betajames

We naturally lead manicured lives, so that our favorite blogs and writers and friends all look and think and sound a lot like us. (While waiting in line for my cappuccino this weekend, I was ready to punch myself in the face, as I realized that everyone in line was wearing the exact same uniform: artfully frayed jeans, quirky printed t-shirts, flannel shirts, messy hair, etc. And we were all staring at the same gadget, and probably reading the same damn website. In other words, our pose of idiosyncratic uniqueness was a big charade. Self-loathing alert!) While this strategy might make life a bit more comfortable - strangers can say such strange things - it also means that our cliches of free-association get reinforced. We start thinking in ever more constricted ways.

And this is why following someone unexpected on Twitter can be a small step towards a more open mind. Because not everybody reacts to the same thing in the same way.

Yesterday found me engaged in a bit of periodic culling of those I follow on Twitter. The excuse I use most often is "cutting down on the noise." However, curiosity got the better of me as I compared my follower/following numbers. 'Who are these people following me in spite of me not following them?" I wondered. Rather than pare down my following number to the regular 300, I instead decided to expand to 374. Let's see what happens...

Much of what we consume happens to be Formless. The bulk of printed matter — novels and non-fiction — is Formless.

In the last two years, devices excelling at displaying Formless Content have multiplied — the Amazon Kindle being most obvious. Less obvious are devices like the iPhone, whose extremely high resolution screen, despite being small, makes longer texts much more comfortable to read than traditional digital displays.

In other words, it’s now easier and more comfortable than ever to consume Formless Content in a digital format.

Is it as comfortable as reading a printed book?

Maybe not. But we’re getting closer.

When people lament the loss of the printed book, this — comfort — is usually what they’re talking about. My eyes tire more easily, they say. The batteries run out, the screen is tough to read in sunlight. It doesn’t like bath tubs.

Important to note is that these aren’t complaints about the text losing meaning. Books don’t become harder to understand, or confusing just because they’re digital. It’s mainly issues concerning quality.

The same technology allows readers to reach out to authors, provide instant reaction and even become creative collaborators, influencing plot developments and the writer's use of dramatic devices.

Digital tools are also making it possible for independent authors to publish and promote their books, causing an outpouring of written work on every topic imaginable.

If the upheaval in the music industry over the last decade is any guide, the closing of more bookstores and a decreasing demand for physical books will force authors and their publishers to find new ways to profit from their work.

slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader's creativity, as uncovering the author's. "My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content," the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe. "I told my students to believe that the text was written by God – if you can't understand something written in the text, it's your fault, not the author's."

And while Fletcher used the term initially as an academic tool, slow reading has since become a more wide-ranging concept. Miedema writes on his website that slow reading, like slow food, is now, at root, a localist idea which can help connect a reader to his neighbourhood. "Slow reading," writes Miedema, "is a community event restoring connections between ideas and people. The continuity of relationships through reading is experienced when we borrow books from friends; when we read long stories to our kids until they fall asleep." Meanwhile, though the movement began in academia, Tracy Seeley, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, and the author of a blog about slow reading, feels strongly that slow reading shouldn't "just be the province of the intellectuals. Careful and slow reading, and deep attention, is a challenge for all of us."

So the movement's not a particularly cohesive one

The first thing that happened was that New York fell away around me. It disappeared. Poof. The city I had tried to set to the page in three novels and counting, the hideously outmoded boulevardier aspect of noticing societal change in the gray asphalt prism of Manhattan’s eye, noticing how the clothes are draping the leg this season, how backsides are getting smaller above 59th Street and larger east of the Bowery, how the singsong of the city is turning slightly less Albanian on this corner and slightly more Fujianese on this one — all of it, finished. Now, an arrow threads its way up my colorful screen. The taco I hunger for is 1.3 miles away, 32 minutes of walking or 14 minutes if I manage to catch the F train. I follow the arrow taco-ward, staring at my iPhone the way I once glanced at humanity, with interest and anticipation. In my techno-fugue state I nearly knock down toddlers and the elderly, even as the strange fiction and even stranger reality of New York, from the world of Bartleby forward, tries to reassert itself in the form of an old man in a soiled guayabera proudly, openly defecating on Grand Street. But sorry, viejo, you’re not global enough to hold my attention.

