...atacombs of its search results—a "time-out" for bad search-query behavior. Almost exactly a year later, Google intervened in the lucrative lyric-searching market in a different, much more direct way: For lots of (but not all) lyric queries, Google now returns an embedded result from its Knowledge Graph database, a straightforwardly encyclopedic addendum to the search engine’s market-cornering aptitude at returning relevant links. The lyrics, of course, also link to the song on Google Play.
Text Messages: Song Lyrics as Music’s New Digital Battleground | The Pitch | Pitchfork
9 years
...ISCO -- On Dec. 13, 2013, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter dropped a bombshell that changed the music industry. With zero marketing and promotion, Beyoncé released her fifth studio album exclusively on iTunes, announcing it with a single photo on Instagram on a Friday at midnight.
Book excerpt: Captivology looks at what captures our imagination
9 years
...on the wrong kind of “MVP”. MOOCs are not the Most Valuable Player that will independently address all challenges faced by universities, students and others impacted by higher education institutions. MOOCS are another kind of MVP: a Minimal Viable Product.
In defense of the great MOOC experiment
9 years
...iginal franchise must be adjudicated for internal self-consistency (not unlike the genre problems of time travel fiction that Gibson, like any author who experiments with that device, must confront). Here the existence of a controlling authority over a given creative property is both a legally binding fact and the ultimate arbiter of arguments on forum threads. Even for more prosaic literary fiction, where transmedia franchises and fan fiction are unlikely to develop, I predict that the conventions and expectations from fan communities will cross over and m...
What Is an @uthor? | The Los Angeles Review of Books
9 years
It’s not as if all of us at the MLA hadn’t dutifully read our Barthes back in graduate school. But it’s one thing to autopsy the death of the author from the safety of the seminar table; it’s quite another when the author (with some 157,000 Twitter followers) nixes one’s take on something so ba...
What Is an @uthor? | The Los Angeles Review of Books
9 years
...vehicle Back to School (1986). My point is that previously the authorial encounter has been an elaborately staged-managed event and as such culturally resonant, even cinematic as these examples show. Today, through social media channels, such encounters have the capacity to become commonplace, their frisson a bit like what The Peripheral’s Flynne calls a wobble.
What Is an @uthor? | The Los Angeles Review of Books
9 years
...y that the media guru could be produced right there on the spot, his appearance instantaneous, his authority absolute. “Boy, if life were only like this,” Allen adds wistfully to close out the scene. There is a similar gag involving Kurt Vonnegut in the otherwise forgettable Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School (1986). My point is that previously the authorial encounter has been an elaborately staged-managed event and as such culturally resonant, even cinematic as these examples show. Today, through social media ch...
What Is an @uthor? | The Los Angeles Review of Books
9 years
...orum threads does one have to absorb to be adequately conversant in the book? If you write about Pynchon’s early fiction without reading his introduction to Slow Learner, you do so at your own peril. What is the threshold of critical responsibility now?
What Is an @uthor? | The Los Angeles Review of Books
9 years
Not visible in the photo is an Ampex portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and a studio-grade microphone, as well as the loops of wires and cables accompanying both. These devices — along with his two faculty handlers, Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, who subsequently edited and published transcripts of the recorded sessions as Faulkner in the University
What Is an @uthor? | The Los Angeles Review of Books
9 years
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