Posted by Jay Livingston
“No one, my hit counter tells me, reads blogs on the weekend.” That’s from an essay, “How is the Internet Changing Literary Style?” at a blog called Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. I think the author is Caleb Crain, but you have to do some detective work to figure that out. Anyway, I’m posting this on a Saturday.
Crain’s essay is a medium-is-the-message piece with a lot of Goffman. The Internet, Crain argues, shifts or blurs the boundary between “front” and “backstage.” It also limits “audience segregation,” and not just on MySpacebook.
It’s impossible to keep the members of the right-wing discussion group Free Republic dot-com from reading the posts at My Barack Obama dot-com, and vice versa. The internet's killer app, as the onetime internet mogul Michael Wolff once said, is eavesdropping.
Hat tip to Tyler Cowen for the link.
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