must add it; it has to be there, in Scripture. Someday.

In an age of living documents, and the constant updating of blogs, the day of people correcting and adding content to websites is today. Too bad Philip K. Dick isnâ??t alive to see it.
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The Kindle Kronikles: Part 4. Blogs and Newspapers
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Reading blogs and newspapers on the Kindle felt strange to me, whereas — after some initial trepidation — reading a book did not. Maybe itâ??s because the Kindle really does feel like the next step in the evolution of reading: words started out on the page, and now theyâ??re migrating to the screen. Whereas reading a blog on a Kindle felt like a distinct step backwards. Because blogs are constantly updated, hyperlinked, are in color, and — more and more these days — feature video and audio. So while blogs, and certainly newspapers, began as just words, increasingly they consist of a variety of media, none of which make it to your Kindle (even photos really donâ??t look very good).

In fact, to me it felt like the reverse of the page/screen evolution; sort of like taking something 3D and turning it into 2D. That being said, when I was on a recent trip I was more glad than not to being able to download a few of my favorite blogs. Reading The Huffington Post on an airplane was a pretty cool experience, but it was also frustrating not to be able to hop from link to link, or to be able to click through to original stories the blog posts were sometimes commenting on.

Also, something that frustrated me about the blog process, and that again seems like a step backwards rather than forward, is that the Kindle seems to treat a blog like itâ??s a newspaper. It seems that, once a day, it â??publishesâ? the blog, and sends it out to devices the same way a copy of The New York Times lands on your front door courtesy of the paperboy. As someone who reads a dozen blogs, and checks his RSS reader for updates throughout the day, the idea of a blog being a static thing makes no sense.

Instead of being pushed out to subscribers once a day, I donâ??t know why the Kindle version of a blog canâ??t constantly refresh and update itself (as long as the wireless signal is on, of course). Also, itâ??s jarring if youâ??re keeping track of the blog using both the Kindle and a computer. While I was traveling I would wake up and read my blogs and websites and then later, when I was on a plane, I would get out the Kindle and sync it up and want to read what Iâ??d missed since packing my computer away. Instead, what I got on my Kindle was literally yesterdayâ??s news. I had the same experience with reading a newspaper on the Kindle.

Even though newspapers have traditionally been thought of as static objects, something thatâ??s delivered once a day, in the Internet age newspapers have become more like constantly updating stock tickers that deliver news and events as they happen. In fact, I check The New York Times website several times a day, the same way I check Daily Kos, because I know that the Times — online, anyway — will have fresh content throughout the day. But on the Kindle, the same as blogs, you get a static edition of a newspaper (presumably the same content thatâ??s in the printed edition). And rather than the Kindle searching out the latest stories every time you turn on the wireless signal, what you get are day-by-day editions. And I donâ??t want to read newspapers on a Kindle; I want to read news.

The Kindleâ??s digital menu listing the dates of different editions of The New York Times is just a digital version of the clutter that I find in my living room after a few days of collecting the real thing. Instead of this, the blogs and newspapers I subscribe to should be singular entities that constantly update and change, the same as their online counterparts. The fact that this isnâ??t the case betrays the notion of the Kindle being a never-ending source of always and instantly replenished content; instead of the screen being a true portal, the device itself is just a vault.

However, I will say that reading the newspaper on a Kindle is a better experience than reading it online. For instance, it was really easy to navigate through a Sunday edition of The New York Times on the Kindle (if you know what sections you like; browsing through ALL of the stories is a chore), whereas I find that poking around on the website on a Sunday is a bit difficult. And while I still read the physical edition of the Times on the weekends (mainly because itâ??s too difficult to sit on a couch with a laptop while eating bagels), now that I have a Kindle I may finally cancel that subscription once and for all.
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The Kindle Kronikles: Part 3. Books
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The first book I read on the Kindle was David McCulloughâ??s 1776 (which I wanted to read because of the recent 4th of July holiday). And I must say that it never felt weird to be reading about the 18th century on an electronic device that would have appeared to George Washington as the work of men from outer space. In fact, I can imagine using the Kindle to read anyone from Tom Wolfe to Thomas Wolfe without it feeling either out of context or just plain wrong. (The only kind of writing that depends on its placement on the page — and thus would lose some of its punch in a reflowable format — is poetry). However, initially it did indeed feel a little funny to read a book on a computer screen; it involved subtly fighting against decades of learning.

