About
Michael Becker is a writer in Bozeman, Montana. He has a master’s degree in English from Montana State University. His thesis, on the shifting border between readers and authors in the world of hypertext and the Web, seemed to go over pretty well, if he might say so. He’s been online since 1996 and blogging since 2002. And, yes, he still believes “e-mail” is hyphenated, “Web site” is two words, and “Internet” and “Web” must always be capitalized.
The Blog
A lot of thought went into titling this blog “Hypercrit.” For a long time, I maintained a blog known as “Becker’s Online Journal.” Over the years I was fortunate enough to have some big names comment on that site, including Patrick Herron and Ken Johnson. Unfortunately, that site bit the big one a short time ago, thanks to a rookie-mistake on my part. (Databases in MySQL are notoriously hard to back up and move if you don’t know what you’re doing!).
I decided to get a new domain name, one that reflected the kind of work I want to do from here on out. “Hypercrit,” one step away from “hypocrit,” combines my thinking about all things “hyper” and my intention: criticism.
Dispatches
I chose the word dispatches (in the tagline below the title) because traditionally dispatches are short notices meant to carry important information. While I don’t pretend that the things on this blog are always important, they are sometimes short. I suppose that makes them, perhaps half the time, “dispatches” per se. Whatever they are, I think they’re probably in the spirit of dispatches anyhow.
August 2007 note: I changed the tag line atop the blog from “dispatches on hypertext and academia” to “dispatches on our expanding digital culture.” The change more accurately reflects the mission of this site as the Web has evolved over the past two years. The debate now raging among the pundits is about the cultural effects of Web 2.0 and whether we are irreparably damaging our minds by spending too much time in this new medium. Whether that’s true or not, I hope the change in tag line will help keep the writing here focused on our current debate and not on a term that is becoming increasingly forgotten: hypertext.
September 2008 note: Almost a year after the last time, I again changed the tag line atop the blog to mention “wonton electron spillage.” The idea of spilling electrons (instead of ink) when we write online has captured my imagination in the past few weeks, enough so that it merited abandoning my pet term “dispatches,” at least for a while.
Creative Commons License
Hypercrit by Michael Becker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.hypercrit.net.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.hypercrit.net/contact/
Internet. Serious Business.
