The following entry is the “SFW” (i.e., PG-13) version of: This Blog Entry Has Been Rated NSFW What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by...

What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by those who were “under aged.” At the back of the local used paperback bookstore, a curtain...

At the end of my last post, I asked the question, “Is nothing sacred?” Here are some responses to that question, via the world of Web 2.0: After a day of denial, Gawker acknowledges that it has been hacked and that the private data of its 1.3M users have been posted to an open site for downloading by others.Meaning?If you have a Gawker account, your password is available to anyone who visits the bit-torrent site. (If you’re...

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...

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...