A modern-day Luddite longing for the slow elegance of print culture
"Sven Birkerts, a modern-day Luddite, is feeling uneasy about all this rapid cultural change. He longs for the slow elegance of print culture. So much so, in fact, that the cover of his new book, [The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age], features a fuzzy caramel-colored snapshot of a naturally-lit library which houses the endangered species of digital modernity: a leather armchair draped with an afghan, droopy lace curtains, and shelves of softened leather hard-backs coveting thick yellowed pages and the tidy, immutable thoughts of yesterday's literary prophets.
Birkerts is terrified that his warm dusty paradise is being ransacked, and the remaining rubble is merely forgotten or misunderstood in a world distracted by garish, pulsing iconography."
(Amanda Griscom, 1996)
Amanda Scott Griscom (1996). "Trends of Anarchy and Hierarchy: Comparing the Cultural Repercussions of Print and Digital Media", Brown University.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Fahrenheit 451: illustrations replace text in newspapers
Montag (Oskar Werner) 'reads' his illustrated newspaper in bed. The scene is from François Truffaut's classic film treatment of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel about a dystopian world where written books have been outlawed.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Fahrenheit 451: passive consumption through audience participation
"When the 'Family' (the television with its 'cousin' announcers and actors) presents an interactive play in which Linda believes she has a role, an actor (Donald Pickering) wearing glasses with thick, black rectangular frames, turns to the camera as it zooms in on him and says, 'What do you think, Linda?'"
(Tom Whalen, Gale Student Resources In Context)
Whalen, Tom. "The Consequences of Passivity: Re-evaluating Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451," in Literature-Film Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3, July, 2007, pp. 181(10).
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Does electronic literature have a future?
"Does electronic literature have a future? Is Google the end of the World? What is the role of digital poetics in global politics? These issues and more are discussed with J. R. Carpenter, John Cayley, Maria Mencia, Scott Rettberg, Alexandra Saemmer, Roberto Simanowski, and Jaka Železnikar."
A video-essay by Talan Memmott and David Prater, September 2011 at the ELMCIP Electronic Literature and New Media Art Seminar in Ljubljana Slovenia.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Art and Culture Destination
"The aim of Culture.Info is to be the first port-of-call for users seeking cultural information on a particular topic. Each Culture.Info sub-portal will provide a carefully researched set of listings of links to information that is more focused and useful than can usually be obtained from the vast majority of existing listings or search engines.
Cultural areas will be added in due course in the following key areas:
* Heritage – including archaeology, archives, conservation, history, heritage, museums
* Media – including advertising, broadcasting, digital & new media, film, games, publishing, radio, television
* Performing – including circus, comedy, dance, festivals, music, opera, puppetry, theatre
* Pursuits – including antiques & collecting, hobbies & pastimes, outdoor activities
* Sport – individual and team, and also sports involving animals
* Visual – including architecture, crafts, design, exhibitions, galleries, painting, photography, sculpture
* Words – including books & literature, languages, libraries, reading, writing
* A place could be a country, a region or even a city."
(Culture.info)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
