Push Pop Press and Facebook

In the above TEDTalk, Mike Matas gives a demonstration of the e-book Our Choice, written by Al Gore as a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth and brought to iPads and iPhones everywhere by Matas’s company, Push Pop Press.  From what Matas shows in the demonstration, the book (or app – he uses the terms interchangeably in his presentation), the interactive version of Gore’s book looks strikingly similar (though perhaps a bit more image-reliant) to the Penguin Amplified Editions I’ve mentioned in a couple of other posts.  Using touch-screen technology, readers are encouraged to manipulate elements of the text, resizing images and scrolling through pages, listening to Al Gore’s voice read and explain the text, and even blowing on the device in order to set small digital windmills going, producing virtual energy for digital houses.  In a strictly non-academic sort of way, I’d just like to say that this is very neat.

Obsolescence and Nostalgia

In The Anxiety of Obsolescence (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), Kathleen Fitzpatrick makes several arguments concerning the latest call of the “death of the novel” due to new media.  After pointing out that the introduction of a new technology always heralds the death of some form or another of literary expression, The Anxiety of Obsolescence argues from the very beginning that “the ways we speak and write about new media – and particularly the means by which we express our concerns about the world that new media forms are eroding or leaving behind – may reveal more about our own entrenched cultural ideologies than they do about the media themselves” (9).

As I look around at my own culture, it seems to me that we spend a lot of time and energy looking back at the greatness of what was, rather than looking forward to the possibilities of the new.  This does not just apply to digital media and technology; I’ve noticed the phenomenon in attitudes towards family, education, gender roles, child-raising, and government, just to name a few.  In short – it’s pervasive and not limited to any one field.