Odyssey Online

…reported from the Atlantic, both Firefox and Chrome continue to elbow into IE’s share…

…in what amounts to big news, the FCC today affirmed Network Neutrality, and began to organize itself to enforce said.  There are proponents of this decision, and their are critics (this article from PC World nicely sketches both sides).  Network Neutrality is all about keeping the infrastructure providers, literally the folks who own the fiber optic cable, from using their conduit technology to establish different levels of web service.  Of course, being something, in this life, it’s not that simple–Edward Felten wrote a good primer several years back on what Network Neutrality is, who the players are, and what the consequences might be.

…in my web travels recently I washed over two articles that tugged at my analog heart.  Full disclosure, I love books and typewriters and am inclined to be swayed by arguments which exlaim the virtues of analog anything.  These articles however both do have something to say….“Ain’t Gonna Hang No Picture Frame” by Rob Horning is a well written short essay about the joy and evocative quality of phyisical photographs, what I used to call snap shots.  The title references a ulitilty that puts what looks like a picture frame around digital images, something horning calls “strange and sad.” Of physical photographs he writes, “…there is a sense that something delicate and ineffable has managed to survive, a small miracle amidst the rampant image destruction we experience in our disposable culture.”  Photo albums, shoe boxes full of unlabled and perhaps even slightly faded photos…

…also of note a piece in the Boston Globe titled “Cursive, Foiled Again” written by David Mehegan. It is a chronicle of the demise of cursive as a study for third graders, and for me this is regrettable.  Two reasons for cursive instruction:

• Ability to understand what the English Poet Ted Hughes meant when he said “Handwriting is drawing.”
• Self discipline, the eye mastering the hand.

Full disclosure, my own writing is illegible.  However, a student just handed me a form with positively beautiful cursive and the document is adorned. The document is the person (think about what Hughes said). Photographs and fountain pens on a snowy afternoon…

…by 12:30 p.m. today, roughly half an hour after Mr. Obama’s inaguration, the Obama team had swapped out the Bush administration design for Whitehouse.gov and replaced it with their own. Here is an image of the Bush adminstration template saved yesterday afternoon, and still in place around 11:30 this morning (last time I checked). By 12:30 today one finds…this page.  The web team apparently beat the motorcade down Pennsylvania Avenue…

Christine Rosen has published an essay titled “People of the Screen” in the current issue of the New Atlantis, and it is well worth reading.  The essay makes the case for the book, and in some ways, makes the case in ways explored by writers such as Sven Birkerts and Neil Postman.  However, the essay also includes some very incisve writing about such things as Kindles, and, also Rosen makes some interesting observations about how the changes technologies like Kindles change reading. From this, she makes an intersting case about how digital divides are forming not along access to computers lines, but about how people read lines.  The essay speaks to the consequences of the question who is still reading novels? She’s thinking about the necessity of pleasure reading…lines that get one thinking about the differences between writing and word processing, between cursive and word processing, and the extent to which processing anything removes experience from the activity.  Off to microwave a frozen panini for lunch…