In case you blinked and missed this Halloween bombshell, let me bring you up to date. Act One: The Mailing (2 AM, October 31st, 2011) What is this, you ask? Is that really a picture of President Obama with a bullet hole in his head? It turns out that this collage of images accompanied an email invitation to the Loudoun County GOP’s constituents in Northern Virginia early Halloween morning inviting them to a bash later that afternoon. The...

What better way to sum up the last couple of weeks’ meditations on the transformative powers of Web 2.0 than WikiLeaks? When Paul and I make our presentations on the future of higher education, we begin by stipulating that the dominance of digital media is not inevitable at some future time, but rather is already a fait accompli. Here’s one way to illustrate this fact: a few months back, the New York Times ran an article with a...

“We are living through the most momentous change in human communication in human history.” Over the past couple of weeks, I have considered three of the four main responses Paul and I receive when we insist upon seeing the advent of Web 2.0 as a paradigm shift in human communication. So far, I’ve ruminated on: 1. We are not; 2. I can ignore it, so it can’t be that big a deal; and 3. It’s not a change at all, but a...

In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong makes the startling–and since much debated–claim that writing “heightens consciousness,” because it alienates the writer from the present moment. He goes on to explain: Alienation from a natural milieu can be and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and understand fully, we need not only proximity, but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as...

Is it crazy to pull the piece because it won't look the way you want it to? What would it take during the production process to make you withdraw an article that had already been accepted for publication? At what point would the intrusions of the copyediting just be too much?

Paul and I are frequently asked what we mean when we say we’re working with the yet-to-be-invented genre of “the idea-driven visual essay.” To answer this, first we must consider the phenomenal growth of YouTube: Created by three guys in 2005 as a means for sharing user-generated videos, YouTube tapped directly into the desire to “broadcast yourself,” the company’s trademarked slogan. The first video posted to...

“As a fundraising piece, it is disappointing because it focuses on tools of delivery to the complete exclusion of disciplinary, departmentally-based content.” Nearly three years ago, I was invited to make a presentation to the Board of Governors about my proposal for the establishment of a Center for the New Humanities at Rutgers. The university was in the “quiet phase” of what is now its public Billion Dollar Capital...

When I was required to turn my attention to the sky as a sophomore in college, I was baffled by Ptolemy’s description of the “apparent motion” of the stars. Even though I grew up in central Florida prior to the night polluting boom set off by the Disney invasion, I didn’t spend much time with my eyes turned heavenward. The moon came and went and that was about the extent of my interest in the universe. I had my own angst...

This enigmatic statement by Thomas Kuhn about what the world looks like after a paradigm shift may be found in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.” This sentence appeared in the original version of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions published in 1962 and remained unchanged in the 1970 version....

Over the past two years, there have tended to be two responses to the work that Paul and I have been doing with multimedia composing and publishing. The first response is defined by tremendous enthusiasm, expressed in the form of ticker-tape parades on Madison Avenue, babies tossed in the air, meetings with the President, free trips to Disney. Reception following the talk The second response, much rarer to be sure, is skepticism and puzzlement....