“The Deletionist is a concise system for automatically producing an erasure poem from any Web page. It systematically removes text to uncover poems, discovering a network of poems called ‘the Worl’ within the World Wide Web.”
Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat. The phone didn’t make me avoid the human connection, but it did make ignoring her easier in that moment, and more likely, by comfortably encouraging me to forget my choice to do so. My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others. The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits.
Jonathan Safran Foer believes that technology is making us more detached. Pair with The New Yorker’s essay on netiquette.
A group of researchers from the University of Cambridge are using Twitter to help research the rapidly disappearing Welsh language.
![Rita J. King investigates the ways storytelling is being influenced by Twitter. Indeed, she writes that “every five days, a billion tiny stories are generated by people around the world … [and] the tweets are being archived by the Library of Congress as part of the organization’s mission to tell the story of America.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/0a956502fb0acf798e24b8d62390c707/tumblr_mnblz3gX3G1r6xvfko1_1280.png)
Rita J. King investigates the ways storytelling is being influenced by Twitter. Indeed, she writes that “every five days, a billion tiny stories are generated by people around the world … [and] the tweets are being archived by the Library of Congress as part of the organization’s mission to tell the story of America.”
As some of you may have heard, a handful of pioneering companies are trying to use flying robots in place of cars for deliveries. In the Bay Area, the geniuses behind Tacocopter are blazing a new path for restaurants, while in France, the postal service in Auvergne is working on a system for newspapers. (Fingers crossed that somebody will try this with lit mags.)
It’s not always technical walls that stop change in its tracks. Sometimes, innovation is limited by language itself. When metaphors start to die, or when we forget that they’re only tools, they can become some of the most powerful forces against innovation.
Rob Goodman, “Bad Metaphors, Bad Tech”
Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to introduce you to a vending machine that sells books.
I can’t conceive of any justification for writing an 800-page book about the internet. The internet’s certainly revolutionized our lives economically, sexually, blah blah. But only real cultures deserve real monuments. Technologies do not.
Joshua Cohen, in our new interview.
Ever want to watch someone write a novel? Nows your chance. Sorta. Silvia Hartmann, UK author of thriller novels, is inviting readers to observe as she types up her next novel in a Google doc.
Every generation rewrites the book’s epitaph; all that changes is the whodunit.
Leah Price provides the long history of our proclaiming the death of the book.
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