Feeds and Streams

Heraclitus said, “You can never step into the same river; for new waters are always flowing on to you.” In many ways RSS feeds function as tributaries in the rivers of information that flood our Inboxes.

Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams is a project by Montreal-based artist and writer J.R. Carpenter and curated by Kate Armstrong. Carpenter took the February 2007 issue of The Capilano Review, which was dedicated to new writing and technologies, and, using RSS, blogging, tagging, and other Web 2.0 tools, parsed, annotated, reordered, and interlinked the essays. The end result, fed into an RSS stream, both exposes and subverts the formal structure of writing and literary criticism. It flows through undercurrents of pure chance and hits the headwaters of creative insight.

iz ritN eng ded?

If Clément Gallet has his way, grammar teachers might be an endangered species. Gallet, a Swiss graphic designer, is the author of a new communication manifesto, “ritN eng iz ded.” In it, he posits that the speed of communication is moving too fast for our traditional written word system, and gives suggestions on how to streamline language to work better with our new communication methods: SMS, IM, Twitter, and Flickr. Rule #2 is “Remove all the capital letters,” a sentence that ironically begins with a capital “R.”

As Wittgenstein pointed out, language is not any one thing, it is a plurality of games we play to use and reuse (find new uses) for anything that can be said to have a use or a function for a community. Language is not the spoken word, the written word, or merely “what allows communication.” Language is the language games that make it possible for us to have a use for “communication” or “the written word.”

In this sense, texting is a game of speed. However, for those with more subtle and advanced needs, the breathtaking beauty and complexity of full-sentence language remains both desirable and necessary.