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Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He pays close attention to the details of the every day, infusing humor and self-deprecation, combining […]
...moreErykah Badu met up with okayplayer.’s program The Questions and the result is a meditation on what participation means in the digital age, among many other things. Watch the interview after the jump.
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Jacob Wren discusses his newest novel, Polyamorous Love Song, the relationship between art and ethics, and whether Kanye West is a force for good in the art and music world.
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Sometimes you want to dream about the life you didn’t get to have. Sometimes you want to see the life you were lucky to escape.
...moreThe personal computer may have revolutionized the way writers write, but distractions from the Internet and social media may not make it the ideal tool for writing. Designer Adam Leeb has created a hybrid typewriter called a Hemingwrite. Long battery life, instant on, and a mechanical keyboard help make Hemingwrite feel more like a typewriter or […]
...moreIt’s hard to go a day without the question, does poetry matter? crop up somewhere, and if you’re in the mood for a longread, David Lehman has written an excellent essay on anxiety about poetry, in an Internet age. Is poetry dead, does it matter, is there too much of it, does anyone anywhere buy […]
...moreCommon wisdom has it that the Internet has disconnected people from their sense of empathy—but maybe it’s just exposed society at large to greater numbers of people who were already unempathetic. This Washington Post blog post reports on a Canadian study which “found that trolling correlated with higher rates of sadism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism, a certain lack […]
...moreWhen Graeme Wood saw an ultra-wealthy college classmate’s name popping up on weird, perfunctory websites, he suspected something was up. After some diligent sleuthing, he discovered he was right—the classmate had used an exorbitantly priced reputation-management service to throw Google off his scent and conceal search results that revealed a financial crime he’d committed.
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Very gradually, this frantic activity ceased to be simply an expression of emotional distress—what the grief experts call “searching behaviour”—and started evolving into a digital, extended elegiac project.
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It was a time in my life when I was frequently “tagged,” along with other Netizens who seemed to keep in touch and do good works. I did no good works, but I tried to keep in touch.
...moreHowever 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 […]
...moreThe LA Times reports that Twitter has released a how-to-manual titled “Twitter for Authors.” The guide details six tips particularly geared towards writers, some of which include the not-so-helpful “Be Authentic, Be Yourself,” and “Above All, Have Fun.” Nowadays many authors use the social networking site as a means of self-promotion, and entire transcontinental book […]
...moreShould you seek a utopian, gender equal virtual space in which to social network, scribd, orkut, and foursquare are where it’s at. However, the internet vortex of social networking sites sees the scales tip in favor of a female majority. In fact, there are 99 million more monthly female visitors to social networking sites as […]
...moreIn an interesting move, popular political site Talking Points Memo will begin using Facebook comments as their main commenting system. TPM Editor John Marshall explains the decision here. “…To make an admittedly long story short, we’re switching to Facebook comments because building or maintaining our own system does not seem like a good use of […]
...moreBeliever co-founder and co-editor Heidi Julavitz writes about how online journals (such as The Rumpus!) caused the Believer to rethink some of its original tenets, including a strong resistance to virtualization. “Ultimately we risked losing readers, and we risked losing writers, too. Thus, it seemed prudent (and exciting) to move toward a mixed material-ethereal model […]
...moreAn online, audiovisual storytelling network: Cowbird. “Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the the commons, […]
...moreSince the early 1980’s, the 51 year old Scottish musician/writer/provocateur Nicholas Currie, better known as Momus, has been releasing music (his latest album, Hypnoprism, was his 18th) to varying levels of critical and commercial success. Since the 1990’s, he has been blogging in various forms, most notably on his old LiveJournal called Click Opera, which […]
...moreAt the Believer, Meghan Daum dissects the “commenting culture” of the Internet and the rampant “haterade” in our public discourse. “A young person (any person) who published a piece as incendiary as “Safe-Sex Lies” today would be chewed up and spit out so many times over by bloggers and commenters and cable-news screamers that the […]
...more“So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to […]
...more“When you write personally and intimately, difficult questions arise. Whose stories do we, as writers, have the right to tell? To what extent do we have the right to write about the people in our lives? What are the limits of good taste? Do we have to consider good taste and ethics when it comes […]
...moreAt The Awl, Blake Butler reflects on attachment to the Internet world (and the machines with which we enter) as well as the meaning of obsession. “It seems too late for any of this to be stopped. Even making aimed attempts to avoid these machinations and the silent spread seems bent against a thing that […]
...moreHere’s a video about the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill, which the President will not veto, includes a provision that allows the military to detain and imprison American citizens indefinitely without trial. WTF? And now for SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act: The Atlantic asks, “Should copyright be allowed to […]
...moreHere’s the bill text of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) An explanation of the three major ways that SOPA could impact journalists. An NY Times op-ed argues “while American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, […]
...moreWikileaks released this TED Talks video yesterday, titled “Facebook and Google / Secret Revealed.” The video explains how our internet searches may be sorted by an algorithm based on our assumed preferences.
...moreThe “Social Media” exhibit is at New York City’s Pace Gallery until October 15th. Walking us through the installations, this piece ponders the way social media art works when taken out of its natural habitat—the Internet. “It seemed to me that the only thing lacking were the proper tools of translation—this art was the internet […]
...more“Young people immersed in the online world are encountering racist and sexist slurs and other name-calling that probably would appall their parents and teachers. And most consider it no big deal, a new poll says.” The survey suggests that people feel more comfortable using “hurtful language” in texts and posts to Facebook or Twitter than […]
...moreThis might seem obvious to many, but apparently there is now research behind the idea that smart phones, computers and the Internet are weakening our memories. According to this article, the phenomena is called the “Google effect” (which you can surely google for effect). And, while we’ve always had external methods of storing information—address books, […]
...moreEver get so frustrated with the Internet that you wanna just take a pen and write right on top of the screen? Well, that happened to me so many times that I decided to start a website where people do just that—or the closest possible thing to it—by taking a screenshot and writing right over […]
...moreI’ve just got this hunch that things might be ok. Watching Shrek in Tehran. Hey, so, what happened to that tsunami? Related: The Chilean earthquake did however probably (possibly?) make the day shorter. Why the internet will never catch on. Gang signs of the deep. A very important issue: taking a stand against alphabetism.
...moreWhat does the internet cost around the world? Typewriter people. Walt Whitman’s levi’s commercial. Architects Journal looks at the top 5 comic book cities. Also: Paris as star map.
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