I will be giving a talk this Friday, June 4 on digital books and issues of copyright at the Oxford English Postgraduate Conference. (Click on the image below to go to the Oxford English Department’s website announcement).

[Update: the full conference schedule and program is available. Click here to check it out].

Oxford English Postgraduate Conference

Phillip Pullman will also be taking part in a discussion during the latter part of the conference, which promises to be a very interesting event. You can click on the image below to visit the conference website with a bit more information:

Mis/Appropriation Conference

My talk will be at 2:10pm and at 3:10pm I will be chairing a panel of speakers, on the interesting topics of the ethics and experience of time and space in reading (link goes to the full schedule online):

Conference Schedule

Will post some excerpts from the conference later!

On Thursday, May 20 I’ll be speaking on the topic of digital books and the experience of reading at the Merton History of the Book Group at Oxford. There will be free sandwiches. (Click on the picture for a larger image).

Merton History of the Book Group Talk

"eBooks, Google Books, (and Printed Books): Reading in the Age of Digital Reproduction."

One of my photos is in the new Schmap Oxford Guide. Cool. Click here for the full website.

The photo is from “The Real Alice” exhibit at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Clay Shirky will be taking part in an interview for the the Oxonian Review in February. Mr. Shirky, one of the world’s leading experts on the way in which the internet has shaped decentralized interaction in our everyday lives,  is currently a professor at NYU and author of the influential best-selling book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. As part of an exciting new “crowdsourced” format, portions of the interview will be taken from the University of Oxford community.

If you would like your question considered for submission and use during the interview, please drop me an email (tyler@tylershores.com) or leave a reply in the comments section below. All credit will be given for any audience-submitted questions used and published from the interview.

Question submitters will also be entered into a drawing to win a free copy of Here Comes Everybody.

The full article will be posted as soon as it is available.

For more information about Mr. Shirky, please visit his website: http://www.shirky.com/

Click here for more information on his best-selling book, Here Comes Everybody.

[UPDATE. 7:00pm GMT Feb. 8, 2010]

Here are some of the top questions submitted so far. We will continue to take submitted questions until next Monday, Feb. 8. Thanks for all of the participation so far!

- Is social media good or bad for social interaction?

- Can you ask him about his views on the relation between charismatic leadership and communal decision-making? It seems to me that most open/crowd-sourced projects have a figure-head, be it Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, Linus Torvalds of Linux etc. Is there still a need for a visionary/motivator/champion in a self-organized “headless” community?

- Is the Internet pulling us apart or drawing us together?

- Brave New World or 1984?

- Given the recent butting-of-heads between Amazon, publishers, Apple (?) and now Rupert Murdoch, what do you think is the future of the eBook and publishing industry? Or books, for that matter?

- Many people no longer subscribe to a newspaper, given that articles are freely available online and are no longer as current by the time they are printed.  Where do you see the news media in 20 or 50 years?  Will there still be dominant players that set the agenda for national and international debates/discussions, or will there be a plethora of special-interest groups only interested in a narrow range of topics and ignoring everyone else?

- We are seeing increasing discussions about the ethics of social reporting - what do you think of things such as Twitter which are becoming more and more alternative forms of reporting than traditional media and journalism?

- I am currently working for a company, wildearth.tv, that broadcasts nine hours of daily live safaris from South Africa as web streaming. We use Twitter to draw attention i.e. “Lions are hunting”. Thousands of viewers share their thoughts in the chat rooms. And one of our animals, a black bear has 80,000 Facebook fans. Do you think that the future of TV makes use of existing interactive web2.0 plattforms such as Facebook or Twitter, or will it be an embedded technologies like “the red button” on the remote control or Yahoo! connected TV?

-  Can a technological medium, even something as radical and pervasive as new media, actually shape society?

In celebration of The Simpsons reaching 450 episodes, KCBS had a feature on the show this morning, where I was invited to speak along with Paul Cantor, Professor of English at University of Virginia. By the way — be sure to check out this Sunday’s The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special: In 3-D! On Ice hosted by Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame). While you’re waiting for Sunday, you might also enjoy this article or this blog post on the upcoming event.

Teaching a college course on The Simpsons? Anytime I get to mention Foucault and a Simpsons episode in the same sentence, it’s a pretty good day. Click on the image below for the full podcast of the show!

Paul Cantor is brilliant, and certainly a highly-regarded figure in American popular culture studies (check out his book, Gilligan Unbound) – so this was quite a thrill for me! I particularly enjoyed his comparison of The Simpsons and Charles Dickens during the interview. You can check out an excerpt from one of Cantor’s essays on The Simpsons here.

Interview on The Simpsons

This talk was given at Google in Mountain View, CA on August 28.

Is that really what I look like and sound like? Well, anyways — some of the things that I discuss are: what is it specifically that makes “Heroes” philosophically interesting? What can we learn from a book about “Heroes” and philosophy? How does a show about heroes and villains give us a chance to reflect on questions of good and evil, right and wrong?

In my chapter on Nietzsche, time, and meaning I explore the ways in which specific examples from the show prompt us to examine our relation to time from both a philosophical standpoint and also what this means to us in our everyday lives as living, thinking beings.

I’m only about 708,000 views behind Ron Paul’s YouTube video, so feel free to rate it if you like it!!

For those that are interested, here’s a link to the video on YouTube. Authors@Google is one of my favorite things in the entire world – check out the rest of this wonderful video series. It’s one of the things that makes Google so cool.

Here’s a link to the actual book:  Heroes and Philosophy: Buy the Book. Save the World

Hello Internet! Please excuse the apparent lack of activity while I figure out what to post and how.