I associate words with pages (the same way that I similarly associate small computer screens with content like e-mail, text messages and my iPod). So to mash the two together was, at first, a strange experience. It reminded me of the scene in Wall-E where the robot, after coming back from a day of smashing garbage and collecting treasures, has a spork (half spoon, half fork). He goes to add it to his collection, but he canâ??t decide whether to add it to his jumble of spoons or his haystack of forks. Instead, since this is a new hybrid of them both, he places the spork to the side (and, I guess, a new collection — and a new way of looking at utensils — begins). This example, as silly as it might seem, I think has real relevance to the future of the book debate. Because people insist on seeing books as books, and computer content as computer content, and yet eBooks are truly a mixture of the two in order to create something new.

As I started to really get into the book, the way the words appeared on the screen felt sort of magical. It was as if each time I â??turned the pageâ? I was shaking up a magic eight ball, with the words then lazily floating to the surface. The screen seemed to be like an Etch-A-Sketch, the screen a blank surface constantly filled and then erased, filled and then erased.

And yet all of the old behavior was there. Whereas, with a print book Iâ??ll occasionally flip forward a few pages to see if the chapter Iâ??m reading is about to end — searching for a good stopping point before I go to bed — with the Kindle I would do the same thing, hitting Next Page a few times to see if there was a natural break in the prose.

The only thing that was a little odd was that I never really knew where I was in the story. In print books progress is easy to tell because every night you gain satisfaction in looking at how many pages youâ??ve managed the get through. But reading an electronic book is like being on a treadmill; yes, youâ??re absorbing the content, but itâ??s hard to shake the feeling that youâ??re not just running in place, going nowhere.

Yes, there are a series of dots at the bottom of that screen that show where you are in the story, but those dots can be misleading. The book I was reading was a non-fiction book, with a lot of endnotes (which, in a print edition, would take up a lot of pages at the back of book). And when I glanced down at the dots at the bottom of the screen at one point, which showed I was about three-fourths through the book, I thought I was three-fourths through the story. So I was a bit shocked when the story suddenly ended, and all of those remaining dots were representing content I didnâ??t want to read. This wouldnâ??t have happened in a print book.

You crack the spine of a book when you first start to read it the same way you crack your knuckles before you start a task you know will be a challenge. And when you do this — or at least, when I do this — I flip ahead to see how long the book is, to see what Iâ??m up against. Iâ??ve often felt daunted when reading the opening sentence of either a very long or multi-volume work (â??For a long time I used to go to bed earlyâ?), gulping as I began my long climb up all of those words. And yet, none of that exists in an electronic format because eBooks are like icebergs: the words we see on the surface are not representative of how many of them are lurking below. This phenomenon essentially turns books into movies, because you know when a movieâ??s going to begin but you never know when itâ??s going to end. This is both good and bad.

Endings in movies can sneak up on you, which give them immense power. Think of last scenes of something like Birdy, Memento or even the more recent There Will Be Blood. Endings like those come out of nowhere, and can pack a wallop. Then again, not knowing when a movie will end can lead to peering at your watch in the dark, wondering when in the hell it will be over. I remember, in high school, being in a theater watching Philip Kaufmanâ??s adaptation of Milan Kunderaâ??s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and just hating it. Every time a scene faded out I hoped it would be the end of the movie, and I was disappointed a dozen times when the screen faded in with yet more scenes. In a book, this is not the case.

We see the end of a book coming from pages away. In fact, sometimes the hardest thing to do, when you have only two or three pages left of a book, is to not go to the very last line and read it. The end is so close, and you want to get there so badly, that the temptation to take a quick glance is sometimes overpowering. On a Kindle, this is much more difficult. The pages are virtual, and youâ??re only being served up one page at a time (with not much of an idea of how that screen fits into the rest), so itâ??s like driving at night and not being able to see much past your headlights. For some people, this will seem a thrill; for others, it may seem a bit claustrophobic.
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The Kindle Kronikles: Part 2. The Device
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As I wrote in a previous post, I now own an Amazon Kindle and have been using it for the past couple of weeks.

In terms of the device itself, itâ??s very light and sleek (without, that is, the cover). The cover, I think, tries to make the Kindle look/feel like itâ??s either a moleskin journal or a hardback book, and yet itâ??s neither.

Once free of the cover, the Kindle feels great to hold is more than comfortable to read with one hand (either one). Plus, turning the page with the tip of a finger, or thumb, of the hand youâ??re holding the device with is a cinch. I had perfected how to do this with paperbacks years ago — in my pre iPod days — when I lived in Manhattan and would read on the subways during my commute, always having to hold onto my book with one hand and the subway pole with the other. I’m glad to see that the skill is again coming in handy.

