Corporations and posthuman bodies

This has been sitting here as a draft for a month now and, in light of the fact that my students in Web writing and I were discussing Andrew Sullivan’s ideas on blogging last week, I’m going to just post it unfinished. It’s a starting point, something I can come back and revisit. I’m going [...]

Avatar and a couple of dichotomies

As I surfed the Web on Christmas day (having nothing better to do than Web surf by a roaring fire while watching my cat play with the new toys from her stocking), I came across this editorial about James Cameron’s blockbuster, Avatar, by Adam Cohen in that day’s New York Times online and I tweeted [...]

Write on…

A new year, time for a little reflection on this whole blogging thing I started back in the summer, fresh off the high of Computers and Writing and the flush of technophilia I always feel during and immediately following that conference. Much like the students in my Web writing course, it’s apparent that blogging is [...]

Of Tweets and Attention Spans and Art

Since we’ve been playing around with Twitter in my Writing for the Web class, and since I’ve been thinking about the poetics/rhetorics of streaming torrents of words, ideas half-formed, the cumulative piling-on of new ideas and meanings in remixes and retweets, I want to think more about what our microblogging, status-updating, twitterpating will produce in [...]

Viva La Resistance

Today my Writing for the Web students and I will be discussing McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” and a chapter from Amy Devitt’s A Theory of Genre, two texts that provide important theoretical grounding for this course.  Both McLuhan and Devitt warn us that medium and genre can constrain and limit us if we [...]

Emotions and Ideas in Real Time

This is an article that piques my interest. I have been reading about the topic of sentiment analysis for a while now, but since I’ve been thinking about the new compositional and rhetorical practices fostered by the Web with such things as RSS feeds and Twitter, I think there’s important work to be done on [...]

Rewrite, Reuse, Recycle: Some Cool Recent Developments on the Remix Front

Okay, finally, as promised, more stuff on the remixing, revision, re-composition, and reconstitution issues that have been on my mind of late…

We Swim in the Stream: Kate Armstrong’s RSS Poetics, News Feeds, Twitter Streams

Kate Armstrong’s “Feeds and Streams: RSS Poetics,” originally published in a special issue of of The Capilano Review devoted to writing and technology, is available as part of a fascinating online reiteration/remix of that issue by Web artist and writer J.R. Carpenter.  In her essay, Armstrong proposes a new literary art that might arise from [...]

Whose Text, Pt. II: More thoughts on remixing, revision, recursiveness

My thoughts in the last post I wrote ended up kind of truncated because I was rushing to finish the post and hadn’t really thought about how the Hemingway story I highlighted relates to some of the other issues I find myself dealing with on an almost daily basis in my work as a writing [...]

Whose Text Is It Anyway? Of Editions and Remixes

Haven’t been able to write much this week due to a combination of out of town company (fun!) and car trouble (not at all fun). But last night I had a moment to scan through the NY Times just to catch up on what was going on. I always check out the Op-Ed page and [...]