Twitter: first impressions

Having a conversation with another person about the appeal of Big Brother, or how - or why - it works, is impossible if that person has never immersed themselves in the experience of the programme. And although Twitter has not attracted the same kind of hostility, it is another 'text' (I'll come back to that word) that has emerged from an evolving mediascape, creates channels/possibilities/modes of self-presentation that did not hitherto exist ('at all?!' my 'nothing-is-entirely-new' inner voice demands), and needs to be participated in to be understood.

I deactivated my Facebook account some time ago, so it was with some trepidation that I decided to enter the world of Twitter, posing as it does, or so it seems to me, some similar drawbacks and dangers.

But first I'll focus on a few differences (and apologies if my Facebook knowledge is now outmoded). Twitter seems in some ways to be less of a 'me' medium (resisting the coinage) than Facebook. The subject of a Facebook status update, almost unavoidably, is the profile owner him or herself, because each update starts with their name. One could say this is true of Twitter too, but I've so far only encountered one person who systematically treats their tweets like status updates, making their name the first word, as it were. The default mode is for the name to act like a character name in a script: it merely identifies the person, and is followed by their utterance, of which it is not a part (to be boring about it, most people start tweets with a capital letter, but continue status updates after their name with a lower case one).

And I'd say there's a much greater tendency for tweets than status updates to be non-autobiographical. They are often not about something that is happening to the person, but something happening 'out there' (where?) that the person is moved to comment on. My good friend Tom Hughes (@yestomhughesyes) once told me about something New Media scholar Henry Jenkins wrote about Twitter, which I think I'm remembering correctly as: 'it is a combination of "I am here" and "Look at this"'.

Time to dip into some of Twitter's textual features.

A minimum of personal information

No favourite movies, quotations or books fields to populate, thank goodness. You even only get 160 characters for your 'Bio' (note abbreviation). The Twitter self is only minimally a static or achieved thing.

Followers/Following

I wonder what the average Followers/Following ratio is. Public figures often have thousands of Followers but themselves only follow a handful of people. I expect that ordinary members of 'the public', like myself (and the majority of Twitter users) will follow more people than they are followed by, as they will follow public figures, organisations, etcetera. I myself feel a lot more comfortable 'following', say, Mark Thomas, than being his 'friend'. Twitter as a whole seems to offer a much better interface with people one could not in any meaningful sense describe as friends than Facebook.

Retweets and hashtags

Another indication of one's Twitter stature, besides the number of Followers one has, is how many times one's tweets have been retweeted (I still await my first!). Looking at it from the other and more important angle, Retweets are another manifestation of Twitter moving away from autobiography and towards something more like a public sphere. They will often register and promote solidarity and public awareness in the face of injustice.

Hashtags are a filtering device that, so far as I can tell so far, act as discussion threads.

I do not yet understand how 'Favourites' work, even having skimmed the information about them on the 'Help' section (perhaps I was reading too fast? - more on that shortly).

140 character limit

The most frustrating thing about this so far is that I've sometimes been moved to put up a quotation - usually from a pop song - but when I've cut and pasted it into the box, I'm overdrawn.

I've already seen that this limit lends itself very well to certain forms. The Facebook status update equivalent is one, of course. I've also been happy to reconnect with Gary Delaney (@GaryDelaney), whose comedy form of one-liners is a perfect fit with the medium. A lot of Tweets allude to some external phenomenon, often a current event which the reader is assumed to possess prior knowledge of (and if they don't, a quick search engine excursion will soon solve the mystery). Many - especially those by news organisations and their representatives - summarise a story or event and provide a link to a fuller account.

(I must quickly express my admiration for the tinyurl system, which is so easy to use and such an innovation! At the same time though, whilst there is an elegance to the brevity of them, their sheer randomness does make them seem a bit ugly/chaotic to me.)

Back to my Google Reader

I suddenly realised this afternoon that whilst I'd been assiduously refreshing my Twitter page throughout the day (encouraged by the parenthetical number which tells me how many new Tweets I have to read), my iGoogle page with its Google Reader gadget had been closed for some time.

My Google Reader has become a bit less compelling lately partly because I get links to some of the same subscriptions more quickly on Twitter.

