“Mention the fact that you’re finding it harder and harder to concentrate lately. The complaint appears to be universal, yet everyone blames it on some personal factor: having a baby, starting a new job, turning 50, having to use a Blackberry for work, getting on Facebook, and so on. … Winifred Gallagher’s new book, ‘Rapt: … Continue reading “Managing Your Own Attention Span: Yes, You Can!”
“Could it be that changes in the Web over the past six years–especially the rise of social networking, blogging, and video and photo sharing–represent the flowering of the Internet’s democratizing potential? This thesis seems to explain the dynamics of current Internet censorship: sites that feature user-generated content–Facebook, YouTube, Blogger–are especially unpopular with authoritarian regimes.”
“A university is to offer a master’s degree teaching students about social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Bebo. The £4,400 MA in Social Media will also explain how to set up blogs and publish podcasts. The one-year course at Birmingham City University will consider social networking sites as communications and marketing tools.”
“Rather than killing it off, modern technologies like email, social networking sites such as Facebook and online media players are helping poets reach new audiences. The grassroots scene is now growing, with live poetry readings becoming more popular and more poets getting their own pamphlets published.”
“While people still love music enough to track it down, collect it, argue over it and judge their Facebook friends by it, many see no reason to pay for it. The emerging practical solution is to let music sell something else: a concert, a T-shirt, Web-site pop-up ads or a brand. Musicians have to eat … Continue reading “Licensing Your Music: It’s Not Selling Out Anymore”
“News that U.S. anti-gay campaigner Fred Phelps is encouraging followers from his Westboro Baptist Church to travel to Vancouver to protest against a production of The Laramie Project, has met with outrage. In response, a cast member of Fighting Chance Productions set up a Facebook page … and within 36 hours had 1,200 members interested … Continue reading “Laramie Project Plans To Counter Protesters With Rally”
“For years now, the nation’s various opera companies have been making strenuous efforts to attract a more diverse audience – with modern interpretations, cheap tickets, outdoorshows, cinematic screenings, “simulcasts” from the New York Met, club nights, cult artists, Damon Albarn’s Monkey, a presence on Facebook and YouTube, and even ticket offers in the Sun. It … Continue reading “Is Opera Finding New Audiences?”
“It may be hard to imagine — given our current obsessions with television shows, movies, instant-messaging, Facebook and blogs — but literature was once at the center of American cultural life. And literary merit was discussed and hotly debated by critics whose essays, in Garrick Davis’s words, courted the educated public with their elegant prose.”
New music websites “track down music similar to your existing tastes by finding people who like the same sounds as you. As we purportedly experience Facebook fatigue and Myspace exhaustion, web forecasters predict that the next phase of social networking will be all about specialist sites like these. And where music goes, books will follow, … Continue reading “Exploring The Virtual Bookshelf”
“The millennials–the cohort born after 1982–might be caled the Look at Me Generation. Thanks to ‘The Real World,’ ‘Laguna Beach’ and the like, they’ve been documented like no group before them, most especially by themselves: on their blogs, their MySpace, Facebook and Flickr pages, and on YouTube. And now the artistes are taking their turn, … Continue reading “The Media Generation”
