Pump up the volume

03 November 2008 | 17:27 - By Stefano Boscutti

Amazon first offered its Kindle, a device for reading e-books a year ago.  Now Virginia Heffernan doesn't know why she waited so long to buy one.

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She can't seem to put it down.  It's ideal for book reading - lucid, light - but lately it has become something more: a kind of refuge.  Unlike the other devices that clatter in her shoulder bag, the Kindle isn't a big greedy magnet for the world's signals.  It doesn't pulse with clocks, blaze with video or squall with incoming bulletins and demands. It's almost dead, actually.  Lifeless.  Just a lump in her hands or her bag, exiled from the crisscrossing of infinite cybernetworks.  It's almost like a book.  An erudite look at the future of words on, er... screen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/magazine/02wwln-medium-t.html

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About this Blog

New New Media looks at how our mediascape is exploding to bits. How the latest technology and the internet are changing the way we live, work and play. How the latest media is shaping us all.

Stefano Boscutti is an executive creative director and strategist. He's like a better looking version of Todd Sampson. He also has an abiding faith that stories and wordplay (and not powerpoint presentations) will change the world.

 
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