tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20673623563241298022025-02-21T02:24:25.546-05:00A chronicle of the social and cultural effects of hypertext and hypermediaDouglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-78514185547762969932007-08-19T10:49:00.000-05:002007-08-19T18:19:35.527-05:00

Aventurina King at Wired is reporting on a publishing phenomenon in China, where free web access to novels has spurred record sales of printed books.Literary sites like Source of Chinese and Magic Sword invite authors to upload their novels onto the web, where they might get noticed by an avid audience of young readers and eventually by publishers. King tells the history of Zhang Muye's

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-59166447065145314922007-08-15T10:38:00.000-05:002007-08-16T08:52:20.484-05:00

I've been following the NY Times open forum on the 50th anniversary of On the Road, which has racked up almost 300 comments so far (just before noon, Wednesday).More praise than criticism, I'm pleased to see. Much of the condemnation of the book amounts to an ad hominem against Kerouac himself for his treatment of women, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc. Much of the praise amounts to lyrical

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-65125426088503734022007-08-14T14:23:00.000-05:002007-08-14T14:43:35.987-05:00

This is the summer of overload. I'm juggling six writing courses (two sections of business communication, two of technical writing, and one each of web and creative writing), in addition to a course in linguistics that wrapped up last week.In addition, I'm trying to score an agent for my recent novel Entanglement and complete a few early chapters of my new piece. This blog has suffered as a

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-58153982837105634102007-07-31T07:47:00.000-05:002007-07-31T07:49:44.893-05:00

Mike Masnick at TechDirt provides some background information on the RIAA push to drive webcasters out of business by raising their royalty rates to absurd highs.The answer is that webcasters favor eclectic artists and independent labels, over the corporately standardized music represented by the RIAA.Traditional radio, of course, is dominated by a few similarly formated stations that all play

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-22594197156775597332007-07-31T07:22:00.000-05:002007-07-31T07:26:50.498-05:00

Stefanie Olsen at News Blog has this new finding about environmental concerns in the online teen community:Teens who are most active online and influential with peers are also the kids most concerned about the environment, according to a study published Monday by research firm JupiterResearch. ... Green teens are more apt to listen to music, post a personal page online, respond to an online poll

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-37467471642440635762007-07-27T07:38:00.000-05:002007-07-27T15:05:09.917-05:00

I couldn't help but smile over Andrew Leonard's Weekly World News-inspired headline on Salon yesterday:INTERNET ALIEN COMMUNISTS THREATEN TO NUKE 1000 YEARS OF ACADEMIC TRADITION! This posting on his "How the World Works" blog covered the shutting down of the Weekly World News, and an article by economist Glenn Ellison about the future of peer review in academic writing and publishing.The issue

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-33338329391732290562007-07-26T07:07:00.000-05:002007-07-26T07:14:20.413-05:00

Edward Champion's recent LA Times article "Blogging: a crash course on introspection" is probably the most muddled commentary on blogging I've encountered in the past year.His thesis is that "confessional" writing has been "spurred by cyberspace," with narcissistic bloggers baring their most intimate secrets with shameless abandon, pandering to "our voyeuristic culture." Champion wonders "why so

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-72948559412118728502007-07-25T15:45:00.000-05:002007-07-25T15:47:00.739-05:00

Technorati Profile

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-11039978187434685012007-07-25T07:15:00.000-05:002007-07-25T15:51:53.392-05:00

Slashdot yesterday provided this link to "Errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia."The page lists 62 of them, in fields ranging from history and biography to math, science and linguistics. This one, for example, is on "Pushkin in Bohemia":It is a basic fact of Russian history that the tsarist administration never allowed the poet Alexander Pushkin to go abroad,

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-27988673192337514452007-07-24T06:32:00.000-05:002007-07-27T07:45:25.555-05:00

At Salon today, Gary Kamiya writes in praise of old-fashioned editing and editors, and naturally touches on the blogosphere:In the brave new world of self-publishing, editors are an endangered species. This isn't all bad. It's good that anyone who wants to publish and has access to a computer now faces no barriers. And some bloggers don't really need editors: Their prose is fluent and

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-44045517163524399842007-07-23T07:42:00.000-05:002007-07-23T07:48:19.357-05:00

The important point that I'm trying to make is that storytelling has nothing, whatsoever, to do with logic. Logic is a limping stepchild of the true processes of the spirit. It's an illusion. It's a defective little parlor trick. Associations are the way that we perceive. Electrical connections caused by the juxtapositions of experience. That's the way we are really built, and storytelling takes

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-19115725957445422042007-07-20T07:22:00.000-05:002007-07-20T07:28:10.169-05:00

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it. The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-11429925003942110472007-07-16T10:32:00.000-05:002007-07-24T10:14:24.354-05:00

Robert Blechman's insightful article, at blogcritics, on how science fiction has depicted time travel in terms of the dominant media of the time (vehicles and roads in the print era, portals and beams of light in the early television days), set me thinking about one of my favorite movies of all time, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.Blechman's piece reviews Paul Levinson's novel The Plot to

