The Problem

I pay for cable TV, I pay for Netflix, I pay $50 a year for Xbox Live Gold. And while I almost never watch TV (that’s the domain of my girlfriend), but I feel beholden to my Netflix and Xbox because I’ve committed money to them. If they were free services, I might not give them as much attention (I’m looking at you, PSN). And that’s precisely what the web is.

We’re used to getting things for free one the Internet because that’s always how it’s been. We put up with ads because we don’t have to reach for our wallets. But I rarely feel a sense of allegiance to websites because I can always go elsewhere for similar information. Granted, there are cases where I read a site specifically for its writers (aka Giant Bomb and Tested), but usually Autoblog is as good as Jalopnik.

This is one reason I still like magazines. Think of having a magazine delivered to your home versus looking at the table of them at the dentist’s office. When I subscribe to Wired or Car and Driver, I’ve made a decision on what to read and have limited my choices. When I’m in the dentist’s office, I stare blankly at the table before a) picking something I already know or b) picking at random. I read an article and get called back to the chair with no sense of satisfaction. Sure, I’ve taken in the information, but it never really sticks with me.

The Experiment

Turning back to the web, what if I used a financial commitment to narrow my consumption? What content would I subscribe to? How much would I be willing to pay? In the case of this thought experiment, I’m assuming that I would be able to enjoy the rest of the Internet, but that I would always start with my subscriptions first and they would take up most of my time.

Content I Would Pay For

TWiT Network, $5/mo

I’ve been listening to This Week in Tech since episode 20 or so. Leo Laporte’s little empire has a broad enough range of content that I don’t even think about subscribing to other podcasts. I listen to TWiT and MacBreak Weekly regularly, and tune into some of the other shows on occasion. But these two shows alone are worth the monthly contribution. In fact, TWiT already has a recurring monthly contribution system setup, making this a natural first example.

The Mike O’Meara Show, $10/mo

I grew up listening to talk radio. Not like political talk radio, and not NPR, but the kind of radio often described as “Guy Talk.” You know, talk radio epitomized by shocks jocks Howard Stern or Opie and Anthony. The kind of talk radio that is basically dead on terrestrial stations. Say what you want about most of the shows, I will defend to the death the Don and Mike Show. They were on the air together over twenty years, and after Don Geronimo left the airwaves, Mike O’Meara picked up the mantle with the rest of the cast to start the Mike O’Meara Show. After a solid year’s run, their station switched formats and they were out of work. But they came back a few months later with a daily podcast and have slowly been gaining momentum on the iTunes charts. The podcast is five hours of good content a week from a group of really talented people. My higher subscription price reflects my desire to support their effort.

Whiskey Media, $5/mo

It probably goes without saying, but between Giant Bomb and Tested, there’s enough content that one could get rid of their television. I’ll admit that I don’t care much for This is Only a Test, but I’m your typical Jeff Gerstmann apostle, following him about and spreading his Word. The Bombcast is my favorite piece of media and I put everything else on hold to listen to it. The Whiskey Media sites are all about depth—the kind of minutae I can really sink my teeth into. While I have no interest in anime, comics, or (upcoming) movies, I’m really looking forward to the Tested wiki. It’s encouraging to know that these sites are run by passionate people with no interest in selling to a megacorp that will control their product coughcnetcough.

Ars Technica, $15/yr

I actually prefer Ars to its sister site Wired. Between tech, games, and science, their tagline might as well be “Stuff Bobby Enjoys.” Unlike other tech blogs, they’re not caught up posting every little cell phone announcement and they don’t earn their pageviews through the rumormill. The writing is good and the coverage has just the right depth. Ars already offers a $5/mo subscription, but I’m not as much interested in their perks (like the PDF library and forum access) as I am their regular content. My ideal subscription price is more like that of a magazine.

AOL / Weblogs, Inc., $5/mo

Say what you want, it’s hard to deny that Weblogs, Inc. has a good slate of blogs. While Gawker is intolerably bad (save for some posts on Lifehacker), I enjoy Engadget, Joystiq, Autoblog, and TUAW.Like Ars, it has a slew of categories that appeal directly to my interests. The writing isn’t always the best, but these blogs certainly have good coverage as a group. I’d feel better about supporting them if I knew that writers got paid more to contribute, but this hypothetical discussion is about the selfish task of reducing my media consumption.

So, then, now that that’s covered, which websites’ content would you pay for?

To preface: this is neither an ad hominem critique of the sprawling San Diego Comic-Con, nor a definitive history. Rather, what I am interested in with “The Roots of Comic-Con” are the antecedent events, types of gatherings, and commercial showcases that gave rise to America’s biggest yearly showcase for all things fantastic, glittery, and full of explosions.

From roughly July 22-26, the city of San Diego—already a pretty large place by any standards—swells with a specific sort of person, the type more at home in the air-conditioned space of the dark room than the sunny vistas of SoCal. It would be easy say that nerds, geeks, obsessives, and the like all flock to events like Comic-Con, but this is not true. All sorts of people find solace in the vast San Diego Convention Center, whether as casual/curious fans, exhibitors, or press agents.

