Like David, I’ve spent the last week in the midst of moving. Forgive me for leaving you newsless last week – I’m still working on getting internet access. N+1 asks, “Is it worth it?” Like many new media columnists before him, Benjamin Kunkel shares a nicely-written meditation on the subject but doesn’t quite answer the question:
Reading the press, watching moving images and listening to recorded music, ordering products from catalogues, talking on the phone, and exchanging correspondence are all modern habits of long standing. The distinction of newer communication technologies is really to promote a intense kind of semiotic promiscuity: more messages are sent and received, and more “content” posted and consumed, while all of these communications–often competing for our attention on one or two screens–tend to become shorter, more frequent, more spontaneous, and more casual…. Bloggers on the whole write carelessly, their ideas are commonplace, they curry favor with readers and one another, and their popularity is no index of their worthiness…. [But] There is no giving up the internet now.
(Via Arts and Letters Daily.)
The J.D. Salinger legal drama.
Readerville has called it quits.
The millionth word in the English language is due to be born on Wednesday.
How War and Peace got its name.
Leaving you with something unrelated but completely cool: a video of the moon filmed 13 miles from the surface (via kottke).