But there's a larger point about the relationship of Twitter (a 'micro-blogging site') to blogs. I've found myself that some of my blogging energy has been siphoned off to Twitter. Things that I might have previously blogged about, I've simply 'pointed to' in a Tweet.

And then there's the question of how Twitter makes you read. It's all about brevity, and speed. I don't follow many of the links that are offered to me, and even when I do, I'm still in Twitter mode, reading at the driving equivalent of motorway speed, so I tend to tear through the longer piece, often thinking at the end that the Tweet gave me the meat anyway! Which leads me on to my next point...

Lost in the ether

My blog subscriptions sit and patiently wait for me in my Google Reader. But if I'm not on Twitter 24/7, I lose out. In theory I could probably catch up with all the Tweets of those I'm following, but that's because I don't follow that many people. Does Twitter have the capacity to deliver and retain all of the Tweets on the feed of someone following, say, 300 people (not uncommon)?

The 'text' of Twitter cannot be mastered, and is different for every one of its users. How would one go about analysing it? What parameters would (could) one set?

Perhaps it's best to think of Twitter as something one tunes into and out of. The default graphic of the clouds makes sense to me in that way - when signed in, one is plucking voices from the ether for a while.

To end

Twitter has made me feel more political. This might partly be a result of my signing up the day after the UK general election, but of course the site lends itself very strongly to the discussion of contemporary issues of widespread import.

And in this dark new era of public spending cuts, where the humanities will certainly take a further hammering and instrumentalists are likely to tighten their grip on 'knowledge production', the value and importance of the critical study of media (the quintessentail 'Mickey Mouse' degree subject and a perennial favourite whipping boy of the tabloid press, who would rather citizens did not possess the tools to deconstruct what they read) need to be championed.

I have been generally positive about Twitter as an instrument for reinvigorating the public sphere, and my personal experience of it these past few weeks has been exciting and overwhelmingly positive, but I have my doubts and reservations about this new medium's speed, brevity and transience. We are all encouraged every day to marvel at the possibilities of technology: how shiny it is, how efficient, what it can do. But technologies always fit into existing social structures, even whilst they have the potential to transform them.

Visions of a brave new world of digital citizenship carry with them new possibilities for exclusion - of the old, the impoverished, the disabled, the illiterate (Professor Charlotte Brunsdon in particular has helped me appreciate the importance of this point).

Who does Twitter exclude? What kinds of citizen does it create - or, less deterministically, what modes of citizenship does it encourage? These are among the questions we need to be asking.

Notes on Springsteen, part one

Even though I'm not an American, no longer young, hate cars, and can recognize why so many people find Springsteen bombastic or histrionic (but not why they find him macho or jingoistic or dumb - that kind of ignorant judgement has plagued Springsteen for a huge part of his career, and is made by smart people who are actually a lot dumber than he has ever been), 'Thunder Road' somehow manages to speak for me.

Nick Hornby

It was quite a thrill yesterday to momentarily contribute to the output of Radio 4 rather than merely listening enthusiastically. On last week's Saturday Live, Tracy Chevalier (author of Girl with a Pearl Earring) chose Bruce Springsteen's 'The River' (taken from his 1980 album of the same name) as one of her 'Inheritance Tracks'. This week, the following e-mail was read out:

Far from disspelling American stereotypes, Miss Chevalier's tracks and musings served as a reinforcing catalyst. Bruce Springsteen in 'The River' sums up all that is bad about the USA: redneck racism and insular allegiance to a flag, not a free-world ideal, and a nation which shirks its responsibilities. The American Dream is merely an American delusion.

(Now it is just possible that the writer is saying that Springsteen is depicting and diagnosing 'redneck racism', rather than simply propagating it, but this was a ten-second but in a magazine-style programme, so dominant impressions are what we have to consider.) I could not let this go unchallenged. I went to the programme homepage, and fired off a comment. Imagine my delight when about twenty minutes later, my e-mail was read out, pretty much verbatim:

I have no idea why on Earth you chose to read out such an ill-informed dismissal of Bruce Springsteen. He might perhaps be accused of a brand of macho sentimentalism or unuseful nostalgia but the charge of racism leaves me baffled and rather angry.

But for someone with as much of an investment in Bruce Springsteen and his music as I have, these few words only mark the start of a conversation I would invite.

