I’m not alone in my thinking here. A writer friend, Kate Rizzetti updated her Facebook status on 21 August 2012: ‘iPad’s are crap for blogging. Crap I say. So – exactly what is the point of them?’

As a child of the ’80s my interests coincided with the high points of the decade’s nerdiness: Dungeons & Dragons, Choose Your Own Adventures and text adventure games. In text adventure games, most famously Zork, the player would interact with the game by typing out commands like ‘north’ (or just ‘n’) to go north, ‘examine’ objects, ‘look’ to view their environment, ‘give’ and sometimes ‘kill’.

A few visits later to websites of a couple of global curators, and it seems the thing to pull information together to make understanding a breeze, with superb bursts of colour or line drawings or typography or even emblems of some kind or another, is the Infographic.

Gwen Harwood’s sentiment about editors – eloquently expressed in an acrostic, has become Australian folklore. While some authors would agree with Gwen, for others it’s not as simple. Nor is it always obvious in this blogging, tweeting, forever-online world, who our ultimate editor might be. In many areas the editor-author partnership remains unchanged. Editors and […]

One of the more prevalent perceptions propagated by the dominant ideologies of the last few decades has been the belief in the death of the avant-garde. Ever since the ex-Leftist French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard decided to announce the arrival of a ‘postmodern condition’ by denouncing radical Marxist politics as well as artistic iconoclasm as outdated […]

According to a recent article by Good magazine about 10 percent of American university students plagiarise from Wikipedia. Others, about 8 percent, copy from Yahoo Answers and Slideshare. These figures are based on a recent study released by Turnitin, a software program that academics use to check for plagiarism – you enter a piece of […]

I’m delighted that less sycophantic views of the career of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs are being voiced – here on Overland, and also in the Guardian – and it’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one bewildered by the businessman’s glorification as a ‘visionary’ and a ‘creative genius’. While it may […]

I can’t imagine leaving home without a book. I’ve been travelling overseas recently. A good part of travelling and preparing to travel has always been about the book. Of course there are the novels and travel guides read before leaving, but more important are the books to take on the trip. For me, it’s always […]

The spectre of the internet has been haunting Australian literary journals for well over a decade. But a few recent events seem to have transformed this spectral haunting into a brutal hunt. According to The Mercury newspaper, Tasmanian Premier Lara Giddings has decided to terminate funding for one of the country’s main print literary journals […]

Harvard University Press has released a new annotated version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Nicholas Frankel. It contains five hundred words that were edited out of the original published version without Wilde’s knowledge. Five hundred words. It’s not much. About half the length of this blog post. Yet as soon as I […]

It would be safe to say that, thanks to the acknowledged horrors of cyberspace (see ‘Internet child pornography a growing problem’ or ‘Terrorists Take Recruitment Efforts Online’, for starters), our view of the wonders of the brave new world of the internet is becoming increasingly less sanguine. As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek observed in […]

My entry for the Meanland blogger competition began with a reference to the work of the Marxist thinker Walter Benjamin and his mostly enthusiastic view of the impact of modern technology on artistic production. I’d like to begin this blog with a quote from Minima Moralia, the wonderfully complex and magnificently complicated book by Benjamin’s […]

Well, it’s official: the (printed) book is dead, long live the (e)book. Or so many political and cultural elites would like us to believe. On the very day of my writing this blog, for example, we were subjected to federal Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry’s apocalyptic diagnosis that Australian booksellers will be annihilated within […]

For the ten minutes before my children sleep the internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest. Tonight’s book is a treasure. Behind its thick crème cover, its pages, also crème, are stiff and square with sixties-vintage pictures. Chapter One, Down the Rabbit-Hole, begins on page eleven. ‘Why not page one?’ a […]

The current Meanland blogger is hanging up her spurs so that cutting-edge collaboration between Overland and Meanjin is looking for a blogger. Well, actually, two bloggers. We’re holding a competition to find two bloggers to write fortnightly for the Meanland project. The winners will receive a one-off prize of $200, and be paid $75 per […]

Not a fan of media theorist Marshall ‘the medium is the message’ McLuhan? Okay, I don’t go in for the technological determinism either, but you can’t deny that the man was uncannily prescient when it came to predicting how our culture would develop – a ‘global village’, electric technology ‘reshaping and restructuring patterns of social […]