Even in a world with such entertainment showcases as E3 and CES, Comic-Con looks like the lumbering behemoth of the group, quickly swelling in size and hoovering up any and all showcase-able media. In some senses, what began as an actual comic book convention would be the ideal repository for all sorts of new and exciting entertainment experiences. After all, people who read comic books tend to have an uncanny, almost instinctual literacy for mixed media. Since comics and graphic narratives are primarily an intersection of the image (and its framing, spatial orientation, variable sizes, etc..) and the word (though a “visual” word, as important for WHERE and HOW it is used as for WHY it is used at all), it follows that Comic-Con would be the perfect place to showcase the fluidity of media, the triumphs of popular creativity, and the masters of marketing. For all of their supposed vices—and there are some, even for a popularizer and egalitarian like myself—comics are a compact form of cultural literacy, 32 solid pages (or more) to aid in the decoding of Western civilization.

That said, while Comic-Con is certainly unique in its vast promotion of both small/independent efforts and the corporate juggernauts, it is not wholly without precedent as a cultural showcase, as an event that teaches a people about itself. What I’d like to do is briefly sketch the sources of this event, which is as much comic book convention as it is flea market, technological exhibition, job fair, audience focus group (writ large), Utopian (in all senses of the world) vacation spot, subcultural rite of passage, and industry trade show.

The Crystal Palace, via WikiMedia

The two precedents that immediately come to mind are the nationalistic technological exhibition and its near ally (or evolved self), the World’s Fair. In the 19^th century, industrialized advances in production, consumption, and distribution meant that a large part of American and European nationalistic pride was tied up in the technologies pioneered by the great minds and hard-working people of a given place. In Britain, where industrialized practices dated to the 18^th century, these showcases for technology (such as the Great Exhibition of 1851, known for its building of the still-amazing but long-ago-destroyed Crystal Palace) tempted ambling audiences with the wonders of progress, of the new, of imaginative science and its realities. In America, a similar impulse paints the Colombian Exposition of 1893, where the glory of the American 19^th century—its railroads, imperialism, miracle cures, celebrities, etc—were placed next to the riches of the rest of the world. Bear in mind that a key factor in the history of these events is the sense of cultural imperialism, the notion that what the Nation produces is of visible interest to the wide world. Comic-Con suddenly does not feel so far-off.

Some of the nationalistic zeal of these Exhibitions is alive and well at Comic-Con. An obviously huge component of the convention is the superhero, a peculiar figure that has survived and flourished across media from nearly 100 years. Since the central prerogative of most superheros is the maintenance of law & order (or the restitution of a kind of static past, untroubled by the various ills of the contemporary world), they are often aligned with nationalistic sentiments. On this national level, Superman is evidently a standard-bearer for truth, justice, and the American way, while the obvious Captain America was an emblem of WWII-era fortitude, depicted as an ideal soldier who could fight the nation’s enemies wherever he found them. The formula holds even for superheroes more concerned with local, personal vendettas. Despite his supposedly international education, and his outward life as a Europeanized playboy, Bruce Wayne/Batman is all about restoring glory to Gotham city. In fact, his reliance on intelligence, education, and technology is the kind of end-result of the liberal-progressive attitude of 19^th century industrialization. These scientists, inventors, and industrialists (Wayne is all three) are the nation’s super-men, the secular saints who will deliver the people from evil and want.

But beyond this building of national identity—where else in the world (aside from, well, Japan) could something like Comic-Con happen with such girth, such zeal?—this yearly event also promotes the commercial spectacle of the American free market. While an exhibition or World’s Fair or Expo is more concerned with showcasing things that only large corporations or millionaires can actually own, such as experimental apartment buildings (see Montreal’s Expo ’67 and its famous Habitat) or Westinghouse dynamos (the above 1893 Colombian Exposition), the flea market promotes the proper ethos of personal ownership. It’s no good tracing the history of the marketplace, as a full account would cover Billingsgate, the medieval covered markets, the Paris arcades, the American shopping mall, and the church swap-meet. Instead, take my word for it: yard sales, flea markets, swap-meets, and concentrated places of shopping continue to thrive. State and church fairs have always been places for hucksters to promote new wares—miracle tonics, shirts that need never be ironed, shoe soles that never wear down, etc—and mutual ingenuity tends to form a nice circuit. As such, new consumer goods do well when showcased together. Comic-Con totally understands this. Even when crap rubs shoulders with what appears to be genuine innovation, the lure of the new benefits from a general atmosphere of commerce and (apparent) invention. Twilight may be awful, but its co-presence with James Cameron’s Avatar promotes a general sense of American hegemony on the world’s entertainment.

But fans, consumers, and vacationers don’t just go to Comic-Con to stir their inner-nationalist or to assure themselves that an American stranglehold on the technological arts remains in plain view. Hell, people go because it’s fun! Thus, Comic-Con takes as much from the flea market as it does from the amusement park, from the Coney Island ethos of enjoyment, relaxation, and the consumer dream-world set to bright lights and HD TVs. The Coney Island of the early 1900s was truly amazing, a constant media spectacle that perhaps has still yet to be surpassed. Where else could an average Joe from New York go on rides, see pseudo-anthropological exhibits, play carnival games, and witness the liveness of death? That’s right: one famous Coney Island spectacle of yore was the live electrocution of elephants, who would be zapped to death before the eyes of a paying public. Comic-Con does not kill people, but the enculturated sense of violence remains. As much as the event gives life—new things to see, do, read, and love—it gives death. Violent entertainment, showcased in public, lives on.

