Pre-Megan’s Law
Before the days of colonization, America was like a young, untouched child.
Flipboard aggregates content from your social graph in really lovely ways, but the juxtaposition of oral culture in an essentially literate design doesn’t always make sense. It’s quite odd to see your friend’s tweet about their breakfast burrito elevated to a strikingly designed pull-quote. The pull quote is a design pattern that emerged from a culture of publishing—from a process by which an editor would carefully select a bit of text that, when extracted and enlarged, would resonate with the greater work. But here, there is no greater work, and no editor: only the blind act of an algorithm.
That algorithm knows a lot about who your friends are, and what they recommend, but it does not (yet, at least), recognize the difference between talking and publishing. The result is content that looks beautiful, typographically speaking, but whose effect is dissonant, rather than engaging.
— Most of conversations on social media are in an oral tradition, not a literate one - even though they’re in written form. Via a working library (link thanks to @monsieurmorris)
(via somethingchanged)
Undoubtedly, the East-Enders have committed colossal blunders; so have their predecessors, and so do the doctrinaire Socialists who pooh-pooh them
— Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England
What do you do when your husband’s autopsy report is on the internet and is deemed a subject worthy of fucking literary criticism?
— Karen Green interview: ‘David Foster Wallace’s suicide turned him into a “celebrity writer dude”, which would have made him wince’ | Books | The Observer (via hndrk)
Of course, many of us live at least part-time in cyberspace already. We call it computer conference, or phone sex, or virtual this or that, but insofar as it involved communicating with other people through narrow bandwidth media, it is about negotiating the tensions between individual subjects, virtual collectives, and the physical bodies in which they may or may not be grounded.
— Allucquere Rosanne Stone
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
—
Galway Kinnel.
Kinnel’s smirk-inducing The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students
