http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/ "It is always the unreadable that occurs." -- Oscar Wilde en-us 2008-04-30T22:21:07-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025571.html Check out the movie trailer for a brief but effective summary of the plot of Gibson's tale. One of the most immediately relevant sections of the story: We're an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't... ChrisU 2008-04-30T22:21:07-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025560.html Hi. My name is Chris Ulicne, and I'm a senior at Seton Hill University (SHU). As part of my education at SHU, I have been blogging regularly about my developing appreciation for the history and future of the book, one... ChrisU 2008-04-29T09:44:51-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025548.html He boggled. "You can't just take dope for the rest of your life, son. Eventually, something will happen to this body--I see from your file that you're stroke-prone--and you're going to get refreshed from your backup. The longer you wait,... ChrisU 2008-04-28T10:58:37-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025505.html I was more than a century old, but there was still a kind of magic in having my arm around the warm, fine shoulders of a girl by moonlight, hidden from the hustle of the cleaning teams by the turnstiles,... ChrisU 2008-04-24T12:22:54-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025465.html Agrippa reminds us that preservation is ultimately a social domain. (Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms 218) I was immediately reminded of the nature of oral culture by the notion of "preservation ... (as) a social domain." I never really gave it much consideration,... ChrisU 2008-04-22T12:44:36-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025463.html An electronic document is literally created anew each time it is accessed. (Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms 203) This just reminded me of the way web pages sometimes load in piece by piece if you're using a slow internet connection. I'm assuming that... ChrisU 2008-04-22T12:28:17-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025452.html From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a... ChrisU 2008-04-21T09:03:56-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025366.html My argument, then, is this: computers are unique in the history of writing technologies in that they present a premeditated material environment built and engineered to propagate an illusion of immateriality; the digital nature of computational representation is precisely what... ChrisU 2008-04-17T13:49:56-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025360.html Digitization is the process by which complex units are made simpler by breaking them down into smaller units. (Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms 134) This passage reminded me of a class discussion earlier in the semester when we were talking about how all... ChrisU 2008-04-17T09:53:13-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025313.html It would be a mistake, however, to think size doesn't matter; we will also consider the ways in which user habits and activities change as storage media grow more capacious. The simple practice of creating subdirectories, for example, is relatively... ChrisU 2008-04-14T09:22:12-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025312.html Yet storage has never been more important than it is now in shaping the everyday experience of computing, interactivity, and new media. Even a passing glance at technologies like iPod or TiVo, both based on magnetic hard drives, should bring... ChrisU 2008-04-14T09:04:09-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025304.html Several of the elected and appointed office holders in our roundtables expressed frustration with reporters who seem absolutely convinced — at the very beginning of the reporting process and long before all of the bases had been touched — that... ChrisU 2008-04-13T10:58:36-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025245.html Daniella Choynowski - The conversion I preferred to keep my computer chaste and self-contained, aloof from all potential communicants. (Lesser, "The Conversion," Writing Material 227) I remember the way my parents resisted getting an internet connection at home because of... ChrisU 2008-04-09T12:05:26-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025200.html One ten-year-old boy explained that Dungeons and Dragons was like history, except that Dungeons and Dragons "is more complicated ... There are hundreds and hundreds of books about Dungeons and Dragons." As far as this boy knew, there was only... ChrisU 2008-04-07T17:06:55-05:00 http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/025198.html Images, especially moving images, are more powerful representations of spatial relations than texts, and therefore this migration from text to graphics is natural and inevitable. (Aarseth 102) There's been some controversy lately surrounding the GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) used in... ChrisU 2008-04-07T16:40:43-05:00