The relationship of corporations and consumers is in a delicate balance at Comic-Con. Some attendees want to see the big stars, hear the big announcements from the studios, in short participate in the mainstream thrill as much as possible. Others go for the independent showcases, the self-published and/or smaller tables that hope to find a kindly audience amidst the thousands of men dressed as Stormtroopers. On a personal level, I wish the best to the smaller outfits at Comic-Con, as it is the biggest live audience they’ll ever potentially encounter. Given the size of the event, it is likely that all tastes can be accommodated. But the flip-side is true. One of the other functions of Comic-Con is as an extremely volatile product-focus-group. The super fans are in attendance, and Warner Bros. can show its latest properties, fully aware that part of the process is the airing of grievances demanded by the die-hards. As such, Comic-Con gives the mainstream outfits a sense of the fringe. While they still want the mainstream audiences, the mainstream money, they can also engage with the vocal minority in hopes of taming the beast of internet complaints. But, as previously mentioned, as Comic-Con grows, so to do the mainstream audiences. While the event’s audiences of 30+ years ago were built more specifically around a common subculture, the scene today is much more fractured. With 125,000 hearts and minds, the corporations and fans begin a mutually beneficial—though sometimes lopsided—battle for favor.

Comic-Con has likewise up’ed the ante for seemingly egalitarian, yet still divided public events. As countless online galleries attest, Comic-Con is a platform for celebrities, actors, writers, and directors to stand behind their latest creations. As scenes from Comic Book: The Movie (2004) and countless YouTube clips suggest, the fantasy of brushing against your personal pantheon of geniuses is fairly high. You will see people you recognize. But, there remain differences. Some of the promotional sessions are uni-vocal. The corporation showcases it’s film, the stars speak canned questions and answers, the audience remains an audience. This is not always the case. Some events are better at including other voices and concerns. But is is worth restating that, as with many things at Comic-Con, appearances can deceive. Some laugh all the way to the bank. Others cry as the ATM receipt shows them to be in the red.

In short, I will readily admit that my demystification of Comic-Con does take a bit of the fun out of it. While the whole media event can still be enjoyed on that very obvious promotional level—where new products make the heart race, where G.I. Joe begins looking even more atrocious than before—it should also be understood as an event that is an exception in some ways, and wholly historical in others. It is a refined showcase for fantastic narratives across media. Its success is a testament to its selective cannibalization of past events, carefully tailored to the current world of entertainment media. It is a fan-friendly convention, but it is also a con.

It’s great for capturing things you’d otherwise be unable to link to. For example, a few weeks ago I was reading something on Time.com, got to the end, and it brought up some suggested reaidng material using the previous article’s headline. I learned that money can buy you Bob Dylan and the Louvre:

It’s also great for me as a web designer because I can take quick screenshots of a site in action to get feedback. If someone says that something looks weird in their browser, they can use GrabUp to quickly freeze-frame exactly what they’re looking at and show you how you messed up.

We have a lot of visual information that’s difficult to convey on the computer. For example, recently I was trying to set up a meeting time and needed to give my friend my schedule. Instead of typing it all out, I opened up iCal, took a screenshot, and sent it over. It helped save me time and maintained the visual organization of my day.

Recently the people behind GrabUp have updated their software to improve it and create two different versions. The free version uses the software to upload it to the GrabUp servers and hosts it on a webpage with an ad. It’s not intrusive and the convenience of using the software is worth it. There is also a paid version (which I was lucky enough to receive a free copy of thanks to the I Bought a Mac blog and Jon Wheatley of GrabUp) which allows you to host images on your own server without ads and even add a watermark if you so desire.

In Conclusion:
Everybody should download the free version for sure. It’s easy to use, convenient, and helpful. It’s a awesome little piece of software and I have faith that they wil do nothing but improve it. However, being totally honest and appreciative of the free license I received for the pro version, the $20 price tag is a little steep. It’s definitely a $10 program, but when you start thinking of the other things like cost $20 (a month of Netflix, a Greatest Hits video game, 75 songs on eMusic) $20 is just too much. Two people paying $10 is the same amount as convincing one person to pay $20. Irregardless, grab up a free version of GrabUp and let it save time in your computing life.

Since I am no longer living in the University community, this announcement and its responses flew right by me. I only found out today, when ITC emailed UVa students and alumni, that the migration process would begin now. As someone who has attended the University at an interesting time in the web’s evolution, as a graduate who is a technology enthusiast, and as a student of digital media, I couldn’t help but think this whole process through. This is a personal tale of email in my life and I think it reveals some interesting things about the changing nature of communication–but not in the terms of the nuts and bolts. Programmers and marketers can only direct so much of the trajectory of a service, whereas users have a lot to do with how it actually gets used. I point to the way Twitter users adopted hash marks (#) for message tagging. Communication is not only being social, but being situated socially.

