Especially when I'm stressed out, I like to open up people magazine, US Weekly, or check out what's happening on people.com. At the gym, I regularly see people checking out these same magazines. It's the age-old obsession with the lifestyles of the rich and the famous, I guess. Or the fundamentally human need to know and relate to other people (even if it is a little distant).

Anyhow, in recent years it seems that the relation between celebrity and media has become increasingly strained. Various stars have gotten in trouble for attacking paparazzi and photographers have been fined for trespassing on personal property.

Everytime I log on to my computer, it opens to the mac homepage. Today, I saw an article on the site entitled "A Windows Expert Opts for a Mac Life, Part 2" chronicling the life and times of a PC expert who switches over to a Mac.

First off, I realize that the article is perhaps a little dry. The guy describes the joys of mac life and how his only problem is a sticky spacebar. He also asks why the other PC companies can't have the Mac-like resources such as the no-hassle ("no hassle" for those of us who have had bad mac experiences) repair service and the "genius bar" of helpful mac experts available by phone (sort of) or in mac stores.

In the spirit of the recent blogs about random internet sites that will provide a nice study break, I offer a quick thought on Chuck Tryon's most recent blog entry. Although his blog has been on our site for awhile (I think) I haven't had a chance to check it out until now. (Now that I am not taking a study break but just outright refusing to study for my ominously looming finals).

In case you aren't familiar with him, Chuck is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Fayetteville State University. His post from December 8 (his "birthday post") mentions how, although he is happy to have a tenure-track job, it has been difficult for him to transition from living in big cities (like DC and Atlanta) to living in the smaller town of Fayetteville. He bemoans the absence of a thriving "independent movie culture" in the small town. Yet, he says "I think I would feel even more disconnected without the internet and especially without the blog communities in which I've participated."

Earlier this year, I signed up for the Merriam Webster word-of-the-day service. It's a free service that sends you a different word each day along with a definition, use-it-in-a-sentence, and a word history. I originally signed up for the service in the hopes that it would help me on the GRE vocab section (I'm not convinced it's done me much good on the test or in everyday life) but I never signed off of the service because it has some fun words sometimes.

Today's word is cybrarian which apparently is "a person whose job is to find, collect, and manage information that is available on the World Wide Web." It sounds so corny to me but apparently the word has been in use since 1992. In general, I think it's funny that the web has had so much influence on new words that almost always sound so corny.

First of all, I really enjoyed seeing what people have been working on throughout the semester. I was really impressed by the form and the content. As someone who has not spent much time working with computer programs or even reading electronic literature, this has been an extremely interesting experience for me.

Today, I was particularly interested in the two presentations that were more along the lines of non-fiction. It seems that a lot of electronic literature that we have looked at is either scholarly or fictional. The closest to non-fiction are the blogs we looked at, but today I felt that the two presentations were more personal than any I have seen online. Perhaps this is due to the fact that they used real names, pictures, and discussed real places or perhaps the fact that I know these people offline. It may be that I am still unexperienced in the wide array of literature online but I am interested to see the possibilities of this sort of "non-fiction" in the future. More particularly, will this type of genre have a place online other than on personal sites that are locked, and open only to those with a username and password?

There is a recent post on Jill Walker's blog about ways in which people are using blogging for purposes like running for political office or running a university. She talks about a man who, after being an active member of local organizations, has decided to run for office and he is blogging it. Walker thinks "...the immediacy of blogging might work particularly well at such a local level." I'm wondering how large the audience will actually be? Is politics an area of life that, if a politician decided to, while running for office, blog about it, even those who don't normally read blogs would decide to start?

I have been reading a book called "Communities in Cyberspace." It is, as the title suggests, a collection of essays about the different aspects of online communities. In it there is an interesting, although a bit old (1996), piece called "Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities". The ideas in the essay may not seem all that revolutionary anymore but the authors open up a still-relevant discussion of the different types of discourse that the Internet facilitates and how it affects individuals on and off screen.

Recently on the blog, people have voiced concerns about concealing the identity of real-life people in their final project hypertexts. As a part of my final critical project, I am researching how the computer's mimicry of the physical world effects us and possibly provides us with a false sense of security. For example, many online sites are now offering security options for customers. Banks are going online to provide customers with online accounts, often only protected by a username and password. Shopping sites offer customer accounts that include credit card and other personal information. Again, only protected by a username and password.

My mom saved me an article from the July issue of "Time" magazine about the current young (under 40ish) writers. While I don't usually read all the articles my mom saves up, I decided to procrastinate and read it through. The author is lamenting the loss of a group of young writers who will define the current generation. She begins the article by saying David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and others are a little old to be defining the current young generation. Of course, we can take issue with that as we like (I absolutely LOVE Franzen and others in his "group" and I can certainly identify with them and their writing) yet the question is: where are the young writers?

In class today, there were two threads of conversation about a viewer's interactions with "The Onyx Project." The first thread seemed to see the process as an experience of the main character's neural processes. In other words, we could see what the speaker was thinking (in the form of the color pictures at the bottom of the screen) while he was talking about something else.

On the other hand, it seemed that others saw the process as something akin to an interview or a real-life conversation in which, while the speaker was talking, the viewer could "interrupt" and choose to "ask" him to speak about something else. By clicking on the pictures, the viewer can prompt another line of conversation.