However, as comfortable as the device feels in the hand, the â??pageâ? (meaning, the screen), rather than being truly white, is a kind of non-fat milk gray. In fact, since itâ??s contrasted with the matte white of the Kindle itself, the screen looks even grayer than it probably is. True, Iâ??ve read plenty of books in my time that were printed on cheap, almost newsprint paper, which was both coarse to the touch and hardly white, so Iâ??m hardly expecting the screen to be bone-white. But the â??slate gray Victorian skyâ? tone of the Kindle screen doesnâ??t at all match the ultra crisp resolution found either an iPhone or a Pocket PC. And, at times, I find this to be a distraction.

In terms of how words look on the screen, I thought they looked great; text is very easy to read, and I didnâ??t mind having to have light in order to see the screen (since itâ??s not backlit, like a Blackberry or iPod). And changing the font size is really easy, and something I did often (like, at night — if Iâ??m tired — Iâ??ll make the font bigger and easier to read). But I also kept wanting to change the font itself. Why not offer a number of different fonts to choose from? That should be a setting the consumer can change as easily as the size of the font.

Another display issue that bothered me was the â??ghostingâ? of the type: the fact that the words from the previous page seem to sort of hover on the screen even after youâ??ve changed the page. This makes the Kindle perennially feel like an old monitor with a Windows logo burned into the screen. I realize that this is an inherent design element/flaw with the eInk technology, and isnâ??t really the fault of the Kindle itself, but for me itâ??s a bit of a distraction. Is there really no getting rid of this?

One thing that I donâ??t mind about the Kindle is that itâ??s an extra device. I used to think that I wanted an integrated device — one thing that did everything — and that I wouldnâ??t want to carry around yet another device or gadget. But I actually like the fact that the Kindle is (more or less) just a device for the reading of content. Maybe this harkens back to the fact that every book is a destination; you get into bed and pick up a book because you want to read. You donâ??t pick up a book to take pictures, record video or get your voicemail. So the fact that I donâ??t use the Kindle to play solitaire is fine with me. True, that means I canâ??t read something if I leave the house and have just my cell phone in my back pocket. But then again, a cell phone screen is too small, and most books are too big, so carrying a Kindle seems the right compromise.

Besides, I tend to get weary when it comes to loading down devices with too many uses and bits of software; sooner or later, itâ??s going to get overloaded and crash. Or else the device will get so far removed from its original purpose that it’ll end up doing two things poorly instead of excelling at one (this reminds me of the New Yorker cartoon where a disgruntled customer in a bookstore says to a sales person, â??No caffe latte? And you call yourself a bookstore?â?). Iâ??m starting to see this with the iPhone and iTouch. People are going crazy for the all of those applications, but each one (not to mention the music videos, movies and TV shows that iTunes now sells), is taking precious bits of memory. I have a 16GB iPod iTouch, and 18,000 songs on my computer at home. The last thing in the world Iâ??m going to do is have half a dozen silly applications on my iPod that take away from my music collection (more Captain Beefheart, less Crash Bandicoot). It doesnâ??t make much sense to me to carry around an iPod and have it be PSP. So when it comes to storing books and text — for now — Iâ??m fine carrying around a specialized device.
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Microsoft ends Live Book Search program
'); document.write('This morning MSFT announced it was ending its Live Book Search program, and will be taking the site down next week. They\'re also ending their support of key digitization initiatives, including many of the library scanning projects operated by the Internet Archive.

Prelinger Library books that MSFT paid to scan will still be available through the Internet Archive and the Open Library, which also offers full-text search and download of over 300,000 public domain books.

The blogosphere is buzzing on this and I anticipate hearing more today.

Brewster has just posted an announcement, with some good news.
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Coming to Berlin and Budapest
'); document.write('I\'m doing a mini-Grand Tour in June, presenting at the Deutsche Kinemathek\'s Kolloquium on Friday, June 13; doing a screening that afternoon and then two evening screenings on Sunday and Monday, June 15 and 16. The schedule is here. Berliners and travelers, please come and say hi.

Note that the June 16 program will be an all-35mm show, featuring the recently restored Master Hands, the even-more recently restored Tuesday in November (a project of Mark Toscano at the Academy Film Archive) and a vintage IB Technicolor and SuperScope print of Chevrolet\'s Populuxe classic, American Look.

