Our first few weeks of Manovich decided my project; I’m going to implement him after a fashion he’d probably hate. The works of Olia Lialina are inspirational, as well. You’ll see an epitomization of Wendy Chun and Sherry Turkle’s computer-as-vehicle-for-the-ultimate-narcissism theory as well.

Kittler Essays: How clever! Using a Gothic novel as a conceit, inaccuracy and pun intended, is the perfect way to get me into social theory. Kittler cemented the feminization of the typing machine (and medium; transportation vehicles are spoken of with the feminine pronoun; Mina is the only successful translator and medium between Dracula and the “good guys”; I only wish that he would have more examined the psychoanalytic [and attendant medical] implications of woman-as-disseminator for good or ill, Mina or Lucy, instead of (if understandably) skirting it.
On Romanticism: if books (were) the means of the ultimate indulgence in narcissism, where we can “read ourselves into” anything, how revolutionary, how different is the computer, as Turkle and Wendy Chun describe it?

“How can public institutions remain healthy and vital if they ignore, or worse yet, belittle the opinions of their customers?” This woman, by conflating a “public institution” with a business institution (by use of “customers”) inadvertently betrays herself; why not question the political technologies that keep technology out of public schools? She, evidently, doesn’t realize (or care) about gratuitous standardized testing and the “circuitous and selective… dismissal” thereof is that testing has little do with the “beneficial effect of technology to learning” (she seems to feel that educators are all technophobes), but to the sociopolitical implications thereof. It upsets me to read things like this.