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-73023506656497215222007-07-11T13:35:00.000-05:002007-07-11T13:38:17.181-05:00

NPR's Morning Edition has carried a story about another blow to traditional print publications. This time, though, no one's blaming the Internet, since the problem originates with the United States Postal Service.Postal rates for magazines are scheduled to rise on July 15, an average of 13%, but the increases will not be uniform. Because they're not automated to USPS standards, small magazines

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-71426690657747140072007-07-03T07:43:00.001-05:002007-07-03T07:45:45.704-05:00

Loyd Case at ExtremeTech wrote a fascinating comparison of how different generations view information:"I think ... that the baby boomers tend to view information as simply words, pictures and diagrams. My older daughter regards information as something that's mutable, and that flows, not as something fixed and chiseled in stone. We see that on the Internet, too, as people experiment with mashups

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-87192127684775910152007-06-26T15:49:00.000-05:002007-06-26T15:54:44.015-05:00

Tony Long, in his Luddite column at Wired, has registered another traditionalist's complaint against Web 2.0 and in moderated support of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. To Long, the Internet ("a narcissist's dream come true") has performed a disservice by supplying amateurs with tools for reporting on events that only trained professionals

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-36053716099915375782007-06-10T11:27:00.000-05:002007-06-10T11:31:45.699-05:00

I've just completed grading final papers for my six spring quarter classes, and am pleased to report that Wikipedia has not yet brought an end to education, truth, or even western civilization. My students gathered material from multiple sources, checked facts, and developed their own reasoned arguments based on the best available data. For teachers who are still concerned over the evil menace of

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-52262927998878450372007-05-27T10:35:00.000-05:002007-05-27T10:42:14.348-05:00

Earlier this month VentureBeat reported findings by Walker Reading Technologies regarding the inefficiency of conventional linear text, the kind you're reading right now.Since "the natural field of focus for our eyes is circular," they say, our effort to focus on a single line, our brains are force "to a wage a constant subconscious battle with itself to filter and discard the superfluous inputs"

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-74674679433661867292007-05-23T13:43:00.000-05:002007-05-23T13:48:14.641-05:00

Following up after yesterday's post regarding online campaign strategies, I recommend Michael Scherer's piece called "Power to the people, 2.0," at Salon.Scherer's focus is on the lessons that John Edwards and Barack Obama learned from Howard Dean, about using the Internet to build an authentic political community. He quotes Joe Trippi, formerly Dean's manager who's now in the Edwards team: "

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-73026072279107302422007-05-22T09:32:00.000-05:002007-05-22T09:36:48.666-05:00

Jose Antonio Vargas, in yesterday's (May 21) Washington Post, gave an insightful commentary on politics and new media, pointing out that "the culture of Democrats is a much better fit in the Internet world" than Republican culture.The Republican party's greatest strength in decades past has been their disciplined technique of staying unified in the delivery of its message. The standard procedure

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-36969281284948835032007-05-15T16:33:00.000-05:002007-05-15T16:40:53.303-05:00

I've just finished reading Matthew Sharpe's dark, hilarious novel Jamestown, in which one of the multiple narrators wonders at himself in the act of recording his thoughts on "humankind's flimsies and least likely invention, paper." My own feelings about paper are untinged by irony, but hypertext has complicated my relationship with it.Last month, I spent an afternoon sorting through some boxes

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-85085553817020056012007-05-02T11:09:00.000-05:002007-05-02T19:33:37.934-05:00

Novelist Richard Ford has never read a literary blog, but he's ready to critique them anyway. In a May 2 New York Times story about the decline of the book review in papers across the nation, Ford remarks that "“Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership, in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-87447390246497109292007-04-29T10:35:00.000-05:002007-05-01T07:50:57.478-05:00

This weekend, I co-presented a workshop with Assistant Professor Judith Anderson at Columbus State Community College's annual creative writing conference, this one titled "Genres and Generations." Our workshop dealt with the opportunities Web 2.0 has opened to artists, and how writers can use blogs and social networking to attract and build an audience for their printed work.During an afternoon

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-70435983772076831912007-04-24T09:21:00.000-05:002007-04-24T09:27:02.170-05:00

CNet's Candace Lombardi has an interesting article on the teaching of handwriting skills in the computer age. In the fall of 2007, Virginia Tech will issue tablet pc's to students and require students to use them in classes. At Memphis State, however, Professor June Entman banned her law students from bringing laptops to class. The speed of the keyboard enables students to transcribe her

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2067362356324129802.post-13769901132792789562007-04-20T08:08:00.000-05:002007-04-20T08:14:51.968-05:00

As students at Virginia Tech cope with this week's tragedy on their campus, and attempt to return to a normal life, many of them are expressing anger at the press for creating a state of siege on their campus. "You've got your story. Now go home," one young woman said this morning during a story on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.One grievance that students have raised -- and it's a

Douglas Grayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02541910618291741777noreply@blogger.com0