Blogs from the Past

I love the trend of creating blogs from past documents and photos. One of the most well known is the Shorpy blog that posts pictures from the 1800s and early 20th century. And who would want to miss the daily entry from Samuel Pepys's diary of 1666? Or the blog from the WWI soldier? It makes me feel the same way I feel when I see portraits at the Cleveland Museum of Art. These people stare out at us and come back to life. I wonder which (if any) of our current blog entries will be as well remembered?

Everything Old is New Again

Enjoyed working with outstanding educators today in my New Literacies in Practice class at Kent State. These are educators of all levels of students and there was a common refrain that we need to be trying these new/old ideas. I was thinking later of John Dewey's book Art as Experience and how, in it, he talks about how the ancient civilizations had a much closer tie between their art and their daily lives. Instead of art being cordoned off in a museum, art could be on the cup they used for their daily drinking or on some utilitarian tool. If anything, post-modernism has led us (perhaps) to a return to a less hierarchical view of forms of representation. A comic strip may be viewed on the same level as a great novel, and a Brillo soap box can be immortalized. Will schools ever catch up to this/return to this?

Social Media Mania

It seems every week I'm seeing more evidence of social media's increased influence outside of the social media themselves. The Sunday New York Times contains several articles each week on uses of social media; this week these included uses of Twitter in churches and synagogues, promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley, Sarah Palin's uses of Facebook, and ethical dilemmas for teachers surrounding social networking sites. Also yesterday, Stephanie and I went to Joseph-Beth Bookstore at Legacy Village and saw a sign for a Twitter book club. Just follow @PicadorUSA and read Apples and Oranges and be ready to discuss it on Twitter on July 24. The new MTV talk show, It's On with Alexa Chung, features audience members tweeting comments that roll across the bottom of the screen. And in the mail today, I received a solicitation for a one-year subscription to poor old Time magazine: 56 issues for $15. I threw it away, because I'm already following Time on Twitter. What are they worried about? They've got a million followers!