As an AOL customer in the mid 90s, email and Instant Messaging became inextricably linked. Your login name for the service was your email address and your AIM screen name. AOL customers could reach each other online or off because it was all part of one system. But what about people outside of America Online? If they couldn’t get them to sign up for their ISP, they might as well grab marketshare through something free. AOL release AOL Instant Messenger in 1997, following in the footsteps of ICQ but for a different crowd. Yahoo! Messenger released in early 1998 and Microsoft’s MSN launched in 1999. Which service you used often depended upon which part of the world you lived in and when you signed up for the service. In 2004,  survey by the Pew & American Life Project noted that 40% of Americans online instant messaged and I’m sure the number has gone up since then. So why focus on instant messaging? Because the rise of all these separated real-time from asynchronous online conversation, IM from email.  I got a mail.com address and a Yahoo! Mail account and used my AIM account for friends. In my junior and senior years of high school we were fortunate enough to have highspeed Internet, so I was always signed into AIM. This didn’t become common for a lot of people my age until having highspeed access at college.

Then I got a domain name. Virtual Fools.com popped up in 2001 and it seemed important have my name at my domain, as if there was something legit about that. I didn’t need someone else to carry my email because I could do it myself! Within a couple of years I realized that most webmail clients hosted on domains suck and started using Yahoo! again for virtualfools POP mail (which is when a client pulls all email off of the server). So it was back to Yahoo! until I was accepted into the University of Virginia. So now I used my Virginia mail (through Outlook Express in my dorm and webmail elsewhere) for email with school friends and classwork.

We did’t have “social networks” when I entered college, but they blew up when I left. MySpace was launched at the beginning of my second year and Facebook in the spring semester of the same. I didn’t bother with MySpace until my last year of college (and still don’t really use it). But the point is my central hubs of Internet communication through college remained relatively static. AIM for talking to friends, UVa’s mail for “work” and email with other people from school (now using Thunderbird), and Yahoo! for all other things email (especially newsletter delivery and signing up for web services). Facebook messages (once implemented) were only used for commenting on Facebook related things. But, at some point I realized I needed to get a “professional” post-school email address, so I grabbed a couple Gmail accounts and decided that’s where I was going to live in email land. This was the first time a lot of us realized we needed email addresses that used our real names, not our screen names.

Post graduation showed an interesting trend in communication with my school friends. The infrastructure had not changed–we still had the same email accounts, the same screen names–but suddenly I witnessed a big change. Most people no longer cared about being online all the time. My group of friends set up a Google Group to stay in contact, but communication became less frequent. Within a month of graduation my AIM Buddy List had halved. It wasn’t that people lost the ability to sign on, it was that a lot of them no longer needed to or cared. Turning the critical eye inward, I asked myself why I stay signed onto AIM. I wanted to be available to be IMed at any time (a strangely asynchronous function of a real-time service), I wanted to be able to reach my friends when I saw they were on, and I used Away Messages as a form of communication. Once again I turned to email for these things, but the traditional role of email amongst the people I knew wasn’t necessarily for sending links or comments. Email was still for long form letters, pressing information or sending things with attachments.

I have written about not getting people on board with new web services. My friends just don’t care about Twitter or Pownce or any number of the services I’ve signed up as of late. One thing I did notice, though, is that lots of other people had switched to Gmail and started using Google Talk, especially at work. Gtalk has replaced AIM for a significant portion of my friends. When I was actually working at a company we used Gtalk internally, so being signed on during the day was nothing unusual. I think that a lot of people can Gtalk during the day because they can do it from their Gmail account–a lightweight way of minimizing the footprint on the computer.

The first thing I did when I got my Georgia Tech email address for graduate school was get it to forward to my Gmail account so that I didn’t have to bother with it. Last semester they switched the Tech email client to Zimbra, which currently powers Yahoo! Mail. It’s pretty slick and I can imagine it would be useful for undergraduate students not already entrenched in some web service.

Bringing this all around to the original impetus of the article, I contemplate how communication would have changed had my primary school email been hosted in a Google Apps for domains environment. Would people have switched to Google Talk earlier? Would the “chat” organization of emails changed the way we felt email should have been used? Would more people actually use Google Calendar to share their goings-on? Or would things have continued along the same trajectory regardless of the technology? How are incoming first years making the transition from high school communication to college communication? How will the Google Mail and Live@edu divide manifest itself? And, lastly, will these kinds of multi-featured email environments “revive” email (and even IM) for those young ones who feel it’s outdated?

Even through the bad camera phone photography, you can see that I did a number on my ol’ Dell over winter break. I dropped it on a tile floor and destroyed both the screen and the hard drive. Pretty smart! At least most of the stuff on the HD wasn’t too valuable (still had a desktop for that). So I bit the bullet and waited until Macword ’08 to see the new Apple announcements. The Air, while cool, just wasn’t going to cut it for my needs. So I made the “Switch” and bought a MacBook Pro. I’m very happy with it and am pleased with how much I’ve been able to customize it. Customization is extremely important to me. That’s why I love Firefox so much. In fact, the first thing I did on my MBP was download Firefox and copy all of my extensions and preferences from my desktop’s Firefox with FEBE. I use 23 extensions to make my life easier. I saw the video posted over at Unwired (a show I enjoy) about Wil Harris’s top five favorite Firefox extensions, so I decided to make my own list of the five that I really can’t function without.