The original comment that the editors chose to broadcast is close to being a rant - especially as it claims to find all of the negative attributes it outlines contained in 'The River'. In that song, a man tells the story of his life: he gets his girlfriend pregnant, marries her, works construction, struggles later to find work, measures the distance that has grown between him and his wife, and remembers going down to the river with her. It's a highly condensed life-story, and the details that Springsteen uses to bring his sketch to life are objects ('a union card and a wedding coat') and emotions ('I just act like I don't remember/Mary acts like she don't care'). Macroeconomics play their part in the narrator's woes, but he simply states 'Lately there ain't been much work/On account of the economy', and leaves it at that (Simon Frith has noted that Springsteen's focus in his songs on 'individuals' fate[s]' make his brand of populism ambiguous). Whence 'redneck racism' or 'insular allegiance to the flag'?

In my reply I tried to acknowledge arguments that have been levelled against Springsteen and which I can see the reasoning behind, even if they are still arguments that I would still ultimately aim to counter. Saturday Live's stand-in presenter (the Reverend Richard Coles) got closer to aesthetic and cultural issues that I think are genuinely at stake when, after the original comment, he asked his guest, 'When you hear the Boss, Jodi [Picoult], do tears spring to your eyes and do you want to hoist the stars and stripes in front of your clapboard house with your apple trees nodding around?'

Immediately after firing off the e-mail I began to think I had conceded too much (see the Nick Hornby quote at the start). But that need not trouble us if, as I suggested above, we treat the above comments as simply the opening rhetorical moves in a much more extended discussion.

Unfortunately it has taken me longer than I though to write even this much. It's almost midnight, the last song on Nebraska has just started ('Reason to Believe'), and I need to go to sleep, so I shall have to end with a promise to continue this at a later date, in the I-hope-not-too-distant future.

I know you're lonely
For words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free
All the promises'll be broken
There were ghosts in the eyes
Of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets
They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on
But when you get to the porch they're gone
On the wind, so Mary climb in
It's a town full of losers
And I'm pulling out of here to win

'Thunder Road'

Stories and the internet

New technologies have an effect upon the way we 'consume' fiction (amongst other things), but they also have an effect on the kinds of fictional scenarios that are plausible if stories are set in the present. 'Don't let a mobile phone ruin your movie' is the tagline of and premise behind a still-current series of Orange cinema adverts (which, although they do not 'ruin' my trips to the cinema, certainly constitute a source of irritation).

Mobile phone technology has affected dramaturgy. It is now less likely that someone who finds themself sharing their house with a killer will not be able to get to the phone. Surely they can just reach into their pocket? Thankfully, loss of battery power and failing reception can still come to the rescue, so to speak - but there is a difference, and possibly a thematically significant one, between being cut off from contact with the outside world by a malevolent force on the one hand and failings of technology on the other.

I used my mobile phone at work today to text my good friend James MacDowell to pose an open, film-related question, as I often do. 'Can you think of instances where characters in fictions use internet search engines'. The first one that sprang to my mind was actually from a novel: in George Pelecanos's The Turnaround, a character goes on the internet to research an old local news event. James replied that the old trope in horror movies of characters going to an old dusty library to find out a key piece of plot information appears to be being replaced by them looking on the internet.

As is so often the case with film studies questions, it pays to start with Hitchcock. James's mention of the library made me think of the scene in Shadow of a Doubt where Young Charlie (Teresa Wright) runs across town to the local library - catching the stern, spinsterish librarian just in time, after being reprimanded by the traffic cop for stepping out in front of a car - to read the news of the 'Merry Widow Murderer', putting together a few other things she knows and deducing that it is her beloved Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten). Following this revelation, as a shocked Charlie walks numbly across the library floor, Hitchcock's camera executes a rhetorical flourish, moving up and away from Charlie and taking up 'the high angle of knowledge' (is this William Rothman's term?).

If we were in the twenty-first century and not the 1940s, Charlie would not have to interact with the members of her local community or worry about closing times (much as the contemporary television viewer does not need to worry about getting home in time for their favourite series, and therefore does not necessarily watch it at the same time as everyone else, thus feeling part of a communal experience). She wouldn't have to leave her laptop in her bedroom, thus precluding the social encounters and spatial possibilities that are so readily available to Hitchcock.

