artwork by Emmanuel Laflamme The Internet is over 40 years old; the World Wide Web, over 20. Google has made the Internet navigable. Apple has made it portable. Facebook has made it social. So, it’s all happened, then? Maybe that’s why we keep encountering more of the same. There are aspects of the digital ecosystem … Continue Reading
Culture, Digital
artwork below by the author There is a secondhand bookstore not far from where I live called Recycled Books. The purple-hued two-story building sits on the northeast corner of the town square in Denton, Texas– only a stumble away from the local bars, an antique mall with a truly impressive collection of faux-medieval edged weapons, and … Continue Reading
Culture, Digital
“Flash fiction,” as an example of miniature literature, is not new, and antedates social media. But, the advent of Facebook and Twitter, and its clones, may have, fanned the trend toward pithiness. They have fostered a written culture where brevity trumps it all. Ornate, mammoth sentences à la Virginia Woolf, have fallen by the wayside … Continue Reading
Culture, Digital
art above by Emmanuel Laflamme The term “Website” is outrageously passé, isn’t it? It doesn’t quite capture and describe what they are. Regardless of what one calls them—cloud-based platforms, mobile apps, Web services, social networks—they are certainly sprouting with a feral intensity, almost with impunity. Keeping a track of them has become a Sisyphean activity. … Continue Reading
Culture, Digital
art by Indiana Joel I deactivated Facebook recently. I won’t spend much time proselytizing about it, because people seem to get pretty touchy and self-righteous about this topic. Let’s just say I was sick of it, and I felt ready for a change. The fact is, I’d caught myself too many times creeping through photos of … Continue Reading
Commentary, Culture, Digital
“WordPharmacy,” at first glance, appears to a pharmacy. Shelf after shelf of an assortment of colorful little boxes, behind glass displays, containing, one imagines, soft capsules, chalky tablets, a bitter syrup, a yard of gauze. Inch a tad closer and one realizes, however, that the names on them are oddly, not very like pills and … Continue Reading
Culture, Digital
Consider the “Luncheon of the Boating Party.” An Impressionist work by the French artist Pierre-August Renoir, it is a part of the Phillips Collection, in Washington, D.C. Its brief caption provides the viewer with its title, the artist’s name, and the year of its creation. The information is basic, and adequate—seemingly. But, would it be … Continue Reading
Culture, Digital
art above by Emmanel Laflamme In a recent essay in The New York Times (“Why Authors Tweet”), Anne Trubek writes about how contemporary writers resort to tweeting as a way of “socializing” with their readers, with the goal of increasing their “fan base”. Fans feel good when they know that the writers they go about fanning (an … Continue Reading
Culture, Digital
art above by Emmanel Laflamme As a child in school, in India, I hated groupthink. Groupthink was then known as herd mentality, best embodied by Eugene Ionesco’s play, “Rhinoceros,” the story of a man who resists becoming one of the many lackeys of state power. At the very end, he can’t withstand the pressure and … Continue Reading
Culture, Digital
art above by Emmanuel Laflamme CoverCake. BlackBerry. TweetDeck. HootSuite. MySpace. GrubHub. Were Rip van Winkle to rouse from his sleep on today’s date, and encounter the above words, he may well take them to be the names of a brand of a lidded confection, a dark hued fruit, a hard toffee, a shrill whistle, a … Continue Reading
Culture, Digital
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