Blogging yesterday

Here's an interesting twist on blogging. While most bloggers post reactions/ruminations/commentary about current events, Shorpy is dedicated to old news -- real old news. Billed as "A 100-year-old photo blog", Shorpy features public domain photographs and news items from the early 20th century, like the Lewis Hine photographs of child laborers. Sadly, requests for comments have gone unanswered; the chirp of crickets resound though the site. I had the same problem with a blog I created last year, which was basically my 1965 diary transcribed with added commentary and pictures. It would be cool to find more bloggers who are blogging primary sources from the past, as it seems to be a tantalizing use of the medium.

What's the message now, Marshall?

Cory Doctorow has a wonderful article in Locus magazine online, "You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen" . In it, he discusses the technological differences between print media (specifically, the novel) and digital, online media. He weaves snippets of his own thoughts and actions into the article in a great stream-of consciousness manner, demonstrating the cognitive changes digital media have promoted. ( "This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who's made cardboard furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip's done, gotta start the music up) (19 more RSS items") We can bemoan the decline of book reading (or, conversely, the rise of multitasking and fragmented communication) but the technology is here, and with each new medium comes new ways of thinking, a new cultural message to be processed -- concurrently, a transformation of old media.

I no longer "read" novels; I listen to them on my iPod. People used to listen to stories, not read them, before the printing press made 400-page books possible and reading necessary. But today's reader has a choice, and many like myself perceive a novel as a long work of fiction, which might be read silently in book form, read aloud from a book to a listener or listeners, or read to me by one or more performers. Such a performance, in fact, could be a solitary experience (the listener on a bus hearing Meryl Streep reading the Velveteen Rabbit) or a shared one (thousands of James Joyce fans participating in Bloomsday, the annual holiday featuring public readings of Ulysses). Include in this vision the possibility of someone interpreting Ulysses in American Sign Language on Bloomsday, and you see that changing the medium of the novel really does alter the experienced "message" of Joyce's words. Of course, setting his manuscript (written on 27 huge sheets of graph paper) in type and producing a small paperback book also alters his words as he experienced them. I wonder what a "novel" will be one hundred years from now, once it has been completely freed from its paper prison?

Announcing our new blog!

This is a blog for and about American Studies at the University of Maryland. As a program, we focus on the critical analysis of the cultures of everyday life; and cultural constructions of identity and difference. Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favorite newsreader so you won't miss an update. Want to be a guest blogger? Contact Jo Paoletti (jpaol at umd dot edu).