Now there’s a catchy title.

Actually, this is one of the liveliest pieces of writing I’ve come across lately. The immediate argument is about copyright in the digital age, but the larger implications–for me, anyway–have to do with what the surging tides of culture look like from a particular vantage point that’s both in the ocean and out of it at the same time. In other words, Doctorow writes from an immanent position but draws the writing toward a transcendent understanding. I take it these are the two principal tasks of any thinker, though not necessarily in that order.

What’s especially interesting for me is that this speech, delivered to the Microsoft Research Group on June 17, 2004, has already appeared online in multiple versions and formats–in just over three weeks. There’s an MP3 audiobook, a Wiki that annotates the original piece, a couple of translations, a pretty HTML version, and more. This version is the “canonical” one, by which I think Doctorow means that it’s the version he has overseen and signed off on personally. That’s not exactly what “canonical” has meant to now. I’m not sure “canonical” is the best word for it. What we need is a word for an authentic link to an originating self. “Holograph manuscript” works for print culture, as (I suppose) does “authorized version.” But what’s the word in cyberculture for “the version that is authoratively connected to the originating self”?

In any event:

It’s a deeply interesting piece and quite provocative. Highly recommended.

What percentage of bloggers do daily blogs from the beginning and never look back? What percentage blog only sporadically? (Although I reckon “sporadic blog” is probably an oxymoron.) Is blogging a discipline, a compulsion, or both? (Neither for me, yet, but it’s early in the game.)

Now, Spiderman 2. Run, don’t walk, to go see this movie. Sam Raimi has made one of the gutsiest popcorn movies I have seen in a long time. The camera and the script linger to great and sometimes overwhelming effect on small details of character interaction that add up to action payoffs that matter. The movie is full of loving and witty homages to everything from Tobe Hooper to The War of the Worlds to Raiders of the Lost Ark to Young Frankenstein. For all the in-jokes, though, the movie never descends into camp. It’s almost never predictable. It’s almost always smart and honest. It’s not flawless, but it is always satisfying and regularly breathtaking. Most of all, Raimi and his team have the courage to tell a story and tell it well–not only in dialogue, but in pictures and sound. (The sound work on this film is exquisite.) From an opening credit sequence that pays loving tribute to Saul Bass to a conclusion that put a lump in my throat, this movie elated me as few popcorn movies do (though all promise to).

Go see it.

As a professor interested in information technologies in teaching and learning, I felt great relief when the problem of access to computers seemed to go away in the late 1990s. For several years, my university had considered the need for a requirement that students bring computers to school. All of a sudden, we had around 98% of our students doing just that, and we seemed to be home free.

But the issue of access comes up again with the broadband question: do all students have equal access not just to computers, but to a high-speed connection? Our residential students do, and they still enjoy a narrow majority, but as faculty develop more rich multimedia content we will have to consider all over again the problem of just how students can get to that content. For off-campus students who do not have DSL or cable modem, on-campus general-use labs are one solution–but many of us in academic computing would like to minimize the footprint of those difficult-to-manage facilities. The other solution is ubiquitous portable computing and wireless access, but the U of Mary Wash won’t be there for another couple of years. And what about dial-up? Should we offer that service at all? Should we be an ISP for anyone off-campus?

Another issue lurking here is that our course management system, Blackboard, is not especially hospitable to multimedia content delivery–at least not at the “basic” level we currently purchase.

We’ll face this problem all over again when what currently passes for broadband is eclipsed by the kind of transfer speeds that make the future Internet truly transparent in terms of response time.

I think of Daffy Duck in Duck Amuck: “Oh brother, I’m a buzz boy!”

Oh brother, I’m a blog guy.

Er, watch this space.

Actually, I think I’ll leave the title, corny as it is, because it gives me a chance to link to this information about the composer of one of the most genuinely psychedelic Christian “folk musicals” I ever heard.