Tab Mix Plus
A powerful tool for customizing tab behavios, Tab Mix Plus integrates directly into the preferences pane in Firefox. I’m so used to my customized functionality that I actually get confused when using other computers. Here’s what I use it to do:
1) Customize tab appearance so that highlight tab fonts are bold and black, unread are bold and grey, and viewed tab text is grey.
2) Open links that open in a new window into a new tab instead (to keep my number of windows down)
3) open new tabs for items in my bookmarks, address bar, search bar, and history
4) When I close a tab it focuses on the tab to the left of it
5) Double-clicking a tab to close it
6) Prevent blank tabs when downloading files

Swift Tabs
Swift tabs allows you to assign hotkeys for navigating your tab list. So now, when I hold either CTRL/Apple and press left and right it will cycle either forward or backward through my tabs. It’s great when I have six pages open and want to blast through them.

UI Tweaker
Again with the Firefox interface customization. UITweaker does a number of things for me.
1) Combine the stop and reload buttons, remove the ‘go’ button, remove the arrow from the address bar, and only show the icons of my bookmark toolbar to save space. On my MBP I only have one toolbar open which has all of these things in one line.
2) Add a input box for a keyword when bookmarking a site. Keywords allows you to type a shortened word into the address bar instead of a URL. This is a default Firefox feature, but you normally have to bookmark a page and then right click the bookmark to add that keyword–this saves you a step.  So, in the address bar, typing “m” takes me to Gmail, “d” to Digg, “vfd” to the Virtual Fools blog dashboard, “cell” to my AT&T cellular account, and “bank” to my Wachovia login page. I must have 20 or so keywords to save me from going through my bookmarks.
3) Turn off autocomplete in the search bar, address bar, and HTML form fields. I don’t like when those things show up, especially when other people are using my computer.

PDF Download
As a student, I see a lot of PDF files in my life. PDF Download does the simple task of letting you choose if you want to download the PDF you clicked on, view it in the browser, or view it in HTML. Combined with Foxit Reader, PDF viewing and printing is much less a pain in the ass.

Menu Editor
Menu Editor does exactly what it says. It allows you to change what is shown in your application menus, right click menu, and tab menus. Never use that “Send Image…” function? Nope! Then why do you need it cluttering your context menu? I got rid of my ‘edit’ and ‘history’ menus because I never use them. Be warned that it’s a little wonky with a Mac, which treats its main categories a little differently. But I highly recommend you download it and organize your options in ways that make sense to you!

Best Film

Kevin - The most touching film I saw this year was The Savages (directed by Tamara Jenkins). Despite the fact that it virtually oozed “indie” and felt similar to many recent vintage pop-indie films during key scenes (especially Little Miss Sunshine), it was by turns serious and funny. This will probably go down as the year of Philip Seymour Hoffman – though each of the last two years could also have that distinction – what with this and Charlie Wilson’s War. The Savages probably affected me as much as it did because of certain autobiographical resonances, but does not deserve the totally best-of distinction.

What does deserve this accolade, as Bobby will confirm, is Hot Fuzz. I saw it several times in the theaters. But the DVD has really defined the experience for me. Let me put it this way: I watch Hot Fuzz when I don’t know what else to do. It is able to simultaneous affirm (which is to say, successfully mimic and include) the main conventions of several genres (not the least of which are the contemporary action film, the horror movie, the buddy cop movie, and the murder mystery) while inverting, subverting, and flat-out making fun of them. It is funny, scary, gross, heart-warming, entertaining, and very unique.

Bobby - I saw Hot Fuzz three times in the theater this year. I never see movies more than once in the theater. Hell, I rarely see movies once while they’re on the big screen. Written by Edgar Wright of Shaun of the Dead fame and starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost of the same, Hot Fuzz is a buddy-cop action-horror-thriller set in a small British village with a suspiciously low crime-rate. Hot Fuzz is the perfect film: It’s clever writing and comedic delivery is accented by the fact that it’s both a great action film and suspenseful. Most movies have a hard enough time getting just one of these right, but Hot Fuzz skillfully executes all three. I mean, how many comedies can you actually say you need to see on the big screen? And how many movies have cameos from Stephen Merchant and Steve Coogan? And one last question: Is it true that there’s a point on a man’s head where if you shoot it, it will blow up?

Best Documentary or Small Release Film

Kevin - I was able to see a good number of smaller-run films in 2007. One of the best – a film of interest to most of VF’s readership – is The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (directed by Seth Gordon). This documentary follows the back and forth struggle between the world’s two best Donkey Kong players. The battle manages to assume epic proportions while at the same time revealing the very human strengths and flaws of the central players. Though focused on the rather well-publicized controversy over the official high score, the movie also provides crucial back story for and documentation of early video game tournament/competition culture, talks about the rise of Twin Galaxies, and showcases interesting archival material. Though far from glossy, it gives due attention to a different kind of hero.

Bobby - Unlike my educated colleague, I am but a philistine and did not see anything like this. I have dishonored the Virtual Fools name.

