Making Geek Chic: Can Tech Crafting Outfit More Girls for Technology? is an article in the new issue of Bitch magazine.  I was inspired to write about tech crafting after participating a core conversation about the subject at SXSW Interactive this year.  It’s available online, so please feel free to read and comment!

LEDs are the New Sequins: Fashion, Craft, and Wearable Technology, a new post for Zeitgeist.  This is basically where I geek out about the rad potential of wearable technology – now and for the future.

Tron Dog by Julia Segal - juliasegal.tumblr.com

The link.

Being a few days away from 2010 feels all sorts of mixed up.  Our dreams of the future from twenty years ago just seem really silly now, even as I think many of us are actually pretty disappointed (if not because we don’t have robot housecleaners than because we still – unbelievably – haven’t prioritized finding and implementing solutions to things like poverty and climate change).  And yet, this ever-increasing digital world we are living in feels pretty dang amazing. So, at the end of this year, I’m thinking a lot about past-future hopes, present disappointments, and the magic of my lived reality.

Compounding all of this is a general feeling of elation that we’re leaving behind the aughts, or the zips, or the zeroes, or whatever we want to call this last decade.  Yes, I know that the new decade won’t officially start until 2011.  But I don’t really want to slog through another year of the 2000s.  Most people I know don’t really want to, either.   (Some of my friends have, in fact, declared the 2000s The Worst Decade Ever, although I don’t feel entitled to make that judgement.)  The catalog of horrors feels almost endless: Bush, 9-11, evangelicalism, torture, class divisions, the worsening state of public education, wars on two fronts, the swelling of the prison population, natural disasters exacerbated by climate issues… Blarg, blarg, blarg, and BLARG.  When I stood on the National Mall and watched Barack Obama deliver his inaugural speech at the beginning of this year, I experienced as much relief as I did hope.  Finally, it seemed, someone had the courage to tell us that there are no good and fast answers to our problems, but that it is our job to undertake the difficult task of making meaningful change, anyway.  That commitment is what really gives me hope, after all.

So as much as I don’t have dreams anymore about my life on Saturn (yes, it has rings, so it MUST be the best planet), I also don’t have any illusions that life in this new decade will be that much easier or better.  As Buckaroo Banzai, that pivotal figure from the world of early 1980s cult sci-fi said, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

So here we are.  And it feels good to hit the reset button (even symbolically) and start a new decade (even if it’s not really) and get started with the hard work of reinventing our present and re-imagining our future.  I’m elated about this!  And I hope you are, too.  So let’s make and achieve some big goals, and let’s do some real good in the universe.

Happy New Year, readers and friends!

I’ve taken my Kindle to book clubs, answered questions about it on the subway, and found myself in countless conversations about the aesthetic and economic implications of the growing e-reader market. I’ve stopped being surprised at how passionate people are about their reading preferences, their fears about the digital future, and their suspicions about the pleasures of reading electronic ink. I think these are exciting conversations to have, and in the course of talking so much about e-books, I  realized that even though I’ve always been a book lover, I stopped being a book buyer a long time ago.  What’s more, I’ve realized that I have a much more enjoyable relationship with e-books now than I’ve had with real books for years.

When I transitioned out of my PhD program in English literature about ten years ago, I had approximately a gadzillion books. I loved them all, and dutifully schlepped them from apartment to apartment, California to Colorado, on my quest to find a job I loved in a place I liked. I also just kept buying, reading, and collecting. My shelves were so stuffed that one of the main reasons I loved a weird little duplex apartment I rented was a set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves set into the walls of its weird little office. I bought, I read, and I collected.

A few years into being a non-academic, I started to wonder about what was at the heart of my incessant booklust. I thought a lot about those growing (and dusty) stacks of books. When I got really honest with myself, I realized that the heart of my book buying ways was vanity. Really. It was. I wanted to be acknowledged as a reader, and thinker, and owner of fine and funky books. Regardless of how anyone might feel about my taste, I wanted to be recognized as a voracious reader. I also wanted the validation of being surrounded by the objects that I had studied so intensively for so long. Books were comfortable. And they made me feel better about myself. (Mind you, I am not suggesting that either vanity or validation is at the heart of your booklust, should you possess it. It wasn’t even the reason I started loving books, but it became the reason I relentlessly hung on to them.)

So I decided to let them go. I gave almost all of them away. I allowed myself to keep one small bookcase of my very favorites, and boxed up some classics, anthologies and academic texts for deep storage. After that, nearly everything I read was borrowed – either from the library or friends. I was lucky enough to be living in Denver at the time, because the Denver Public Library is one of the finest libraries in the country, and I had virtually no problem reading anything I wanted whenever I wanted (or after a very short wait).

Becoming a book borrower instead of a book buyer was super significant for me. It re-aligned my relationship to words and stories, and moved me beyond my attachment to books as both physical objects and symbols of my intellect or capabilities. It helped inform my anti-clutter sensibilities, and bolstered my desire to own less stuff, in general.

