Every time I start trying to write down my messy thoughts about this material, I find that what I'm writing quickly turns negative in tone. Maybe this is because the thoughts are messy; I wouldn't exactly be the first person to not really like what I don't really understand. On the other hand, maybe there's a reason for my inherent, if mild, antipathy toward this stuff, and maybe that reason is informative.

In class and on the blog, we have definitely identified the resistance that the electronic literature we've encountered seems to have toward conventional readability. The theorists seem to regard this resistance as a virtue, while we have been considerably more suspicious. And justifiably so, I think. Here we've spent a few years learning to be increasingly serious about literature, and suddenly we're reading stuff that seems... hokey. Seems to rely on preciousness, fireworks and formal conceit.

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).

Something that has been on my mind for a little while now and has consequently passed its class discussion expiration date. . . McLuhan makes a big deal out of the idea that media provide us with extensions of ourselves, but what if the medium is unreliable? I'm concerned only about the mechanics of the medium, not about the misrepresentation of any "real" world. I mean what happens when you reach for something and it's just not there? Objects in the physical world rarely surprise us with their sudden absence; very few things seem to be there but aren't. We don't tolerate books with missing pages, or television signals that spontaneously drop segments from shows. But the internet, which we imagine will one day encompass all content everywhere, is full of dead links, of pages that don't turn. How many times has class in ITS been momentarily derailed by a misdirected browser? And thanks to our sexy embedded hyperlinks, even search engines can't help locate the truant content of the blogosphere.