The elechristina is a relative of the elepanda. It’s also a vessel for a domain map. The story on the right is title-less, and explores bigness and littleness. When I was little, I felt like I was big – all serious and wanting to sit at the adult table. In bigness, it seems that littleness is returning a bit. (See elechristina.)

These are pages from a story I wrote this spring after reading the story about a teacher who disappeared for three weeks and was diagnosed with dissociative fugue after she was discovered. The idea that one can disappear, voluntarily or involuntarily, is fascinating to me. I was also interested in the Theory of Forms, and about what constitutes a ‘______-ness.’ Apple-ness, Christina-ness, our essence. How much of it can disappear before we are not we? I created it during Andrea Dezso’s book design class. It’s still unbound.

A few months ago, Jacob was telling me about this idea of online blight. Abandoned URLs, neglected web sites, content that hangs in this kind of digital purgatory (inbetweenspace, not hell-like) between life and non-life. Would my own blog have been that, if I’d let it be forgotten? I’ve been thinking about the similarities and differences between how our habits play out in cities and online. Urban “blight” (a term that sounds like the 70s to me) also implies poverty and graffiti and brownness (not whiteness). Is there really an online equivalent, or are we just talking about 1996 web design? (And if we are, I’d like to see it – not via the wayback machine, but truly abandoned web sites, with rotating gifs and all.) Or, is there actually a situation of, say, online squatting here? It seems that there’s a phenomenon of registering domains, eventually abandoning them, and returning to find them taken over by spammers.

And then, more – thanks, Paul. A few days ago, Danah Boyd gave a talk about how the migration from MySpace towards Facebook represents a white flight, and signals the ghettoization of a space that’s been abandoned by the rich, white and educated. And sure enough, there’s that language again: Facebook as safer (“predators” live in MySpace, apparently), cleaner (design-wise), classier (used for networking, instead of dating or finding sex).

So are these new media things – in this case, social networking sites – all about democratization, or do they embody the habits we tend to exhibit in the non-cyber world? (See tech determinism vs. the social construction of technology.) I have the same trouble with Danah Boyd as I do with Malcom Gladwell and other people I distrust because I tend to agree with them too quickly. (I used her work at Berkeley when I was thinking about Alice.) But, there it is, and I’m wondering if this idea of a digital divide – which, in the world of ed/tech, refers to the access to technology that’s also characterized by richness, whiteness, geography, etc – will move, at least in the United States, from being a problem of access to one of segregated cyber spaces.

There’s a piece by James Gleick in this Sunday’s NYT about the future of books. He weighs in on the conversation we’ve had several times about the consequences of technology for physical objects. Remember bicycles? Right. His argument is that books are perfectly suited to the task they’re intended for – reading print – in the same way that hammers and bicycles are. So, he predicts that books will not go extinct in the same way that the phonograph did and CDs will, because those devices are good for something (projecting sound) that other things can do better. Books, though, are the best way of reading print.

That isn’t to say that they’re the best way of communicating information. Obviously, he writes, telephone books and encyclopedias are dead; they’ve been reinvented, in a better way, online. And, related to Google’s scan-every-book-in-the-world project, books that were previously relegated to a dead zone between public domain and bookstores (that is, books that are out of print but not yet copyright-free) may now see a new life if they’re made available online.

So I think Gleick’s point is that books aren’t going anywhere. Changing, yes (some of them might be reincarnated online) but that just frees the book from mass-market obligations. The book won’t be interested in mass appeal, cheapness or comprehensiveness – the Internet is good at that. Let’s instead think about what the book is good for.

I’m so optimistic!

So that – the most-photographed-barn-in-America – has become the challenge for us to overcome at this site, and our first response to that involves hiding Easter eggs that include “information” (stories, pictures?) about the landscape across the water. I’m not completely set on this yet; I think it needs to be rethought before we start going into different iterations. It’s pretty important to me to see the value in this project myself (and not just shrug, and say hey, I’m not the typical user, but someone would do it …), and I’m not quite there yet. I’ve started thinking about the water, and our relationship to it – as New Yorkers who live on islands, as park-goers who skip over it to admire those buildings on the Manhattan side, as tourists who don’t see the water when we see it.