This gathering I photographed was intended to be a social event to bring hundreds of social media executives together.  Maybe it’s a stretch, but I see irony here — guests seemed to spend more time with their phones than with each other.  This begs the question: Outside of virtual, online sociality, does Social Media make us more or less social in person?
Dirt-cheap [e-] books benefit the very rich – and the very dead. They might also help new authors to find a foothold and win an audience – although, on that logic, newcomers should think about showcasing their work for nothing. Many do. But the almost-free digital novel hammers another nail into the coffin of a long-term literary career. Who cares? Readers should, if they cherish full-time authors who craft not safe genre pieces but distinctive book after distinctive book that build into a unique body of work.
The internet is broken (or, more to the point, easily breakable…)
For all that the revolution in Egypt tells us about the power of networked media to promote bottom-up change, it even more starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away.
Thank you Doug Rushkoff for scaring me straight here…yikes.
Fiction
Nonfiction
“We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute — the foundation of the human condition — and should be better.”
-Mario Vargas Llosa, address to the Swedish Academy, Dec. 7, 2010
(via)