Archive Fever: Writing and thinking with oceans, memory, and attention.

New Steve Jobs: “This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done” – Steve Jobs, referring to the soon-to-be-launched Apple Tablet. Old Steve Jobs: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.” - Steve Jobs, referring to Amazon's Kindle and other similar devices.

One of my favorite ex-students pinged me with this link from the NYT: The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site . This seems pretty significant, and obvious. I like free content (but I also like quality) so I am mixed in my emotive response here. Thinking through it, I hope this is a step toward rearticulating what the economics of our digital d/Discourse will look like. I certainly hope it's not simply a remediation of our old economic maps. My bet is that what happens with this will determine a lot of what happens in other economic spaces of the literary, from libraries and e-book/book retailers to mass media transitioning to a majority Internet presence.

It's the first day of spring semester classes here at UNC-Chapel Hill and I can't help but think of all the liberating and bogus narratives that we once again begin to propgagate. Here's a link that depicts, pretty damn well, the end result of humanities navel-gazing over the past few decades. If you bristle at this, check your twinge-o-meter cause if it was no big deal and this were nonsense it wouldn't bother you. I especially like this excerpt below. As things stand, I can only identify a few circumstances under which one might reasonably consider going to graduate school in the humanities: * You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else. * You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere. * You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household. * You are earning a credential for a p...