Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters. Central to repositioning critical inquiry, so it can attend to the specificity of the medium, is a more robust notion of materiality. Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. It makes materiality an emergent property, so that it cannot be specified in advance, as if it were a pre-given entity. Rather, materiality is open to debate and interpretation, ensuring that discussions about the text's "meaning" will also take into account its physical specificity as well. [End Page 67] Following the emphasis on media-specific analysis, nine points can be made about the specificities of electronic hypertext: they are dynamic images; they include both analogue resemblance and digital coding; they are generated through fragmentation and recombination; they have depth and operate in three dimensions; they are written in code as well as natural language; they are mutable and transformable; they are spaces to navigate; they are written and read in distributed cognitive environments; and they initiate and demand cyborg reading practices.

Let's read this at the end of the term!

The Portland Mercury and historic Hollywood Theatre have come together to bring you HECKLEVISION, an all-new series that will permanently change how you think about movie-going. Here's how it works, in three easy steps: 1) We (Merc & HWT) pick a hilariously horrible movie (but one we secretly love). 2) Through the magic of MuVChat technology, you text your heckles, jokes, and commentary from your seat and they appear onscreen below the film 3) We all drink beer and laugh a lot.Sound awesome?  Then charge up those cellphones, limber up your thumbs, and get ready to launch your best text lobs at our screen!

Richard Prince is an art world superstar. His paintings sell for millions, and many hang in the world's great museums. But one recent series of works cannot be shown in public - at least, not lawfully. Last year, a judge found Prince liable for copyright infringement for using the photographs of another artist without permission. A federal court in New York is set to hear Prince's appeal Monday, and the outcome of that appeal could have major implications for the art world and beyond.

first in a series of articles exploring how the Met's longstanding & successful HD simulcasts of productions might be "changing" opera as a form...

my kids are obsessed with this station....interesting illustration of some of the convergence between radio & social media discussed in reading this week...

Uno, Nessuno, Centomila (One, No One and One Hundred Thousand) is a classic novel by Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. Published in 1925, it recounts the tragedy of Vitangelo Moscarda, a man who struggles to reclaim a coherent and unitary identity for himself in the face of an inherently social and multi-faceted world. What would Moscarda identity tragedy look like today? In this article we transplant Moscarda's identity play from its offline setting to the contemporary arena of social media and online social networks. With reference to established theories on identity construction, performance, and self-presentation, we re-imagine how Moscarda would go about defending the integrity of his selfhood in the face of the discountenancing influences of the online world.

This paper sets out to develop a theoretical framework for examining implications of digital media uses for digital inequality in the domain of social interaction. First, by drawing on the social affordances perspective, this paper seeks to establish an additional dimension of digital skills, namely, online social networking skills. Furthermore, to explore the implications of interactional ICT use for digital inequality, this paper theorizes how online social networking skills may condition uses of various digital media for communication (i.e., communication multiplexity) and proposes two propositions for future empirical examination.

Yes...a morphing of "ethics" and "privacy" appears to be the dominant discourse at the moment (here and elsewhere). While they are not the same things, there does appear to be an anxiety about the "boundaries" around privacy in pedagogical situations that manifest in the unfurling of ethical flags...but what are the other ethical implications of using digital tools in the classroom (or pedagogically, more broadly)? conversely, what are ethical implications for NOT doing so?