Subtitle: Fire Hydrant Along Wesley Lake
Subtitle: Overlooking Wesley Lake
Note: This series of photographs is inspired and encouraged by Billie Hara (my most excellent collaborator at Composing with Images), whose series of the same name contains photos taken when we were in Asbury Park, NJ, on September, 26, 2009. We were attending (and presenting at) the Springsteen Symposium and took the afternoon off from panels to photograph Asbury Park, a city Springsteen describes in “My City of Ruins.” Please see her excellent photographs.
Today is Bruce Springsteen’s 60th birthday and readers of the blog and my Twitter followers know that I am a huge fan and in a few days will be presenting a paper at the international Springsteen Symposium. My paper is investigating the literary tradition of supermarkets in terms of Bruce’s new song, “Queen of the Supermarket,” which has received some fairly harsh criticism, to say the least.
As I was writing the paper I recalled a poem I wrote back in my poetry days (1996 I think) that references Springsteen, and is also tangential to the food service industry. It was written at a time when I was breaking my poems down to the barest of phrases, focusing primarily on the sounds of the words: alliteration, consonance, repetition, anticipation. Lots of attention paid to individual lines. It’s not my best work, but it’s always fun to look back on what I once wrote.
I thought his birthday was as good a time as any to share it, so here it is (with a few minor revisions).
“Supreme Manufacturing Company, Rahway, N.J.”
Red brick crumbles just below
The storm drain. Water drips
Onto a single milkweed leaning
Against the factory. The air
Is still. The parking lot steaming.
Sun glares off a window
Into the eyes of three Cubans
All in Yankees caps, loading
Artificial juices for Rahway
Prison. A bottle breaks. Bees swarm.
They spray water, laugh,
Smoke cigarettes, shield their eyes.
I, shirtless, sitting
On the hood of a Malibu Classic
Listen to Bruce Springsteen on the radio
Singing about Roy Orbison singing
About the lonely. A monarch butterfly
Lands on the milkweed, and I wonder
If, with all this humidity,
It will ever get out of Rahway alive.
This semester in Writing for Electronic Communities I’m assigning a selection of readings on Web 2.o, which I am calling The Web 2.0 Readings Packet. (Original, I know.) I thought I would share what I have included so far and also see if you have any suggestions that I might have forgotten. I suspect that not all of these will make the final cut, but I’m also interested in building an archive of Web 2.0 readings that could be used at some point in the future for teaching or scholarship.
I have organized the packet over time so that we might be able to see a progression in ideas. I’ve also included seminal articles that pre-date Web 2.0 by a number of years. This is, of course, to ground the discussions of Web 2.0 in an historical context.
One of the benefits of online packets is the ability to include video, audio, still image, and interactive sites as readings. I’ve included a number of interactive sites and three videos, but I haven’t added still images or audio files. If you know of any that might fit I’d be excited to add them to the packet.
Note that I have removed links to articles that are available in PDF format. These articles are available for students behind a password protected site. Also, the citation method is a mishmash of APA and BWQCS (Bill Wolff Quick Citation Style).
Let me know what you think—and comment with any and all suggestions (article, video, still image, interactive, and audio).
Bush, V. (July, 1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly.
Dibbell, J. (Dec. 1993). A rape in cyberspace; Or, how an evil clown, a Haitian trickster spirit, two wizzards, and a cast of dozens turned a database into a society. Village Voice. [PDF]
Berners-Lee, T. et al. (1994). The world wide web. Communications of the ACM, 37, 76-82. [PDF]
Turkle, S. (Jan 1996). Who Am We? Wired.
Moulthrop, S. (2001). You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media. Postmodern Culture, 1(3). [PDF]
Mathas, A. (2004). Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata.
Kelly, K. (Aug 2005). We Are the Web. Wired.
O’Reilly, T. (30 Sept 2005). What is Web 2.0? O’Reilly.
Harris, J. (2006). We Feel Fine. [Interactive.]
Harris, J. (2006). Love Lines. [Interactive.]
DeVoss, D.N., and Porter, J.E. (2006). Why Napster matters to writing: Filesharing as a new ethic of digital delivery. Computers & Composition, 23, 178 – 210. [PDF]
boyd, d. m., and Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11.
Wesch, M. (Mar 2007). The Machine is Us/Using Us (Final Version). YouTube.
Harris, J. (2007). Universe. [Interactive.]
Vaidhyanathan, S. (Feb 2008). Naked in the ‘nonopticon.’ The Chronicle Review. [PDF]
Thompson, C. (Sept 2008). Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. New York Times Magazine.
Kelly, K. (Nov 2008). Becoming Screen Literate. New York Times Magazine.
Zimmer, M. (2008). Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0. First Monday, 13(3).
Scholz, T. (2008). Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0. First Monday, 13(3).
Allen, M. (2008). Web 2.0: An argument against convergence. First Monday, 13(3).
Jarrett, K. (2008). Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0. First Monday, 13(3).
Albrechtslund, A. (2008). Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance. First Monday, 13(3).
Silver, D. (2008). History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward. First Monday, 13(3).
Wesch, M. (Jun 2008). An Anthopological Introduction to YouTube. Presented at the Library of Congress. YouTube. [Note: 55 minutes]
Hoy, A., and Fuchs, T. (2009). twistori. [Interactive.]
Huberman, B., Romero, D., and Wu, Fang. (2009). Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. First Monday, 14(1).
Wolff, W.I., Fitzpatrick, K., and Youssef, R. (2009). Rethinking Usability for Web 2.0 and Beyond. Currents in Electronic Literacy.
Johnson, S. (5 June 2009). How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live. Time.
Wesch, M. (Jul 2009). The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity. YouTube.