Hypercrit

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

Month: April, 2007

Redirect

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Wired Campus Blog: Adventures in Fair-Use Doctrine:

Fair-use doctrine, as codified in U.S. law, allows people to reproduce portions of copyrighted works "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research." That seems straightforward enough. But there's a spanner in the works, as Shelley Batts can attest: […]

The Post-Digital Library

In the May issue of Harper’s, Gideon Lewis-Krauss writes about the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, a privately owned and operated library a few blocks from the city’s public library. Its owners, Rick Prelinger and Megan Shaw Prelinger, focus their collection on physical materials working together with digital holdings. The couple sees libraries as refuges […]

“Interesting places are rubbish!”

I’ve just gotten back into town after a trip to Helena to see author Neil Gaiman in person at the Montana Library Association’s annual convention. The English writer, who’s behind such graphic novel hits at the “Sandman” series and novels like Good Omens and American Gods, read an unpublished short story and answered audience questions […]

Contemporaeity

Dan Visel at the Institute for the Future of the Book writes about how contemporary and reactionary blogs must be. With blogs, he writes, people check the most recent entries to see what is new. After all, that’s how blogs work. The most recent news gets top billing.
As a result, it’s hard for digital forms of […]

Corrupting English

Text messaging is trashing Irish students’ writing, the Irish Department of Education reported. The said “The frequency of errors in grammar and punctuation has become a serious concern” after studying the writing habits of 15-year-olds. They go on: “Text messaging, with its use of phonetic spelling and little or no punctuation, seems to pose a […]