Best Book

Kevin - Though maybe not the most important book of 2007, Michael Palin’s Diaries: 1969-1979 has been the most enjoyable thing I’ve read in a long, long time. Edited down from thousands and thousands of pages of a personal diary (regularly kept since the year that Monty Python’s Flying Circus first aired), Palin’s personal world becomes yours. Sure, there are the inevitable laundry lists of what he ate during particularly good or bad days, lots of regretful notices of having drank too much the night before, and several instances of straight-forward malaise. Despite the few details too many, the diaries are refreshingly personal, revealing the honest opinions of a forthright and funny man. In addition to Palin’s personal world (his views on parenting and on taking care of his ailing father are especially poignant), he provides inside, gritty detail on the social and artistic world of the Monty Python troupe. He also chronicles his first shot at film stardom (Jabberwocky) and his personal struggle to see the completion of his and Terry Jones’s series of Ripping Yarns.

Bobby - I must recuse myself from this one as the only two books that I bought this year that were released this year were Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I read about half of before getting caught up in school work, and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, which I just got for Christmas. The beach is where I usually get my reading done, but I only spent one week in Jersey this summer and my accomplishments illustrate that. At least this keeps me on par with the rest of the country.

Best Book Read (Not Necessarily Released this Year)

Kevin - This is a pretty-well impossible category for me. I generally read a book per week (more during the height of the school year). Forgoing academic film studies books, I’ll just throw a random title out there: The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. If you have not heard of it, look it up. Honestly, it was not the most fulfilling read of the year, but it was the longest and one of the most canonical. Thus, “Longest Book Read this Year” award goes to The Forsyte Saga, a massive undertaking of 3 books and two bridge stories which shows the transition from Victorian to Edwardian to Second World War era England.

Bobby - Most every student I’ve talked to who took John Haidt’s Psych 101 class at the University of Virginia has been unabashed about professing their love for the man. There’s a Facebook group called “If John Haidt Started a Cult I Would Join it Immediately.” During the year I took the course we got to read some draft chapters from his upcoming book The Happiness Hypothesis. At the beginning of the semester I tacked the tradeback edition onto an Amazon order to get free shipping. I highly recommend it because it’s an easy read from the field of positive psychology: a discipline that says that psychology doesn’t just have to fix problems, it can also take people who are feeling fine and make them feel any better. Haidt uses plenty of colorful examples to illustrate concrete psychological facts that can help improve your life: things that you can think about so the world doesn’t bog you down. It’s helped me and maybe you can find something in it for you too.

Most Consistent T.V. ShowKevin - Entourage! See below.

Bobby - TV categories are difficult because you have to decide whether you want to look at the end of the Spring shows or the Fall line-up. The Sopranos ended with a… something, but I didn’t care about it any more. I couldn’t begin to tell you how 24 ended this year. Season 3 of The Office was awesome. The first season of Heroes, which I didn’t start watching until this Fall, was fantastic. Veronica Mars, which concluded its series’ run in the Spring stayed strong despite its rocky relationship with the network. But these should really be classified as last year.

This Fall featured a lot of inconsistent shows. The two I made the effort to watch weren’t the best ever. The Office had its ups and downs and Heroes had a generally downward trajectory. The writers’ strike hasn’t helped things either. Now that there are no new episodes of anything I’d want to watch, I’ve stopped watching any live television that doesn’t include the letters NCAA or NFL.

So, instead, I will turn to this summer for a show that never ceased to entertain: Entourage. Entourage has maintained its quality by playing on the strengths of the characters, the spectacle of Hollywood, and story arcs that are interesting enough to create some coherence between all the little ridiculous plots. This award is all about consistency, and Entourage was the only show I watched that delivered it.

Best “New” Show

Kevin - Though it first reared its head in 2006, I am going to consider Clark and Michael, the internet parody serial created by Michael Cera and Clark Duke, to be a “new” show. Having had my own hand in the internet serial business (as a multi-tasker on John Kenneth Muir’s The House Between), I know the charms and limitations of the format. Clark and Michael brushes that line between fact and fiction, self-parody and self-actualization: Michael and Clark play aspiring writers and actors working the Hollywood circuit in pursuit of their T.V. show. Cameos and absolutely off-the-wall events are the norm. Though Michael Cera has recently achieved something approaching stardom (Juno and Superbad have the world singing his praises), Clark and Michael shows him at his most candid, raw, and true.

Bobby – I need to phone this one in because I just tried to publish the story, got an error, and realized when I went back that it hadn’t saved the newest version of our article. I wrote a nice piece about how I didn’t watch any new TV because I didn’t want to make time for it. My lengthy explanation is now gone and I don’t feel like rewriting it. Basically it boiled down to: ‘there are a ton of talented people working in television, TV is not dead, and 2008 will be about how we watch as much as what we watch.’ Maybe then I’ll have a favorite new show.

Best Album

Kevin - I’ll go with another cheat: best “archival” release. For my money, the most important (as well as most interesting, challenging, and out-of-nowhere) jazz release (partially a re-lease…sorry about all of these qualifying statements) is Webster Lewis – The Club 7 Live Tapes. Lewis was mostly known for his compositions in the disco era and into the early 1980s. This set, culled from performances in Oslo, Norway in 1971 tastefully mixes soul, acid jazz, funk, and danceable beats. Lewis covers “It’s Your Thing” to great effect, but the real gems are the original compositions. Extended, jazzy, out-there, soulful….wish I had been at Club 7 back when these were recorded!

