I'm currently in the process of working on law school applications, as well as helping my friends who are working on their own grad school applications. More and more schools are requesting that applicants submit their materials online, so that is the route I've elected to go. I have a very love/hate relationship with these online applications. On the one hand, the ability to copy-paste or automatically fill in some of the basic information that every application asks for has made my life much, much easier. I like being able to save my applications online, not having any papers to keep track of. On the other hand, some of these text boxes do not have anywhere near enough room. You run into the same problem on paper applications, but at least then you know ahead of time how much room you have, and can fudge things a little bit with small writing if you have to. There is at least one applicaiton that I may have to submit in paper because the boxes they provide don't even have enough room to list the name of the company I've worked at for the last two years. I'm glad the option is being offered, but some of these electronic application are a bit more of a pain in the neck than I anticipated.

I just cleaned out the bulk box in my yahoo account, partially to procrastinate, partially to see if anything had accidently gotten directed there.

I remember when we first got the internet at my parent's place, my father was always freaking out, telling us that we were under no circumstances to open an email when we didn't know the sender, or the message was bulk-forwarded. At times I had to call friends to make sure they had in fact sent me the chain letter that would promise upon opening dismemberment, nightmares, eternal happiness, true love, and an endearing if medically unsound puppy if i did/not foward the message to the requisit number of people in 17.5 nanoseconds.

We talked in class today about the format of "Kind of Blue" and whether it can be reproduced in print form or whether the story relies on its email/internet form for meaning. From what I gathered, some people believed its email style could be transferred to an epistolary print novel, especially since the fake in-box doesn't quite make sense in that all of the emails--no matter the recipient--are in the same in-box. Others seemed to like the online style, and I agree. I tried to think of what ways that this story might rely on its medium and form, and one thing that came to mind is its promiscuity.

This is a going to be a short post, but I wanted to ask if any of you have heard about this.

I've heard of companies and organizations trying to manipulate things so that their websites end up as the first or second hit on google, but I hadn't heard about political groups directly and systematically trying to manipulate what information the public does and does not find when they try to google candidates. It makes you question

I just read “Walking Mornings,” and I agree with Frabby that it is a lovely, if despondent, piece. It did help me understand Joyce’s wariness of the internet and the Information Age better than I did before. He is deeply worried about the fate of attention, choice, and possibility—things that are central to how we interact with the world, how we make sense of it, and how we make a meaningful place for ourselves within it.

He writes, in reference to ever-proliferating technologies, “never before have human beings been as surrounded as we are now by so much empty possibility. Never before has there been such potentiality harnessed only to displaying itself” (90). It may look like we are making informed choices and absorbing ever-increasing amounts of knowledge from technology, but Joyce thinks that most of the information and experiences that are available to us are actually hollow. This worries Joyce, because he thinks that most of the things that technology presents us with are either insignificant or actually harmful to our ability to be thinking, self- and other-aware individuals. (Although I would argue that hypertext fiction is an exceptional technology: the good stuff seems to be able to suggest new modes of reading and thinking to us—certainly a meaningful contribution.)

This article from the New York Times mentions not only Pomona (!), but also how the web is changing yet another aspect of our lives-- in this case, the college application process.

I did. It felt like the apocalypse, seriously. And it was down from what...7 pm to 10 pm? And not even all of it was gone. ITS said something about a "backbone" of the internet being down, and thus the pages associated with it wouldn't work.
I didn't care what the reason was. I felt like I was suddenly all alone and cut off from the world - especially since AIM didn't work. My room was suddenly empty. I was really quite shocked to see how adversely it affected me.
That got me thinking - what would happen if say, the whole West Coast lost internet for a week or so? Or worse, the whole US? Would our economy crash? Would the automated transit stop? On the other hand - would more people actually be outside, talking to their neighbors, like during the big blackout in New England in summer 2003? There were certainly a lot of people at the Junior/Senior Symposium tonight, mostly people who didn't know what to do with themselves without the internet.