Friday, August 8, 2008

ignorance of the digital persuasion

A couple of years ago, I was taking a poetry class. (We mainly read, discussed and wrote about poetry, rarely writing our own. This was a good thing. Try writing a sestina and maintaining your dignity as a serious English major. You’ll see my point. Unless you are a poetry genius. In that case, good for you.)

Anyhow, we were discussing a Whitman or a Frost or a someone-else poem, and the guy who always slept through class actually piped up, saying “I found some guy reciting this on U2.” He mentioned it a couple of times. My teacher commented on how you could find anything on U2. Everyone nodded in understanding agreement. I was sitting in my own little (oft-inhabited) bubble of confusion.

Why were “we” describing things as “on” U2? What did U2 have to do with American poetry?

A few weeks later, I heard a story on NPR about the sale of You Tube to Google and I finally heard exactly what was being said.

I foresee many years of Pic rolling her eyes and sighing, explaining, once again, “Mamma…I told you. It’s 3DB! Three dimensional blogging. Geez.” (See, I can’t even come up with a better example that this lame attempt.)


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Along these same lines: Does anyone know how I can backup my archives? In case some mishap befalls blogger, I'd like to know that my posts won't disappear. Thanks.

1 comments:

Crystal said...

I'm with ya sister. It was a LONG time before I knew what YouTube was an even longer before I used it...okay...actually, I've never used it. I don't even know how. Other people have shown me things on it, but that's about it. I often think to myself that I'd like to go all gadgety but a, it's expensive to crave gadgets and b, well, it just seems like a LOT of work. Besides I don't think my brain has room for too many skills...I can only be decent at a few things at any given time.