Apparently, Americans consume a whole bunch of it.

In the spirit of end-of-the-semester blog-posting, check this out.

So, Americans drink more bottled water than beer, are more likely to get whacked by a wheelchair than run over by a lawnmowers, and are only slightly more likely to get into an accident with a bicycle than with a bed...

Hmm. That bed one makes me suspicious.

But! Still more: "Adolescents and adults now spend, on average, more than 64 days a year watching television, 41 days listening to the radio and a little over a week using the Internet. Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog."

I'm not sure if this is (well, actually, I'm certain that it's not) relevant to the class in any way, but I wanted to share it because it was really funny (to me)--
Apparently there are some morons (hard-core athletes??) who think it's a great idea to go surfing in Cleveland (my hometown) in the middle of December.

There are forty mile per hour winds... the water is (at its most lovely) described as "chocolate" (I finished my scuba certification by diving in Lake Erie... I could see, at most, a grand total of five inches)... The temperature is frigid...

What a lot of creative projects we saw today--I'm really impressed by what's been created. Everyone started with the same material but were inspired to develop such individual interpretations--hats off!

But anyway, I wanted to go a bit further with tophat1's post about the non-fictional nature of a lot of the hypertexts our class seems to have created. We've had "autobiographies," reflections on a Los-Angeles state of mind, family trees... They've all been really cool.

But this made me wonder: why is it that our memories seem to lend themselves so well to hypertexts? This seems to be something that Oz's project (as well as Nightowl's) are addressing. I keep thinking of silversprung's comment on how hypertexts, like thought, are associative. Is it this richness of association, all wrapped up in our memories, that we're seeing expressed in these nonfictional hypertexts?

There was so much going on today re:identity in our class presentations--I sort of got to thinking about it during tophat1's presentation, of course, but then so many of the other presentations seemed to hang around the same theme.

One particular example of what I mean came up during a bird's presentation--

a bird was saying that, although she had been advised to "change the names" on her project again and again, it just felt totally wrong to write a story about her sister (for instance) and then claim its subject had a totally different name than her sister's. There was, for her, this profound link between person/personality and name/identity.

Being the second entry in the category of shameless plug isn't quite as exciting as the first, but here goes--

I'd love (and indeed, need) input on my own blog. It's about (importantly enough) collaborative authorship/writing. Here's the link.

You don't have to read the whole thing--just glance at a post or two and leave me a comment if it's not too much trouble. You'll be joining the exalted ranks of those like McKenzie Wark! (I don't know if that's a good incentive, but it's a try.)

Thank you a million--I know that

I've been getting a bit back-logged on my magazine reading in the past couple weeks, so the Thanksgiving-break flight-time was an awesome opportunity to catch up.

I was reading in The New Yorker about video games, rather surprisingly. Actually the article is about game designers--more specifically Sim City (and more) designer Will Wright.

It was funny to read, especially in the context of our discussions last week about the role of the gamer vs. the role of the game designer. The article definitely manages to present Wright as an author, or at least, perhaps, as an artist.

I was reading the Hayles at like 4:30 in the morning in an over-crowded, really ugly airport, so I'm not sure that any of my thoughts on her paper will make much sense, but bear with me!

I have this feeling that Hayles is trying to change the way we view the world altogether in this piece--on every page there are big claims that ring a bit like McLuhan's "the medium is the message." (Actually, doesn't her discussion on 73 about how the literatry corpus is similar to the human body, in that it "is at once a physical object and a space of representation, a body and a message", smack of McLuhan?)

Funny thing here.

It's sort of cool, if very weird, social software called Dandelife.

People post pictures/videos/texts recounting events in their lives that are associated with acertain day. The different posts get assembled into a giant timeline. Users can track the lives of people that they know, make their own accounts and add to the timeline, or simply wander from post to post.

Some of the entries:

--The first one that popped up when I arrived came from my birthday!
Sept 27, 1990: "One night, 13 years old, snuck out and lost my virginity.

Now that Shock and Awe has decided to become a blogger after college, this article might offer him some hope.

This 21 year old kid, Brian Stelter, has been running the-It blog for the television industry for the last couple of years--it's tvnewser.com. And this kid is seriously high profile, as one of the article's interviewees attests:

"'The biggest TV executives, the men and women who run the top networks, look at this kid’s Web site all the time,' said Joe Scarborough, the host of the talk show “Scarborough Country” on MSNBC. 'And the genius of it is that everybody thinks they own him. Everybody says: "Oh, I’ve got a great relationship with Brian. Let me leak it to him."'"

Apparently GAM3R 7H30RY has made something of a splash in the media.

Here is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education that includes an interview with Wark, interviews with some of the people responsible for GAM3R 7H30RY (how I hate typing that) at the Insitute for the Future of the Book, plus some quotes from our very own KF (!).

I've been writing quite a bit on GAM3R 7H30RY (caps lock seems to help) this weekend for my paper, so my head's sort of spinning with it--to the point that I'm not sure what I've read/written/seen blogged about... But one of the important aspects that the above article brings up is the future of online publishing. The author, Jeffrey Young, paraphrases Ben Vershbow (an IFB employee) saying: "the networked e-book is ideal for scholarly books, or any work dealing with big ideas that might be difficult for a lone author to tackle..." KF goes on to suggest a new model of online publishing, with peer review done by vetted scholars through the publisher.