Then on June 19-21 I\'ll be in Budapest for the NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) conference.
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My book. Let me Amazon show you it.
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I’m delighted to say that online bookstores are shipping copies of Here Comes Everybody today, and that it has gotten several terrific notices in the blogosphere:
Cory Doctorow:
Clay’s book makes sense of the way that groups are using the Internet. Really good sense. In a treatise that spans all manner of social activity from vigilantism to terrorism, from Flickr to Howard Dean, from blogs to newspapers, Clay unpicks what has made some “social” Internet media into something utterly transformative, while other attempts have fizzled or fallen to griefers and vandals. Clay picks perfect anecdotes to vividly illustrate his points, then shows the larger truth behind them.
Russell Davies:
Here Comes Everybody goes beyond wild-eyed webby boosterism and points out what seems to be different about web-based communities and organisation and why it’s different; the good and the bad. With useful and interesting examples, good stories and sticky theories. Very good stuff.
Eric Nehrlich:
These newly possible activities are moving us towards the collapse of social structures created by technology limitations. Shirky compares this process to how the invention of the printing press impacted scribes. Suddenly, their expertise in reading and writing went from essential to meaningless. Shirky suggests that those associated with controlling the means to media production are headed for a similar fall.
Philip Young:

Shirky has a piercingly sharp eye for the spotting the illuminating case studies - some familiar, some new - and using them to energise wider themes. His basic thesis is simple: “Everywhere you look groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, take some kind of public action.” The difference is that today, unlike even ten years ago, technological change means such groups can be form and act in new and powerful ways. Drawing on a wide range of examples Shirky teases out remarkable contrasts with what has been the expected logic, and shows quite how quickly the dynamics of reputation and relationships have changed.

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My book. Let me show you it.
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I’ve written a book, called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which is coming out in a month. It’s coming out first in the US and UK (and in translation later this year in Holland, Portugal and Brazil, Korea, and China.)

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Here Comes Everybody is about why new social tools matter for society. It is a non-techie book for the general reader (the letters TCP IP appear nowhere in that order). It is also post-utopian (I assume that the coming changes are both good and bad) and written from the point of view I have adopted from my students, namely that the internet is now boring, and the key question is what we are going to do with it.

One of the great frustrations of writing a book as opposed to blogging is seeing a new story that would have been a perfect illustration, or deepened an argument, and not being able to add it. To remedy that, I’ve just launched a new blog, at HereComesEverybody.org, to continue writing about the effects of social tools.

Wow. What a great response — we’ve given out all the copies we can, but many thanks for all the interest. Also, I’ve convinced the good folks at Penguin Press to let me give a few review copies away to people in the kinds of communities the book is about. I’ve got half a dozen copies to give to anyone reading this, with the only quid pro quo being that you blog your reactions to it, good bad or indifferent, some time in the next month or so. Drop me a line if you would like a review copy — clay@shirky.com.

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It\'s Live! New JCMC on Social Network Sites
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It gives me unquantifiable amounts of joy to announce that the JCMC special theme issue on “Social Network Sites” is now completely birthed. It was a long and intense labor, but all eight newborn articles are doing just fine and the new mommies are as proud as could be. So please, join us in our celebration by heading on over to the Journal for Computer-Mediated Communication and snuggling up to an article or two. The more you love them, the more they’ll prosper!

JCMC Special Theme Issue on “Social Network Sites”
Guest Editors: danah boyd and Nicole Ellison
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/
- “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship” by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison
- “Signals in Social Supernets” by Judith Donath
- “Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances” by Hugo Liu
- “Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites” by Eszter Hargittai
- “Cying for Me, Cying for Us: Relational Dialectics in a Korean Social Network Site” by Kyung-Hee Kim and Haejin Yun
- “Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com” by Dara Byrne
- “Mobile Social Networks and Social Practice: A Case Study of Dodgeball” by Lee Humphreys
- “Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube” by Patricia Lange
Please feel free to pass this announcement on to anyone you think might find value from this special issue.

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Race/ethnicity and parent education differences in usage of Facebook and MySpace
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In June, I wrote a controversial blog essay about how U.S. teens appeared to be self-dividing by class on MySpace and Facebook during the 2006-2007 school year. This piece got me into loads of trouble for all sorts of reasons, forcing me to respond to some of the most intense critiques.

While what I was observing went beyond what could be quantitatively measured, certain aspects of it could be measured. To my absolute delight, Eszter Hargittai (professor at Northwestern) had collected data to measure certain aspects of the divide that I was trying to articulate. Not surprising (to me at least), what she was seeing lined up completely with what I was seeing on the ground.

Her latest article “Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites” (published as a part of Nicole Ellison and my JCMC special issue on social network sites) suggests that Facebook and MySpace usage are divided by race/ethnicity and parent education (two common measures of “class” in the U.S.). Her findings are based on a survey of 1060 first year students at the diverse University of Illinois-Chicago campus during February and March of 2007. For more details on her methodology, see her methods section.

While over 99% of the students had heard of both Facebook and MySpace, 79% use Facebook and 55% use MySpace. The story looks a bit different when you break it down by race/ethnicity and parent education:

While Eszter is not able to measure the other aspects of lifestyle that I was trying to describe that differentiate usage, she is able to show that Facebook and MySpace usage differs by race/ethnicity and parent education. These substitutes for “class” can be contested, but what is important here is that there is genuinely differences in usage patterns, even with consistent familiarity. People are segmenting themselves in networked publics and this links to the ways in which they are segmented in everyday life. Hopefully Eszter’s article helps those who can’t read qualitative data understand that what I was observing is real and measurable.