Bobby - I maintain that anybody who says music sucks right now isn’t trying hard enough. We have unparalleled access to back catalogues and increasingly varied access to new music. Even the “bad radio pop” that people complain about isn’t all that terrible—it’s just not to many discriminating tastes. Last year kicked off the start of my expanding music taste and this year was a barrage of new things to listen to. I could probably name ten albums off the top of my head that I thought were great this year. Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, Les Savy Fav’s Let’s Stay Friends, Radiohead In Rainbows, Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, The National’s Boxer, Person Pitch by Panda Bear, Sounds of Silver by LCD Soundsystem, or even scary-lady Amy Winehouse’s soulful Back to Black… just a handful of what I can think of right now and that doesn’t even count the stuff I haven’t heard. And the stuff that I recognize as good music but is just not my taste. And the stuff I listened to that I loved but wouldn’t consider for the list. A hard decision to make. Oh, and sorry Kanye, I thought you CD was very mediocre.

In the end, I’ve decided to go with M.I.A.’s Kala. There’s so much going on in each song that I discover something new on each listen. It integrates a huge variety of global influences and shows maturation from her first album. It’s an album that I can both study with and party to. The M.I.A. music video aesthetic is fascinating too. She’s a great artist that everyone should give at least one listen to.

Best Album Discovered (Not Necessarily Released this Year)

Kevin - I’ve discovered sooooo many good albums this year (see my favorite internet service of the year). I will just say that Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Brotherman in the Fatherland is one of the most amazing things I have ever heard. Everything on the jazz spectrum done better, with more style, and more verve. Getting away from jazz a bit, Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain is as close to essential as you can get. For novelty value, try Psychedelic Shack by The Temptations. You will never think of them in the same way again.

Bobby - Kevin showed me a documentary earlier this year about a band most people have forgotten. It’s the other quartet of mop-headed Brits: The Rutles. From Rutland, England, the Rutles have a spread of music that sounds similar to counter-parts The Beatles. So similar in fact, that you’d think they just copied them… Hmm…

Actually, for those who don’t know, The Rutles is a parody group of The Beatles created by Monty Python writer/actor Eric Idle and songwriter Neil Innes. Unlike parody groups that just make fun of their source material, The Rutles are more a style parody. While the movie highlights just how ridiculous some of the things in the lives of The Beatles were, the songs are every bit as catchy as the originals. More than parody, the songs are tributes to the McCartney and Lennon style. So The Rutles’ self titled album takes top accords this year. Do I have to spell it out? C-H-E-E-S-E-A-N-D-O-N-I-O-N-S.

Best Game

Kevin - 2007 was a good year for games. I liked a good deal of what I saw, excepting the repeated themes and relative lack of thematic expansion. The most fun I had , despite my trepidation with the genre, was with Rock Band. Perfect multi-player bliss. Simple, addictive, fun for the hardcore and the novice alike. Plus, it is a game for which usual taboos and barriers are easily broken down. Though Rock Band was probably not the best game of the year, I can’t speak with the same authority as Bobby. My gaming lies in the recent past!

Bobby - A flurry of games came in at the end of the year, as usual. I’m not enjoying Super Mario Galaxy as much as I expected. I mean, it’s a fun play, but it’s a Mario game. I think I expected to be blown out of the water by the use of the Wii’s controls and instead am just satisfied. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it just puts it in top 2-5. BioShock also deserves a spot in the top 2-5, along with Puzzle Quest and Rock Band.

That means #1 goes to Portal. I choose Portal instead of Orange Box in general because two of the things had been released before, I still haven’t played Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and while amusing I don’t think of Team Fortress 2 as anything spectacular. But Portal was the only game this year I just never wanted to stop playing. Annoying Internet obsession with Weighted Companion Cubes and Cake aside, the portal mechanic was compelling and the puzzles were engaging. I felt a great sense of satisfaction from solving the puzzles and even more when I started to think outside the straightforward solution and tear my way through levels. It was also fairly ‘subversive’ as it did interesting things with gender and violence. The most interesting game I’ve played in a long while.

Best Game Played (Not Necessarily Released this Year)

Kevin - Let’s take a trip back 5+ years to when Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was THE game. In my mind, games have long shelf-lives and often work best after fine aging. While Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is “better” in almost every regard, I could very easily play Morrowind on my computer without overtaxing everything. Though the world currently loves MMORPGs, I find that in my gaming world, hell is often other people. What better way to escape from their grasp than to plunge into a nearly endless world. Though I can’t bring myself to beat the game – and at 100+ hours, I really should – I can confidently say that Morrowind has given me my best experiences of the year. As I just purchased a PS2, I am pretty sure that next year might be a year of console exploration. But for now, shut your friends out of the house, sit back, and get re-acquainted with the single player PC RPG experience.

