Digital Natives

I'm completely intrigued by this article. You can see the outline of an entirely new media apparatus coming into sharp focus. It makes Gregory Ulmer's theorizing (which I know mostly from classes with him at University of Florida and his book Teletheory) seem unbelievably prescient. I'm thinking, in particular, of his concept of 'electracy', his notion of electronic media literacy. What made me think of this are the comments in the article about how the college students under scrutiny get their news in a 'disaggregated' way. They pay almost no attention to the big 20th Century forms of mass media (television and newspapers). This is a kind of media engagement, an electronic media apparatus, that, as theorized by Ulmer owes as much to pre-Gutenberg oral cultures as it does to post-Gutenberg print ones. Mcluhan was not fooling around when he coined term "Global Village." And I feel like now, more than ever, I need to go back and not just read more Ulmer, but Walter J. Ong and Marshall Mcluhan as well.

I like this too...

SSION: WOMAN from john dretzka on Vimeo.

I like this but if you lived through the 80s, if it was thee formative period of your life, it just doesn't seem all that original. It's a collection of footnotes and references. It's a good example of how the footnote — or hyperlink perhaps — has become the prevailing content of our time. And, the funny thing about this is that the vanguard period for this (the footnote as content) also goes back to the 80s: to post-structuralist experiments in writing. It always intrigued me that these experiments (with their obsession with the footnote and the comment in the margin) presaged the hypertext and the rise of internet. So this video is good (especially the body-faces) — just not all that original. The never ending end of history... Everything has already happened... No future... And the end of history more or less coincides with the rise of youth culture — in the Sixties. "Don't trust anyone over 30" — which morphed, in our time, into an endless succession of "blah blah is the new 20s" ("the 40s is the new 20s", "the 50s is the new 20", "the 60s is the new 20s"). We live in culture that's obsessed with youth, one that's hysterically obsessed with getting old, of being outdated. So in the future of no future there are no old people and the present is an endless nostalgia for the recent past. Heaven is a place where nothing — and hence everything — ever happens. And the kids these days, the youths, are vanguarding it.

Welcome to Griddleville

I want to see more Griddleville. Is there more? Is there only 14 minutes? Go here and watch these 14 amazing minutes, now, man.