A point made by Hayles and others this semester, that other people in the class seem to have a better handle on than I do, was brought up briefly today: that of how hypertexts change and become something new when they are released to the world.

This has suddenly become a very real concern to me in designing my final project. One of the major components of my project is a blog which I set up on a public forum. I didn't really think about comments when I set it up, assuming that the chances were low that a random person would stumble on it and really take time with it before it was done, but today I got my first comment, and it was extremely disturbing. This reader took my fictional characters and the fictional situations I put them in to be real, and commented accordingly. Expressing hope for their future and wishing a character luck in a specific venture. He also made the point of how much he had come to enjoy the main character through reading his blog.

Jan Pronk was a UN envoy in Sudan who got expelled from the country for comments he made on his blog. This article details how the Sudanese government accused him of "psychological warfare" for blogging about two defeats government troops suffered in Darfur. His blog contains highly sensitive diplomatic information, the kind "normally sent back, encoded, only to national capitals."

Fareed Zakaria discusses mediation and blogging in a fascinating way in the conclusion of his book The Future of Freedom (W W Norton and Company, 2003).

"The personal web site (blog) was hailed as the killer of the traditional media. In fact it has become something quite different. Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs--and the best are very clever--have become guides to them, pointing out unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become new mediators for the informed public...the creators of blogs think of themselves as radical democrats, the are in fact a new Tocquevillean elite" (254).

Yesterday, a gunman killed one and wounded nineteen more when he opened fire on the campus of Dawson College, a college prep school in Montreal, Canada. He was subsequently killed in a gun battle with police.

The connection between this gruesome story and blogging is that the shooter, using the alias "fatality666", periodically posted violent rants and pictures on his blog. It's sad when technology, rather than helping people communicate meaningfully with each other, just makes it easier fo

This post will be highly dispersed (and, now that I've looked back over it, awfully long) because I have a million ideas running around in my head after finishing this coming week’s reading. I’ve never read any media theory before, and my brain feels like it’s been exploded (or imploded, or both--you’d have to ask McLuhan.)

First, a bit of self-conscious reflection on reading the texts with Professor Fitzpatrick’s underlining and margin notes on them: it seems like an unusual kind of hypermediacy, in which one of the media is totally dependent-- even parasitic-- on the other, but it is the dependent medium that is evaluating and assigning value to the medium upon which it depends. It sounds like one of Ong's (many) paradoxes.

As I was making my first forays into the blogoshpere (still hating all the made-up words) I stumbled upon a very controversial blog that I think raises interesting questions about the responsibilities of those who write and read blogs. Chinabounder is a white male living in Shanghai, supposedly an expat who teaches there, who documents his sexual encounters with the local women on his blog. This has caused a furor among the conservative Chinese population.