(We are still waiting for all of the JCMC articles from our special issue to be live on the site. Fore more information on this special issue, please see the Introduction that Nicole and I wrote: Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.)

Discussion: Apophenia

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User-generated neologism: \"Indigenous content\"
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My class in the fall is called “User-generated”, and it looks, among other things, at the tension surrounding that phrase, and in particular its existence as an external and anxiety-ridden label, by traditional media companies, for the way that advertising can be put next to material not created by Trained Professionals?.

All right-thinking individuals (by which I basically mean Anil Dash and Heather Champ) hate that phrase. Now my friend Kio Stark* has come up with what seems like a nice, and more anthropologically correct version: Indigenous Content (which is to say “Created by the natives for themselves.”)

* ObKio: Best. Tagset. Evar.

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history of social network sites (a work-in-progress)
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As many of you know, Nicole Ellison and I are guest editing a special issue of JCMC. As a part of this issue, we are writing an introduction that will include a description of social network sites, a brief history of them, a literature review, a description of the works in this issue, and a discussion of future research. We have decided to put a draft of our history section up to solicit feedback from those of you who know this space well. It is a work-in-progress so please bear with us. But if you have suggestions, shout out.

history of social network sites (a work-in-progress)

In particular, we want to know: 1) Are we reporting anything inaccurately? 2) What are we missing?

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New Freedom Destroys Old Culture: A response to Nick Carr
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I have never understood Nick Carr’s objections to the cultural effects of the internet. He’s much too smart to lump in with nay-sayers like Keen, and when he talks about the effects of the net on business, he sounds more optimistic, even factoring in the wrenching transition, so why aren’t the cultural effects similar cause for optimism, even accepting the wrenching transition in those domains as well?

I think I finally got understood the dichotomy between his reading of business and culture after reading Long Player, his piece on metadata and what he calls “the myth of liberation”, a post spurred in turn by David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous.

Carr discusses the ways in which the long-playing album was both conceived of and executed as an aesthetic unit, its length determined by a desire to hold most of the classical canon on a single record, and its possibilities exploited by musicians who created for the form — who created albums, in other words, rather than mere bags of songs. He illustrates this with an exegesis of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, showing how the overall construction makes that album itself a work of art.

Carr uses this point to take on what he calls the myth of liberation: “This mythology is founded on a sweeping historical revisionism that conjures up an imaginary predigital world - a world of profound physical and economic constraints - from which the web is now liberating us.” Carr observes, correctly, that the LP was what it was in part for aesthetic reasons, and the album, as a unit, became what it became in the hands of people who knew how to use it.

That is not, however, the neat story Carr wants to it be, and the messiness of the rest of the story is key, I think, to the anxiety about the effects on culture, his and others.

The LP was an aesthetic unit, but one designed within strong technical constraints. When Edward Wallerstein of Columbia Records was trying to figure out how long the long-playing format should be, he settled on 17 minutes a side as something that would “…enable about 90% of all classical music to be put on two sides of a record.” But why only 90%? Because 100% would be impossible — the rest of the canon was too long for the technology of the day. And why should you have to flip the record in the middle? Why not have it play straight through? Impossible again.

Contra Carr, in other words, the pre-digital world was a world of profound physical and economic constraints. The LP could hold 34 minutes of music, which was a bigger number of minutes than some possibilities (33 possibilities, to be precise), but smaller than an infinite number of others. The album as a form provided modest freedom embedded in serious constraints, and the people who worked well with the form accepted those constraints as a way of getting at those freedoms. And now the constraints are gone; there is no necessary link between an amount of music and its playback vehicle.

And what Carr dislikes, I think, is evidence that the freedoms of the album were only as valuable as they were in the context of the constraints. If Exile on Main Street was as good an idea as he thinks it was, it would survive the removal of those constraints.

And it hasn’t.

Here is the iTunes snapshot of Exile, sorted by popularity:

While we can’t get absolute numbers from this, we can get relative ones — many more people want to listen to Tumbling Dice or Happy than Ventilator Blues or Turd on the Run, even though iTunes makes it cheaper per song to buy the whole album. Even with a financial inducement to preserve the album form, the users still say no thanks.
The only way to support the view that Exile is best listened to as an album, in other words, is to dismiss the actual preferences of most of the people who like the Rolling Stones. Carr sets about this task with gusto:

Who would unbundle Exile on Main Street or Blonde on Blonde or Tonight’s the Night - or, for that matter, Dirty Mind or Youth and Young Manhood or (Come On Feel the) Illinoise? Only a fool would.

