Life in the Network

I am ready to scream. I have been trying to get my comic to load to Flickr for the past 2 hours. At first the files exceeded Flickr's 5MB limit, so I separated all my frames into separate files. Now Flickr is saying "File was not a recognized type or was unable to be decoded." Did anybody else have this problem? Since it does not look very good, I've put my chopped-up, minorly successful comic into the Extended Entry section.

In "Into the Electronic Millenium", Birkerts tells us that "presentation structures the reception and, in time, the expectation about how information is organized." He goes on to talk about how "tag-line communication, called bite speak" has begun to emerge as a consequence of our changing relationship with media. (p.66) Lately I hear this kind of bite-speak more often, or maybe I'm just more attuned to it now. Sometimes I think Powerpoint has become our collective psychological communication template-- we've come to expect information to come in neat little pre-digested chunks. Even now, I'm just trying to get through all my points in as succinct a way as I can.

Landow writes, "The written record nonetheless marks a wonderful freezing of something otherwise evanescent." (Twenty Minutes into the Future p.220) There is a permanence to books that can be sort of frightening, but I think there's some value in being able to read history by a book's content, and by the book itself. I hate to think a day will come when we'll take it for granted that we need electricity/power to read a book, rather than just our eyes and some light. Books are for trading, for collecting; their outturned covers are both conversation starters and Do Not Disturb! signs, and they're cheap enough that anyone can own them.

I definitely use email as a way to avoid the telephone. I like the silence of it, and the ability to say everything without having to figure out whether it's my turn to talk. I like being able to respond thoroughly to something, and to be able to rethink my words before I send them out into the world. (I'm sure the speaking part of my brain is withering away.)