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Tools cannot and should not ever be considered neutral. Whether tangible (a hammer and nails) or intangible (any given language), tools encode assumptions and biases, some unconscious and some not, built into them by those who invent and refine them. Those assumptions and biases are sometimes idiosyncratic but almost always cultural. […]
Considered as a technological invention, what Kerouac’s typewriter-plus-scroll prefigures is . . . the word-processor document file. A space for writing as open and lengthy as you want it to be. Automatic word-wrap, automatic pagination, a new “page” within the document as soon as your text overruns the last one, nothing to get in the way of the pulsing of your words and the evolution of your idea. […]
Jack Kerouac’s famous “scroll” of the typescript for his landmark 1957 novel “On the Road” is an iconic artifact, due to the cultural impact of its content, but its treatment (however reverential) as an oddball, one-off experiment masks its maker’s insight into the technology of writing and its prophetic relationship to his medium’s future. […]
According to a BBC report, the word “omnishambles” has been named “word of the year” by the Oxford English Dictionary. “The word — meaning a situation which is shambolic from every possible angle — was coined in 2009 by the writers of BBC political satire The Thick of It.” Putting an American spin on it, we get Romneyshambles: Any political project with Mitt Romney at its helm. […]
There’s a direct relationship between the klutziness in the handling of visual imagery and the demographics of the Republic Party and its subsets. Bluntly put, if I wanted intelligent advice on effective and persuasive 21st-century mass communication via visual and electronic means, I wouldn’t expect to get it from over-40 Caucasian small-town midwestern and southern males and females. […]
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 SPJ Research Award 2014 Thought for the Day Ignorance is a condition; dumbness is a commitment.
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SPJ Research Award 2014
Election 2012: Image World (15)
According to a BBC report, the word “omnishambles” has been named “word of the year” by the Oxford English Dictionary. “The word — meaning a situation which is shambolic from every possible angle — was coined in 2009 by the writers of BBC political satire The Thick of It.” Putting an American spin on it, we get Romneyshambles: Any political project with Mitt Romney at its helm. […]