Is Tumblr the New Medieval Stockade?

Public humiliation as punishment has a long history. What has changed are the tools we use to inflict it. The Web now provides us with a far more public and potentially humiliating vehicle than ever before. Until, that is, we become inured to its effects.

Blogs have often been used as a post on which to publicly whip those who've offended us. I certainly have taken a few shots at others in this space. People Who Sit In The Disability Seats When I’m Standing On My Crutches is a perfect example of a more sustained campaign.

However, Tumblr, which promotes itself as "the easiest way to express yourself," seems to have become the weapon of choice among the eternally aggrieved. You need only look to This Is Why You're Fat, Look at this Fucking Hipster, and Asleep on the Subway for evidence. I'm sure there are other examples, which I'd love to know about.

I'm sure some of those pictured are jerks who deserve ridicule, while others are actually lovely people who are guilty of nothing more than getting silly during a night out or being too tired to stay awake on a train. That's not the point.

Even film crews and photographers working on a public street with the intent of publishing and distributing their work must get signed or recorded waivers from all passersby whose images they capture. If they don't get a waiver, they must obscure the individual's image so they're not identifiable. There's a reason for this: even in a public spaces, we all have a right to our privacy and to the published images of ourselves.

OMG! They're Totally Nailing Him to teh Cross!

The Passion of Christ, courtesy of Trinity Church and Twitter.

This Is What the Death of the Book Looks Like

Consistent with my abiding obsession with The Guardian's culture blogs, I direct you to Peter Robins' recent post about the sense of retro-chic pervading current book design.

His conclusion about the death of the book is a bit hysterical. The book is a durable medium that's not going anywhere anytime soon. But it has ceded it's place as a dominant medium—much less the dominant medium. And Robins' spot-on observations about book design prove this point. For when a medium is usurped, it becomes in the minds of the public an objet d'art infused with emotion and nostalgia. It becomes the symbol of a kinder, gentler time.

By Combining Technology and Poetry We Find Our Humanity

Is an Hour Enough to Save Everyone's World?

Just got back from a lunchtime walk during which I was approached by three college-age people, each asking for two minutes of my time to solicit my support and funding for, respectively, Save the Children, gay and lesbian marriage rights, and Greenpeace. Along the way I was also asked by two homeless people for money.

All five encounters physically reinforce the relentless images of crisis and desperation confronting us in our mediated society. In the face of such need and the natural fear it engenders of being in need, it's a wonder more of us aren't either hardened or crippled into inaction.

Stephen Fry, Ubergeek

Two weeks ago, the actor and author Stephen Fry was part of a wide-ranging interview on BBC Radio 4's Analysis: Clever.com. The transcription of excerpts are entertaining and full of the wit and common sense that a non-techie but avid digital user often provides. It's also worth your time to listen to the whole podcast, which is linked to among the excerpts.

Among his best observations, Fry tells us why the Web is like a city (it has libraries and theatres and museums—and a red light district), how Facebook is becoming low rent and MySpace is already there, how texting resembles 17th and 18th century letters but with fewer abbreviations, and why email is a literary form unto itself.

Lexia to Perplexia, and Back Again

According to the scholar N. Katherine Hayles, "Electronic literature, generally considered to exclude print literature that has been digitized, is by contrast 'digital born,' a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer."

As you can imagine, the genre has existed for decades as a near-monastic pursuit. It has a small but devout following and has attracted the attentions of such powerful thinkers as Hayles, Jay David Bolter, George Landow, and Stuart Molthrop.

However, the mainstream hasn't been ready for it. Electronic literature, which encompasses several forms including hypertext fiction and interactive fiction, rarely provides an easy read. Furthermore, the genre has been technologically hamstrung. In its early days, not many potential readers had ready access to computers. And throughout its history, its chief authors have had to be as facile at coding as they are at creating narrative, despite the development of a rather clunky and expensive program dedicated to creating hypertext narratives.

Now, I think, is electronic literature's time to breakout. The technology has improved and opened and the public's behaviors have been conditioned enough that the vehicles and tastes for such narratives are converging.

As Japan proves, mobile devices are getting good enough to consume—and compose—narratives. And the potential such open and free technologies as Twitter and Facebook to develop an audience around short, connected (even cryptic) hypertext narratives that can spin off in multiple multimedia directions is ripe for the plucking.

Now is the time for the next wave of authors of electronic literature to take the art to its next level.