Only a fool. If you are one of those people who has, say, Happy on your iPod (as I do), then you are a fool (though you have lots of company). And of course this foolishness extends to the recording industry, and to the Stones themselves, who went and put Tumbling Dice on a Greatest Hits collection. (One can only imagine how Carr feels about Greatest Hits collections.)
I think Weinberger’s got it right about liberation, even taking at face value the cartoonish version Carr offers. Prior to unlimited perfect copyability, media was defined by profound physical and economic constraints, and now it’s not. Fewer constraints and better matching of supply and demand are good for business, because business is not concerned with historical continuity. Fewer constraints and better matching of supply and demand are bad for current culture, because culture continually mistakes current exigencies for eternal verities.

This isn’t just Carr of course. As people come to realize that freedom destroys old forms just as surely as it creates new ones, the lament for the long-lost present is going up everywhere. As another example, Sven Birkerts, the literary critic, has a post in the Boston Globe, Lost in the blogosphere, that is almost indescribably self-involved. His two complaints are that newspapers are reducing the space allotted to literary criticism, and too many people on the Web are writing about books. In other words, literary criticism, as practiced during Birkerts’ lifetime, was just right, and having either fewer or more writers are both lamentable situations.

In order that the “Life was better when I was younger” flavor of his complaint not become too obvious, Birkerts frames the changing landscape not as a personal annoyance but as A Threat To Culture Itself. As he puts it “…what we have been calling “culture” at least since the Enlightenment — is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.”

This is silly. The constraints of print were not a product of “emergent maturity.” They were accidents of physical production. Newspapers published book reviews because their customers read books and because publishers took out ads, the same reason they published pieces about cars or food or vacations. Some newspapers hired critics because they could afford to, others didn’t because they couldn’t. Ordinary citizens didn’t write about books in a global medium because no such medium existed. None of this was an attempt to “constrain unbounded freedom” because there was no such freedom to constrain; it was just how things were back then.

Genres are always created in part by limitations. Albums are as long as they are because that Wallerstein picked a length his engineers could deliver. Novels are as long as they are because Aldus Manutius’s italic letters and octavo bookbinding could hold about that many words. The album is already a marginal form, and the novel will probably become one in the next fifty years, but that also happened to the sonnet and the madrigal.

I’m old enough to remember the dwindling world, but it never meant enough to me to make me a nostalgist. In my students’ work I see hints of a culture that takes both the new freedoms and the new constraints for granted, but the fullest expression of that world will probably come after I’m dead. But despite living in transitional times, I’m not willing to pretend that the erosion of my worldview is a crisis for culture itself. It’s just how things are right now.

Carr fails to note that the LP was created for classical music, but used by rock and roll bands. Creators work within whatever constraints exist at the time they are creating, and when the old constraints give way, new forms arise while old ones dwindle. Some work from the older forms will survive — Shakespeare’s 116th sonnet remains a masterwork — while other work will wane — Exile as an album-length experience is a fading memory. This kind of transition isn’t a threat to Culture Itself, or even much of a tragedy, and we should resist attempts to preserve old constraints in order to defend old forms.

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responding to critiques of my essay on class
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One month ago, I put out a blog essay that took on a life of its own. This essay addressed one of America’s most taboo topics: class. Due to personal circumstances, I wasn’t online as things spun further and further out of control and I had neither the time nor the emotional energy to address all of the astounding misinterpretations that I saw as a game of digital telephone took hold. I’ve browsed the hundreds of emails, thousands of blog posts, and thousands of comments across the web. I’m in awe of the amount of time and energy people put into thinking through and critiquing my essay. In the process, I’ve also realized that I was not always so effective at communicating what I wanted to communicate. To clarify some issues, I decided to put together a long response that addresses a variety of different issues.

Responding to Responses to: “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace”

Please let me know if this does or does not clarify the concerns that you’ve raised.

(Comments on Apophenia)

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Tagmashes from LibraryThing
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im Spalding at LibraryThing has introduced a new wrinkle in the tagosphere…and wrinkles are welcome because they pucker space in semantically interesting ways. (Block that metaphor!)

At LibraryThing, people list their books. And, of course, we tag ‘em up good. For example, Freakonomics has 993 unique tags (ignoring case differences), and 8,760 total tags. Now, tags are of course useful. But so are subject headings. So, Tim has come up with a clever way of deriving subject headings bottom up. He’s introduced “tagmashes,” which are (in essence) searches on two or more tags. So, you could ask to see all the books tagged “france” and “wwii.” But the fact that you’re asking for that particular conjunction of tags indicates that those tags go together, at least in your mind and at least at this moment. Library turns that tagmash into a page with a persistent URL. The page presents a de-duped list of the results, ordered by interestinginess, and with other tagmashes suggested, all based on the magic of statistics. Over time, a large, relatively flat set of subject headings may emerge, which, subject to further analysis, could get clumpier and clumpier with meaning.

