Hypertext detractors

The second half of this century has seen the rise of three modes of electronic performance that happen to be short: the sitcom, the music video, and the sound bite.

New forms always attract critics, and these three have never lacked for detractors. Many have argued that these forms are debased by their brevity, and that electronic media are responsible for shortening our attention spans. In some quarters. These popular genres are dismissed as superficial spectacles that titillate and numb the debased tastes of the masses.

In the same vein, New Media -- notably hypermedia -- are widely assumed to appeal to the same demands for spectacle and brevity. Multimedia edutainment, for example, is praised by its supporters for its appeal to the "MTV generation" while detractors decry youth's loss of immersion in the pages of a good book.

But cultural observers always decry the debased tastes of youth. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought for jazz and Joyce and D.H. Lawrence against the sneers of their elders. Young Romans flocked to hear Catullus and Ovid even as senators declared their poetry a threat to the commonwealth.

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Web today under the spell of what?

Stephanie Strickland :

Of the nine system-processes that characterize both life and knowledge in the 21st century - I refer to feedback, hierarchy, bounds, network interaction, scale, cycles, symmetries, evolution, and equilibrium - it is this last that does not characterize the Internet and does not characterize Web-specific literary works.

If the last half of the 20th century fell under the spell of linguistics and genetics, I suggest that the spatial understanding of both, "genome as book," must give way to an understanding that is inherently dynamic, inextricably statistical, and informationally multimedial in its forms of analysis; an understanding that is less about structure and more about resonance, about the ongoing fitting of moving mind to moving world through moving medium.

My thesis is that Web-specific art and literature is where this understanding is being developed. I hope to demonstrate this with regard to works by several renowned Web artists, but to contextualize my discussion I need to explain scale and level. A sense of scale is key to understanding dynamics, the kind of scaling represented by conventional powers of ten, or some other repeated.

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Politics of difference

According to Gregory Ulmer, distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing....

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Boys and girls

During the key ages when kids are in school, boys and girls actually behave very differently," said Paul Kropp. "Our brains are different."

Kropp spent a substantial portion of his speech comparing the gender differences that influence reading material preferences. The entire room read Robert Munsch's Mortimer out loud, a book that would typically appeal to boys. It encouraged aggressive and defiant behaviour in comparison to Franklin's Fib by Paulette Bourgeois and Brenda Clark, which promoted emotional reflection

"I know for myself personally I need to spend more time looking at the non-fiction sections of my library and those types of books that will appeal to boy readers particularly, where there's always a weakness," said Gaetan Hammond, a teacher-librarian with Regina Public Schools.
As an educator and an author, Kropp has tried to fulfill the interests of young people by writing more than 50 novels. Some of them were specifically made for what he calls "reluctant readers." He has also written several award-winning young adult novels and beginner-level books with illustrations.

The idea behind the presentation was to recognize the differences in literature and how to balance them to promote literacy in the the classroom. Following Kropp's speech, the teacher-librarians were sent off to take some classes of their own.

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