Television swallowed up millions of man-hours of free time by drawing people into a shared passive addiction. Prior to the age of TV, never before had such a large number of people done the same thing at the same time…. Read More ›
Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky, devices and the brain’s weathering
Why the Internet guru Clay Shirky eventually banned the Internet in class. (A distorted precis, comments, and notes on the margins of Shirky’s reflection.) New media evangelist Clay Shirky has recently prohibited students’ use of digital devices in his class…. Read More ›
The thirst for response as a fuel for the Internet
Over lunch one day an acquaintance of mine criticized my theory of response. “Not everyone writing on the Internet is doing so in order to get a response,” he said. “Take me, for example – I have a blog about… Read More ›
Twitterature – enjoying literature in bits
The tweet as a quantum of content. 800 tweets can make up a novel, but not always. You still need a plot and an author. Writing is not an inherent skill. People read aloud back in the Middle Ages, and… Read More ›
“Human as media. The emancipation of authorship” is available on Amazon
“Over 6,000 years of literary civilisation, there have been perhaps 300 million authors: people capable of communicating their opinion beyond their own physical circles. Now, thanks to the Internet, in the historical blink of an eye, the number of authors… Read More ›
Find a companion for whatever you wish. How the Internet makes probable coincidences inevitable ones.
In early October 2012, the mother of seven-year-old Muscovite Seva Bezrukov posted a newspaper classified ad asking the owner of a DeLorean DMC-12 to get in touch. It was precisely this car that was used in “Back to the Future”,… Read More ›
Human as Media 