Early on it would immediately erase the profile of anyone it learned had died.

Ms. Chin says Facebook now recognizes the importance of finding an appropriate way to preserve those pages as a place where the mourning process can be shared online.

Following the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, members begged the company to allow them to commemorate the victims. Now member profiles can be “memorialized,” or converted into tribute pages that are stripped of some personal information and no longer appear in search results. Grieving friends can still post messages on those pages.

Of course, the company still needs to determine whether a user is, in fact, dead. But with a ratio of roughly 350,000 members to every Facebook employee, the company must find ways to let its members and its computers do much of that work.

in a media environment crowded with virtual content farms where no detail is too small to report as long as it was reported there first, Politico stands out for its frenetic pace or, in the euphemism preferred by its editors, “high metabolism.”

The top editors, who rise as early as 4:30 a.m., expect such volume and speed from their reporters because they believe Politico’s very existence depends, in large part, on how quickly it can tell readers something, anything they did not know.

“At a paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when you’re actually sitting there on deadline, trying to file,” said Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor, in an interview from the publication’s offices just across the Potomac River from downtown Washington.

“Now at any point in the day starting at 5 in the morning, there can be that same level of intensity and pressure to get something out.”

Ross and Cohen’s style of engagement — perhaps best described as a cross between social-networking culture and foreign-policy arcana — reflects the hybrid nature of this approach. Two of Cohen’s recent posts were, in order: “Guinea holds first free election since 1958” and “Yes, the season premier [sic] of Entourage is tonight, soooo excited!” This offhand mix of pop and politics has on occasion raised eyebrows and a few hackles (writing about a frappucino during a rare diplomatic mission to Syria; a trip with Ashton Kutcher to Russia in February), yet, together, Ross and Cohen have formed an unlikely and unprecedented team in the State Department. They are the public face of a cause with an important-sounding name: 21st-century statecraft.

It's architectural, it’s spatial, it’s procedural, it’s aural, it’s happening on dozens of different physical platforms. We don't have ways to talk about the aesthetic experience of mastering a system of rules, the growing understanding of how that system treats, rewards, or punishes you, where its peaks and valleys are. We don’t know what it means to have art you can win or lose. (I’ve run workshops where we try and adapt Romeo and Juliet to interactive media: What happens to tragedy when you can win?)

We’re not even talking about a moving stable target. The medium is still the site of constant experimentation — technological, formal, aesthetic ideas emerge every year. And compared to the mainstream games that take two or three years to make, the world of hobbyist, indie, and academic game development are on fast-forward, and more ambitious developers are constantly watching and learning from them). We know we can do better. If we're honest with ourselves, Bioshock isn't good enough. Grand Theft Auto IV isn't good enough.

Anyone who has played one of the new generation of video games and not taken some pleasure in doing so is either a liar or not a human being (alien, skin job, etc.). We play these video games because they are fun, and fun does not easily break down into units of greater analysis. Fun is fun. Exploring new worlds containing creatures strange and hilarious is fun. Hunting zombies is fun. The feeling of speed and adventure created by a good game is fun. I remember the sheer sense of exhilaration playing one of the first Sonic the Hedgehog games. In the real world, I would never move so fast and with such abandon. I remember the genuine, giddy fear that shot through me the first time I was manhandled by a zombie in Resident Evil.

Because videogames are experiential and fun, we have writing about videogames that has almost exclusive focus on experience and fun. This is fine as a starting point, but it shouldn't be the alpha and omega of how and why we talk and write about videogames. As I think we can see in Bissell's Extra Lives and Rossignol's This Gaming Life, such focus has a tendency to cloud, overlook or simplify what videogames are and do. There are exceptions, of course, but not overwhelmingly so. I'm also unsure about the successes of Bissell and Rossignol in terms of reaching a larger audience and/or convincing skeptics of why videogames matter.

Fun is not a good enough answer. Experiential writing is not a good enough answer. At least not for me.