There exists a company that will take a Twitter feed of your choosing and print it out on several rolls of toilet paper. The company tagline? "Social media has never been so disposable." I shit you not, the website is called www.getshitter.com.
Back in my day, we kept a book in the bathroom. Or some magazines or something. Kids today, honestly.
[Bethany Marzewski gets credit for finding this one. Not sure how she does it -- or what areas of the Internet she's surfing. We should check out her relatively inactive Twitter feed.]
Yesterday's Super Bowl commercials are plastered all over the Internet today, including in this great round-up from Slate. Author Seth Stevenson mentions Donald Gunn's 12 standard advertising formats. This video, made in 2007, features the author himself going over the 12 formats. If you've never thought about how simple the infrastructure is for these bite-sized pieces of media -- or if you're trying to find meaning in Super Bowl ads beyond the apparent conclusion that Americans care only about cars, beer, and Doritos -- look no further for your crash course.
One of my best friends is studying for her Ph. D in English literature at Illinois, and she sent me this video awhile back. I'm a sucker for typography animation, and I thought this was a creative approach, as well as educational -- I'd never thought about how computer coding melds style and content. Spend four minutes of your day watching the video and then muse with me.
I wonder what Virginia Woolf's writing would have looked like if she'd been able to copy-and-paste, to pick up and move entire sentences or paragraphs or ideas. A lot of her writing is peppered with false starts and stops ("Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing."), and we don't really write that way anymore: On the one hand, it feels old-fashioned, and a contemporary voice is much more hip, more jive, in our Internet-savvy, hipster-joke-laden, 20-something reader constituency. On the other hand, second-guessing a digital text piece is much easier than trying to make changes to longhand or even printed copies. There's a permanence to ink on paper that is both helpful and detrimental to the creative process; it makes the piece feel real, but it also makes it feel finished, perhaps falsely. In 1976, Tim O'Brien published an essay titled "Speaking of Courage." When he re-published the story in his 1990 book, The Things They Carried, O'Briend revised the essay, changing bits and pieces to emphasize the elements that he realized, 14 years later, were the true purpose of the story.
When I was 10 or 11 years old, I wrote HTML code for my personal website. It's odd to realize that as I was finding animated GIFs of flying unicorns, others were shaping the future of the Internet. If the Internet looked like this 13 years ago and then like this 8 years ago and then like this 3 years ago and then like this
yesterday (notice the steadily increasing number of ads) -- I can't
even imagine where we'll be just a few years from now. Holograms coming
out of computer screens? Ooh, how about Minority Report-style computer interfaces, complete with backing classical music track? That would
really make the animated unicorn GIF shine.
