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Cut and Paste with Intention

By

Caroline Kangas

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However crude, social media today allows us to cut and paste our world into a space (mostly) under our control.

Whether we’re posting on Pinterest (an action likened to tearing pages out of a magazine to share with friends), retweeting news updates, or liking songs on Facebook, the internet serves as a new scrapbook of sorts.

In his NYR Blog essay conversation with Ellen Gruber Garvey’s Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, Christopher Benfey explores the transition from consumer to producer through intentional posting.

Scrapbook-style writers included range from Walt Whitman to abolitionists, Emily Dickinson to modern NYT columnist Joe Nocera — all of whom are trying to bring order to the torrent of information overwhelming readers.

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Caroline Kangas
Caroline Kangas calls both Seattle and San Francisco home (though she currently resides in the latter). She recently received a mouthful of a liberal arts degree from the University of San Francisco and can be found selling pirate supplies at 826 Valencia or wandering the streets with her diva of a french bulldog, Elle.

One response

  1. Ellen Gruber Garvey Avatar
    Ellen Gruber Garvey

    Thanks for noticing the NYRB essay! There’s more on Writing with Scissors on The Root — on African American scrapbooks: http://www.theroot.com/views/writing-black-history-scissors

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