597 And The Weather Today




In Edmonton, the cold and the snow sat this winter out. But the mild winter didn't really make for a shorter winter, time being time. In the middle of it, it still seemed long, and long turned to longing for spring, and into then into joy when the ice today said enough.

A day like this makes you think of Bill Bourne's Bluebird.
It's a long road, patience is a virtue, darlin'
By and by we will hear
The bluebird singin' on the old coal trail
And we'll know that the springtime's here.
The springtime and its themes of melting and rebirth are also trickling out of my 597 readings, where the metaphor is used to characterize the power of digital communication. Andy Campbell, in Undreamt Fiction, likens the land we have escaped from, or been shown the way out of, to a non-moving (I read icy) world.
Campbell writes: "In the digital world, text does not have to stand still, can be superimposed against colourful backgrounds, animations and imagery with no print design restrictions or costs, and it can also change and mutate depending on a user/reader's interactions. It is as if the physical entity that is text itself has changed from static to liquid, has learnt to move around and react in response to other media."
There is a debate about whether this weather and this melting is good in itself, good because of what it will bring, or just a sloppy mess. The sides are presented somewhat unobjectively in an article from Ianto Ware, titled Andrew Keen vs. the Emos: Youth, Publishing and Transliteracy.

Ware lines up against Keen and the other voices who would have us believe that the ice, for whatever its imperfections, could, at least, be built on. The ice belongs to the cultural gatekeepers, those authorities who have either the courage or the training or the audacity to separate the good from the bad, the true from the false, the ugly from the beautiful in whatever craft of profession or trade they sit atop of.

Liquidity, for Ware, is the virtue. Against Keen's, Ware approves the definition of publishing that is more fluid. And then the judgment that transliteracy "perfectly describes the capacity to move fluidly across discursive environments."

While I let those thoughts soak in, and try, for assignment 3, to figure out how transliteracy theory throws light on the Duckett video, I wonder if part of being transliterate, or a boon of being transliterate, is in trying to read nature.




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