When I moved to Brooklyn, I continued to borrow – from the library and from friends. I ended up buying a few more books after joining book clubs (and also feeling the knee-jerk compulsion that most people in new cities often have to fill up their new space with something comfortable and known) but not very many. And then (as some of you know) I started having a lot of problems with my back. So Ehren gave me a Kindle as a holiday gift this last year, mostly because he didn’t want me to have to ouch around the subway, lugging books. And it’s pretty much one of the most thoughtful and loving gifts anyone has every given me.

There some downsides to the Kindle (all e-readers are evolving and all of them have problems), but the upsides have been tremendous. Chief among them is, of course, that I can carry around a bunch of books without having to carry them at all. It’s great to be able to share books with Ehren, too. But I’ve also found my reading experience greatly enriched: I’m highlighting passages, taking notes, and looking up words in books these days, which is something I haven’t done for years. Yes, instead of decreasing the aesthetic pleasure of reading, my Kindle has actually activated a more engaged relationship with books than I’ve had since I left academia. And you know what? I buy more books now that I own a Kindle than I have in the past seven years as a library fangirl. Let me say that again, differently: I make more purchases from the publishing companies that are currently freaking out about e-readers than I did before e-readers were even invented – even despite the fact that I continue to get a lot of my e-books for free. I love the convenience of being able to buy an e-book (typically cheaper than print versions) and download it immediately. I love being able to read many of them at the same time, too.  I realize that I might not represent the majority here, but my experience suggests that not all e-book readers have the same desires or the same habits. The truth of the matter is that I’m still not a book buyer, but I am an e-book buyer.

(Let me say here that I’m also a tech savvy gal who knows about the difference between buying a book from Amazon and buying a license for a book from the company, and I’ll look forward to discussing that issue in a future post.)

I recently showed my Kindle to my mother and my grandmother. Both are tech adverse, and yet both women were compelled by a single, important feature: the ability to increase the text size to gigantic proportions. I’ve also had conversations with older folks on the subway about this. After seeing the large font in action, one man declared to me, “Well, that settles that. I’m getting one.” Have you seen how unbelievably big and heavy large print books are? I write about this because we assume, somehow, that the physical objectness of the book is at the core of the pleasure of reading – but it seems, in fact, to be an obstacle for many. So I’m excited about how e-readers will enhance my experience as I become an older reader, too.

So there you have it… Girl meets Kindle.  Girl names it Kindle McMurtry. Girl reads more, reads more deeply, and reads more books that she actually purchased than before she met Kindle.  It’s a love story.

It’s not a lengthy interview, and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing.  However, there are two parts I want to zero in on…

How new media offers opportunities to scholarship, rather than taking them away:

You’ve been thinking about the state of scholarly publishing. What are the current problems?
The short answer is that the current system of scholarly publishing is dying, and dying fast; the business model under which much of it operates is utterly unsustainable, and the parts that are sustainable are destroying the budgets of our libraries. Plus, the systems of valuation and assessment through which scholarship operates today are hindering rather than promoting real innovation. (I’m obviously really cheery on this subject.)

What would your ideal scholarly press look like?
First off, I don’t want it to be a press. It should be an all-digital, open access network, based in the university but structured as an academic unit rather than as a revenue center. It should use an open, communal process of post-publication peer review. It should be brave—and scary. My dean told me after I got tenure that he hoped my next project would startle and confuse him. That’s what I want from the next generation of scholarly publishing.

Why literature is not in jeopardy:

The first video MTV aired was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Has the television killed the novel?

The death of the novel has been greatly exaggerated. If not, how could we possibly have a project like Infinite Summer, in which hundreds of people are reading Infinite Jest together?

Or will the Internet kill it?

It might change it, but it won’t kill it. In fact, the Internet gives the lie to many of our anxieties about the state of reading right now; so many people are reading and writing so much online that it becomes crystal clear that ‘no one reads anymore’ really means ‘no one reads anything I think is good anymore.’

With all of the emphasis on digital will anyone read an actual book made of paper in twenty years?

Absolutely! The actual book form isn’t dying, any more than radio died when television came along. It’s just that radio developed a particular niche that wasn’t replicated by television. Similarly, books will survive, but the kinds of things we want to read in print versus the kinds of things we want to read digitally will gradually differentiate.

Well, hooray to all of this.  As an e-book lover and a social media marketer, I feel like I’m called upon fairly frequently to defend the changing media space in which I play.  It’s always nice to read reasoned calls to just RELAX about things a bit and then go forth and INNOVATE.  Yes, it’s hard for writers, readers, marketers and consumers to cut through the signal right now.  But I think we’re working on adapting the right filters.  In the meantime, I’m happy to be one of the damn lot of scribbling women on the internet.

And as a lapsed academic, it’s really great to see that leaders like Fitzpatrick have emerged from inside the Academy.

Read the whole interview!