What am I doing “now”?
Oct 17 at 11ish a.m.:
I’m on sabbatical in the Fall of 2023, working on my book manuscript, Explosivity, which is now under review.
I’m writing from the U.S.-occupied traditional lands of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people who have inhabited these coastal areas for the last six-thousand years. Today, I write from a co-working space near home.
I recently finished reading, Traffic by journalist and editor Ben Smith. I thought it was a rather notable report on the early social web and may be valuable to people studying digital culture. As a reported book, I wished it had more oral history and more clarity about the process of interviewing sources for recollection that by now are almost 20 years old. Sometimes I had to find deep in the end-notes if something came from a secondary source or a new interview. But all in all, I thought it was a revealing glimpse at the lived relations that gave rise to ideas about interfaces, sharing, and measurement of online activity.
Before that, I read the astounding novel by Lisa Chen called Activities of Daily Living. In relation to some of the geographically site-specific work I do, I recommend her Guernica piece about a migrant shipwreck, Project for a Trip to the Golden Venture Crash Site. This article is an experiential walk and it became fictionalized in the novel above itself.