You may be asking yourself how this differs from saved searches. I asked Tim. He explained that while the system does a search when you ask for a new tagmash, it presents the tagmash as if it were a topic, not a search. For one thing, lists of search results generally don’t have persistent URLs. More important, to the user, tagmash pages feel like topic pages, not search results pages.

And you may also be asking yourself how this differs from a folksonomy. While I’d want to count it as a folksonomic technique, in a traditional folksonomy (oooh, I hope I’m the first to use that phrase!), a computer can notice which terms are used most often, and might even notice some of the relationships among the terms. With tagmashes, the info that this tag is related to that one is gleaned from the fact that a human said that they were related.

LibraryThing keeps innovating this way. It’s definitely a site to watch.

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Spolsky on Blog Comments: Scale matters
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Joel Spolsky approvingly quotes Dave Winer on the subject of blog-comments:

The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you’re looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones…. That’s what’s important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment.

Joel then adds his own observations:

When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.

This can be true, all true, as any casual read of blog comments can attest. BoingBoing turned off their comments years ago, because they’d long since passed the scale where polite conversation was possible. The Tragedy of the Conversational Commons becomes too persistently tempting when an audience gorws large. At BoingBoing scale, John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory cannot be repealed.

But the uselessness of comments it is not the universal truth that ~~Dave or~~ (fixed, per Dave’s comment below) Joel makes it out to be, for two reasons. First, posting and conversation are different kinds of things — same keyboard, same text box, same web page, different modes of expression. Second, the sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale.

If you are operating below that scale, comments can be quite good, in a way not replicable in any “everyone post to their own blog”. To take but three recent examples, take a look at the comments on my post on Michael Gorman, on danah’s post at Apophenia on fame, narcissism and MySpace and on Kieran Healy’s biological thought experiment on Crooked Timber.

Those three threads contain a hundred or so comments, including some distinctly low-signal bouquets and brickbats. But there is also spirited disputation and emendation, alternate points of view, linky goodness, and a conversational sharpening of the argument on all sides, in a way that doesn’t happen blog to blog. This, I think, is the missing element in Dave and Joel’s points — two blog posts do not make a conversation. The conversation that can be attached to a post is different in style and content, and in intent and effect, than the post itself.

I have long thought that the ‘freedom of speech means no filtering’ argument is dumb where blogs are concerned — it is the blogger’s space, and he or she should feel free to delete, disemvowel, or otherwise dispose of material, for any reason, or no reason. But we’ve long since passed the point where what happens on a blog is mainly influenced by what the software does — the question to ask about comments is not whether they are available, but how a community uses them. The value in in blogs as communities of practice is considerable, and its a mistake to write off comment threads on those kinds of blogs just because, in other environments, comments are lame.

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Taking history back from the \"storytellers\"
'); document.write('About a month ago, a group of moving image archivists that participate in AMIA-L, one of my favorite listservs, started talking about the problem of poorly-produced (and poorly-thought-out) reenactments, and how they had grown to infect historical documentaries. I was on vacation and couldn\'t participate in a timely way, but the clear desert air incubated a bit of a rant, a slightly revised version of which I\'m now sharing.

Please bear in mind that when I say \"we,\" I mean moving image archivists.

While there seems to be agreement that the reenactment trend has spread way too far, I think there\'s a deeper problem facing historically/archivally oriented docs, and it\'s actually something we can help to solve.

Some of the most interesting documentary films take their structures from organic phenomena like the hours of the day, or the trajectory of a river from source to mouth. Others are essays that follow a structured thought process. Still others divide into sequences or parts that need to be understood and compared as discrete units for the film to generate meaning in the viewer. In fact, there are nearly infinite possible documentary structures, of which I think we\'ve only seen a small fraction. By contrast, the mainstream documentary focuses on what\'s now called \"storytelling,\" a highly traditional representational strategy that in recent years has come to imply the omnipresence of characters (good and evil), a narrative arc and a conventional act-based structure in which seemingly insurmountable problems are frequently solved.

