'Texts Without Context'

‘THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.’

— Michiko Kakutani, ‘Texts Without Context’, The New York Times, 17/03/2010

'Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text'

‘Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.’

The Onion, 09/03/2010

'When Lit Blew Into Bits'

‘The Internet (…) invades literature on its home turf. It has created, in the last ten years, all kinds of new and potent rival genres of reading—the blog, the chat, the tweet, the comment thread—genres that seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains process text.’

— Sam Anderson, New York Magazine, 06/12/2009

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Notes for an MA dissertation on contemporary science fiction and the technoculture.

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