As James also pointed out to me, the bookshop scene in Vertigo would probably have to go too, at which point I ceased to be able to think analytically, and could only reply with 'Nooo!' (a response that James admitted was also the way he had thought of ending his previous message). Perhaps Pop Leibel and google are interchangeable to Vladimir Propp, but they are not to me.

Music and lyrics

As part of my ongoing curiosity about web-based information sharing, I am considering signing up to Twitter. So today I thought I'd have a little look at some Twitter feeds. I'd heard Evan Davis mention his on the Today programme. I wasn't compelled to sign up by the tweets themselves (although looking again now, just after the final Leaders' Debate, I can see Twitter working the way it should), but I did like his capsule 'bio' ('Yes, this is the bloke on the Radio 4 Today programme, Dragons' Den and the Bottom Line. These are my views, not those of the BBC.'). I was disappointed that Jay-Z's was run by someone else.

The best one was the tireless Catherine Grant's Film Studies For Free feed. It performed what I take to be one of Twitter's main functions; that is, to provide me with a summary of and link to other things of interest - perfect for a magpie like me. So now I've bookmarked a District 9 article which will help me with the editing of a piece on that movie that I'm working on. And I also couldn't resist 'Jewish band serves up kosher Lady Gaga'! This linked to this page, where you can both hear a Jewish American a capella group recreate chart hits but substitute lyrics that speak to Jewish culture. For example, the chorus to 'Poker Face' becomes 'Can’t eat my/Can’t eat my/No you can’t eat from my/Kosher plate/Hamotzi lechem min ha-aretz' (that last part is a Hebrew blessing over bread, and scans perfectly).

I enjoy the eloquent juxtapositions that arise when something new is added to a song. I love 'One song to the tune of another' on Radio 4, and particularly enjoyed Phil Jupitus singing to lyrics of Aqua's 'Barbie Girl' to the tune of Frank Sinatra's 'Theme from New York, New York'. As Chris Evans recently demonstrated on Radio 2, 'Love Me Tender' to the theme tune of The Archers also works surprisingly well, and might cause one to ponder the clash of cultures that would be represented by The King visiting Ambridge.

Culture clash is also what makes 'Amish Paradise' such a highlight in the output of a man who has devoted his life to rewriting lyrics to humorous effect, Weird Al Yankovic. We have the urban, gangster's milieu of Coolio in our heads, but we hear about the lives of members of a religious community who eschew modern technology.

A similar thing is happening in the more recent Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and Zach Galifianakis 'version' of Kanye West's 'Can't Tell Me Nothing', only in this case, there's no lyrical substitution, but instead of an impeccably groomed and supremely confident black man in the music video, we have two rather shambolic, hairy, out-of-shape white men out in the country, miming along to the lyrics (sometimes letting fly some spit whilst doing so). We ought to remember that the fact that the original video is set in the desert, thus avoiding much of the conspicuous consumption of many a rap/hip-hop video, and that Kanye West's appearance is pretty 'conservative' overall, mean that the Oldham/Galifianakis video is not a straightforward lambasting of the excessive trappings of hip-hop culture. It's a bit gentler and stranger than that. And, of course, the joke appears to be partly on Oldham and Galifianakis, who appear to be bringing attention to rather than downplaying their physical demerits. (This said, one bit of the video that never fails to crease me up is the moment where we see a tractor in profile, and its front and rear lifting mechanisms are demonstrated. Surely we're meant to think of the ludicrous suspension on the bonnets of cars filled with girls?)

All this has provided me with the context (or, if you prefer, an excuse) to share something that I've been sitting on for a while. I was originally going to let it stand alone, in a blog entitled, 'Bone Marrow and Giblet: A Travesty', but I will now put it here, with thanks to Zborowski, Falconer, and Lawton - and apologies to Knopfler:

A love struck Romeo

Brings the streets a marinade
Laying everybody low
With the meat sauce that he's made
Finds a street light
Steps out of the shade
Says something like
'You and meat babe, how about it?'

Juliet says, 'Hey it's Romeo
You should've brought me a lamb kebab'
He's underneath the window, she's singing
'Voila, some pudding black!
You shouldn't come around here, marinading meatballs like that,
Anyway, what you gonna do about it?'

Juliet, the pies were loaded from the start
And I bit into a tasty piece of heart

And I forget, I forget, the movie song
When you gonna realise I make the best beef bourguignon, Juliet?