Of course, there\'s nothing wrong with storytelling, whatever it may be, and not all stories are bad. What\'s wrong is the assumption, which has become not only pervasive but compulsory, that documentaries need characters, that the narrative arc must reign supreme, and that we\'re obliged to show people wrestling with and resolving problems. I\'ve sat with PBS gatekeepers and heard them refer to programs as \"stories,\" not films or shows. Ultimately this insults potential audiences by assuming they\'re only able to ingest a limited narrative menu. Is it really true that, when it comes to media, \"the best surprise is no surprise?\"

The vernacular language of documentaries is freezing in place. If I tried to pitch The River today, they\'d say \"A river? Where\'s the story? You need to find characters with great stories who live along the banks.\" If I sought money for The Man with the Movie Camera, I\'d be sent back to research more about the cameraman\'s inner life and emotions, and to find or invent interpersonal (rather than interframe) conflict. Now, there are indeed essay-based makers, like Adam Curtis, perhaps Errol Morris, and many others (forgive my lack of knowledge, but I\'m not a Netflix guy). Sam Green is now making a film on utopia that I think is not shrinking from ideas, even though it does follow a few people around. And then there\'s James Benning. But it\'s just harder to make different work and have it seen.

So, where do archives come in? The last 20 years have witnessed the emergence of new kinds of documentation, such as home movies and other unofficial materials. Much of this kind of imagery reflects personal historical perspectives, unlike other kinds of archival material that emanate from institutions, governments, studios and corporations. This is great, but what\'s happening (especially with amateur material) is that film is being used to construct histories that emphasize personal experience, that rely on the depiction of struggle and transformation at an individual level, and that constitute \"stories\" in a narrow rather than broad sense. I\'m not advocating socialist realism here, just criticizing the reduction of world-historical events and phenomena to the story of \"a day in the life of my cranky grandfather who survived the war and is just about to get evicted.\"

Many of us who collect or take care of moving images and sounds feel that original materials tell pretty good stories on their own. Aside from some courageous DVD collections of uncut archival films, a supplement here and there, and several sketchy sites presenting downloadable archival materials, most original materials don\'t reach the public without being run through the storytelling Cuisinart. While context is essential to really understand and work with most moving images, overbearing narration, emotionally invasive music and highly personalized visions of history don\'t constitute context. Bits and pieces from our collections are being woven into works that don\'t really speak to the value of their components.

So, where do we come in? I propose two ideas.

The first is easy. Let\'s put original, unedited archival material out in the world in such a way that it competes with documentaries. This isn\'t going to kill our stock footage income, because producers and directors always feel they can improve on reality by imposing structures of their design, and they\'ll still come around. But it will insure that audiences can see original documents without the imposition of artificial layers of narrativity. (Plus, I have always wondered how archives can ethically let historical mediamakers use clips without making the original works from which the clips come available to anyone who wants to see the complete continuity. When someone cites a passage of text or a still image, there\'s a powerful implication that someone can check the citation themselves. We don\'t make this easy.)

Archives are part of the system of cultural production. So are archivists. Which brings me to a second suggestion.

We have all noted that the cost of production and distribution is going down quickly, even though it isn\'t zero. Why then aren\'t archivists making more documentaries, and why isn\'t production seen as an integral archival mission? Why on earth do we observe invisible barriers of specialization that cause producers (whose interests are often fleeting and superficial) to become the chief interpreters and contextualizers of our collections?

Librarians write books, too. Museum curators make text and media. Why don\'t we make more movies? Everyone else in the world feels entitled to.

As more and more archivists become curators and preservers of digital files, and as working with physical moving image materials becomes an unjustly underfunded artisanal specialty, we may have to figure out what exactly it is that we do. I suggest we consider becoming moving image authors too.
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Seen at the Detroit Public Library last month
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Media in Transition conference
'); document.write('OK, I\'m going to try to be a better blogger. But it\'s been hard ? the combined effort I pour into Facebook, Twitter and email feels like an unpaid, half-time job.

Anyway, I\'m attending the Media in Transition conference at MIT next week. It looks great.
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Anyone want a partial run of Printer\'s Ink magazine?
'); document.write('Ad historians, culture historians, collectors: We have a partial duplicate set of Printers Ink (the weekly, not the monthly), starting about 1927 and running through 1957. Some volumes great condition, others not. We would be delighted to offer it to someone with an interest in this material and the ability to pick up in downtown SF, as it\'s too much to ship.

It is full of interesting copy and fascinating ads about the ad industry. Let me know!

--> Printers Ink found a home.
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New films starting to trickle online
'); document.write('Thanks to AV Geek Skip, new films from our collection are starting to come online. Many of them are as new to me as they will be to you. Check out the latest uploads here.

Oh -- this is a repeat post, I see. Whatever.
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Remembering Bill O\'Farrell
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$\"\"$ Bill was an uncommonly kind, generous and convivial person, a sympathetic enabler of archival activity and a collector and redistributor of evidence that might help to contextualize films that seemed without history. We will all miss him. We\'re thinking of his loved ones.

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We had fun today at MakerFaire
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Photos.
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