Hypercrit

Michael Becker writes about journalism, new media and digital culture in general.

Month: October, 2006

Update

For those of you who do read this blog, rest assured that it is not dead, not by a long shot. I’ll come back with more regular updates in the near future.
As a side note, I just picked up Richard Lanham’s The Electronic Word and Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. More to come on those in […]

Virtual News Anchor

So the guys at Northwestern University have put a new spin on the news aggregator. News At Seven pulls feeds from the Internet along with relevant photos. The feeds are then formatted into a half-hour long news show that is read by — get this — the virtual character Alex from the game Half-Life 2.
A few of the videos are […]

Idologues in the Classroom

Maxine Hairston’s article struck a chord with me. First of all, she criticizes English departments for their politicization, which I take to be a jab at literary theory. Secondly, she makes me completely self-aware of how politics fit in to my writing class. For her, ideology in the classroom is unprofessional if it seeks to […]

The Human Conversation

The notion of conversation stuck with me as I finished Kenneth Bruffee’s essay. From time to time, I find myself lost in theory, praxis, pedagogy, rhetoric, and dialogue. I am confronted by an overwhelming sense that the work we do as scholars is meaningless. What good does it do to argue about literature and composition […]

Hatchfest Panel

Well, here’s to being sick and missing out on big things. I was ill Friday, which forced me to cancel my composition class. On top of that, it also forced me to miss out on a panel at Bozeman’s two-year-old film festival, Hatchfest. The panel was on the future of digital technology and featured the […]