Came up on different meats
Boths were meats of shame
Both dirty - but lean
Yes and the dreams were just the same
And I dreamed your dream for you, and now your dream is veal
How could you look at meat as if it was just another one of your meals?

Well you can fall for brains and liver
You can fall for brains alone
You can fall for streaky bacon
And the promise of T-bone
You promised me everything
You promised me chicken wing, yeah
Now you just, oh Romeo yeah, you know I used to have a spleen with him

Juliet, when we made duck, you used to fry
Said I'd love you like steak and kidney pud
I'd love you 'til I die
There's a steak for us
You know - the venison
When you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong, Gi-i-i-blet?

I can't do the pork, like the pork on the TV
And I can't make biltong, like the way it's meant to be
I can't stew everything, but I'll stew anything for you
I can'd do anything 'cept be in love with you
And all I do is miss you, and the way we used to eat
All I do is cut the meat, with blunt cutlery
All I eat is brisket, and the rib that is prime
Julie I miss your calf's liver all the time...

Search engine serendipity

I idly typed 'jobs for bibliophiles' into google yesterday, and it led me to an entry on an interesting website called wisebread.com which I've now started following. Tagline: 'Living large on a small budget'.

I reluctantly consented to and sat through a sales pitch today from a guy trying to sell keywords so that every time someone types certain words into the search engine on their website, our 'product' comes out on top. So much for democracy, or indeed meritocracy.

But then, there are some types of information that can't be controlled, even by political parties with relatively deep pockets. Watching 'Bigotgate' unfold today, beginning with a Sky News microphone that Mr Brown forgot about, and then attracting tweets, blogs, tv and radio coverage, fed by playback-on-demand, I thought again about how the way we share information is changing, and what an exciting thing it is to think about. What is the best way to write about these phenomena? Perhaps the upcoming event 'Where Does History Happen?' will furnish me with some more tools.

Bigotgate may also, entirely fortuitously, provide a boost for an artist whose 'emotionally charged work ranges from the comic to the forlorn', whose only connection to Mr Brown's gaffe is to share a name with the voter he complained about. Google the name 'Gillian Duffy' and you will probably see near the top of your search results a link to gillianduffy.com, the artist's website.

Such is the communications world we live in: a Rochdale pensioner is generating the sort of publicity money can't buy, or in Mr Brown's case, bury.

'Small, Striking Moments'

This is the comment I wanted to leave on Girish's latest blog entry, which has the same title as this one, but there wasn't enough space in the comment box!

I've been working on Hitchcock's Rope for some time now. It's a film full of striking moments (like the moment, already discussed by V F Perkins, where a swing door's movement is synchronised with a character's actions, perhaps suggesting complicity between the director and the murderous protagonist).

There are two great moments that sprang to mind after reading this blog. Perhaps I thought of them because they're arresting moments, moments of thought, for the characters as well as for the viewer.

The first comes after Brandon (John Dall) has decided he'll serve party food not from the dining table, but from the chest where he and his accomplice have stowed the body of David Kentley, a supposed 'inferior' whom they had a right (a duty?) to dispense of - according, at least to their Nietzsche-inspired worldview. The moment I am thinking of is the one where Brandon lays the tablecloth over the chest. He is already pleased with his latest 'artistic touch' of serving food from David's grave (as Brandon's ex-house master and teacher, Rupert/James Stewart, will later put it). As he lays the cloth, though, he slows down - both in thought and speech - and these elements of performance signal to us that an additional layer of significance to his act has just this moment occurred to him, during the execution of the act itself: his laying of a table is also a draping of a coffin.

The second is the moment where Rupert's suspicions are finally confirmed by an object. Mrs Wilson (Edith Evanson), the housekeeper, passes him the wrong hat by mistake - David's hat, as confirmed by the initials embossed inside. This is a key plot moment, but after watching a few times, I realised that of course there's a joke, of sorts, in there too: the hat is too small because, as would befit an 'inferior', David's head is smaller than Rupert's!

Two of the most rewarding parts of studying and teaching film for me are working with film sequences - on the page and in the seminar room. I love discovering new things or refining my understanding/articulation by turning moments over, looking at them in new contexts, or just searching for the right phrase to describe something that is happening in a sequence.

And taking all these great moments and observations about them and turning them into a more sustained overall account is often where the hardest work lies. I would add that, as well as the thinking about individual films in a sustained way often beginning with moments, a key rhetorical device in much writing about film is to do the same. One of the most promising beginnings to a piece of film criticism is 'There is a moment in X where...'!

'I intend to do everything ... I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too ... I shall involve myself wholly ... everything matters'

Susan Sontag wrote the above in her journal, aged 16. What a wonderful sentiment! Here are some interesting things that I've read or heard lately.

On Radio 4's 'Today' Programme this morning (complete with Ennio Morricone music, of course):

1 'Inspired by Hollywood cowboy films, researchers have delved into the science of gun fights.'

A two-person button-pressing experiment showed that 'those who reacted to their opponent were on average 21 milliseconds faster than those who initiated the movement.' (Good to know, but Pete Falconer's research about honour, back-shooting and the Western town at night is more interesting if we actually want to learn something about shootouts in Hollywood Westerns.)

2 US populism

In The Economist this week there's some interesting stuff about 'a resurgence of political populism on both the left and the right', which reminded me of a conversation Pete, James and I were having about US vs European politics, and the prospect of drinking with Howard Hawks and/or Frank Capra. A couple of bumper stickers doing the rounds in America at the moment: 'Save trees: stop printing money'; 'Honk if I'm paying your mortgage'.

Also on this subject: brucespringsteen.net alerted me to a recent expression of US populism. Bruce has contributed to a History Channel documentary 'The People Speak', based on a book, A People's History of the United States.

3 The Zero Rupee Note

There's also a sidebar about a fascinating phenomenon in India. A 'piece of paper the colour of a 50-rupee note with a picture of Gandhi on it and a value of nothing' is "circulating" in India. Why?

Its aim is to shame corrupt officials into not demanding bribes. [...]

One official in Tamil Nadu was so stunned to receive the note that he handed back all the bribes he had solicited for providing electricity to a village. Another stood up, offered tea to the old lady from whom he was trying to extort money and approved a loan so her granddaughter could go to college.

[Their creator] thinks the notes work because corrupt officials so rarely encounter resistance that they get scared when they do. And ordinary people are more willing to protest, since the notes have an organisation behind them and they do not feel on their own.

The THE also had a lot of stuff to make me exalt in the fecundity of the world and the human examination of it (helping to offset the predictable and understandable dose of doom and gloom about 'the sector'). Sometimes even dropped in expressions like 'situated messiness' or a single idea/observation ('people in the same class position tend to support different parties depending on where they live') send me off on pleasurable methodological ruminations. And even the barest book synopses make me hungry to read (Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture, by Paul Gilroy. 'Gilroy seeks to awaken a new understanding of W E B Du Bois' intellectual and political legacy by considering the ways that consumerism has diverted African Americans' political and social aspirations').

There are a couple of interestingish pieces (by Alan Ryan and David Greenaway) putting HE's current situation in some kind of historical context (skimming the online versions, I see they've attracted some comment).

4 In praise of index cards

The most pleasurable and beautifully-written piece of all this week is written by Bob Blaisdell, an American professor of English, on how he came to love index cards. I've used them for revision and planning purposes in the past. One of my academic inspirations also uses them. Blaisdell mainly talks about using them for the purposes of learning Russian.

As I was putting them into a [...] rubber-banded packet, I realised that there was another connection to baseball cards: the old cards' edges are less sharp, their surfaces even feel warmer. Through my fingertips, before I look down, I know the word or sentence will be a familiar one.

This reminds me of a poetry and philosophy conference I went to where one of the keynotes, Jorie Graham, was talking about the difference, neurologically, between typing and writing with a pen - the importance of tactility to memory and mental processing. (I also can't resist reproducing this great aside: 'I guess I don't understand the pleasure of playing poker on the computer either. I love the feel of cards - not the idea of them.')

5 New blogs

James brought my attention to 'The Feminist Spectator', because her latest blog entry is on Up in the Air. I enjoyed the piece, left a comment, and added the blog to my 'following' list. I'm still thinking about the idea of blogs and the public sphere. On that subject, yet another article in the THE was about Han Han, a Chinese man whose blog has an audience of 242 million! I just tried to read it, but it's not available in translation. It'd take a lot of index cards before I could read it in the original!