Bobby - I finally finished up Final Fantasy XII in October. It’s by far my favorite entry in the series to date and ranks as my third favorite RPG and second favorite PS2 game. It did everything I want out of a role-playing game. I found the gambit system to work extremely well, taking the monotony out of constant menu-commands and improving the pacing of battles. The story left a little to be desired, but its competency was complimented by some of the best voice-acting I’ve heard to date. I could listen to the woman who voiced Fran talk and Balthier make snide comments all day long. It’s a good sign when you don’t want to strangle the main male protagonist—Vaan is 100x better than Tidus. I had a great time with the game and would enjoy playing it again if I didn’t have so many other titles on my plate. I am now playing FFXII: Revenant Wings for the DS, though, which is like a temporary fix for my FFXII habit.

Best Hardware Release

Kevin - NOT GONNA LIE. My 80 gb Zune is pretty much just what the doctor ordered. Holds what I need it to, can be used for video (though that is not my scene – I own a 32 inch television for a reason), and is relatively small and space-compact. For those of you who have not heard it personally, my desire to embrace the Zune stems from my intense distaste for iTunes. It uses too many resources when it runs, it is too big on the screen, it ruthlessly overwhelms and takes-over one’s music collection. Though the iPod is a great little device, it means transporting my eMusic and Winamp loving self over to a standard which I am very much against. So, for 2007, the monstrous 80gb is a winner.

Bobby – That iPhone is pretty nifty, but its just a fancy phone. My hardware release choice is a little generic, but it’s meant to capture a growing trend. That would be the affordable notebook computer. The OLPC (one-laptop per-child) project aimed to create a $100 laptop that could be sold or donated to developing countries so that children in those education systems would at least not be so far behind the digital curve that first world countries were blazing along. The whole thing is complicated, but the gesture is nice. Everybody who wants access to computers and the Internet should be given a chance. And while the OLPC missed its mark by about $100 dollars, it had smart minds at MIT on the job. Then there’s the Intel Classmate, which has received decidedly better reviews than the OLPC and has been picked up in more countries. Even inexpensive lightweight laptops are coming on the consumer front: ASUS’s Eee PC rocks a build of Linux to do basic computer tasks starting at just $300. And have you seen low-end Dell and HP laptops lately? If all you want is a working computer, you can get an extremely cheap mass-market laptop. Basic technology should be affordable and I hope it becomes even more so in 2008.

Best Internet Service

Kevin - I have sung its praises elsewhere, but eMusic.com has become my go-to place for all things music. They are limited – only a relatively small selection of labels, incomplete catalogs for some of their holdings, and relatively weak classic rock holdings – but provide a great venue for discovering the new and the different. Since I started on eMusic in November of 2006, I’ve discovered many favorite artists (The Pharaohs, Piero Umiliani, Eric Dolphy, Gazzara, The Cinematic Orchestra, etc) and have filled in my knowledge of previous favorites. I have found several all-time favorite versions and tracks. I pay $20 a month for 10+ albums, an addiction which would cost over $100 if I were still doing it the old fashion way.

Bobby – More than anything else, I’ve enjoyed using Tumblr this year. Tumblr is a microblogging service that allows the user to post really simple entries either from scratch or other websites using a simple javascript bookmark. You can post links, quotes, chat/IM logs, pictures, and videos. Say you’re on YouTube and you find a video you want to share with your friends. You just click the special bookmark button and it will automatically pull out the video, embed it, link to it, and allow you to comment if you wish. You can also have it import feeds automatically, like your Twitter updates or Google Reader shared items. It’s a fast and easy way to get interesting material out there. Quick to post, quick to read, and generally clutterless. One of the things I like about it is that it’s built to work for people who aren’t signed up for the service, but adds another layer of functionality if you befriend other people using the service.

Favorites Website/Blog

Kevin - The internet has no shortage of film blogs. One of the very best is Greencine Daily. Greencine is a service which is comparable to Netflix but positions itself as being aimed at the the world cinephile. Though I’m not a member of the service, I like the fact that the content is backed up by very passionate people. The “Daily” blog over at Greencine contains festival reports and roundups, condensed news (beyond celebrity gossip), notices of new books, links to reviews, and much more. It is well written, generally brief, and quite comprehensive. I recommend it to all film enthusiasts.

Bobby - Thanks to Google Reader and RSS feeds, I read more stories and articles this year than probably the last five years combined. Granted, I tore through some at a blazing pace just to see a headline or the gist of the article, but anything that piqued my interest I took the time out for. It should come as no surprise that video game blogs account for at least half of the stories I read: Joystiq, Kotaku, GameSetWatch, GameSpot, Destuctoid–all great, but I did have one favorite. Chris Kohler’s Wired Games blog Game|Life was consistently interesting, well written, and had a good mix of personal and professional flavor. Most of the articles from the year are by Kohler and Susan Arendt, but even the newer contributing writers have maintained the same level of quality. The nice thing about the blog is that it doesn’t feel it has to post on every single story that comes out. You can continue to go to Joystiq or Kotaku to make sure you don’t miss a beat, and turn to Game|Life to get a couple quality stories a day. Keep up the good work in ’08, Chris and Susan.

Life-Saving Technology/Software of the Year

Kevin - We’ve got gadgets and gizmos aplenty. In all honesty, there has been nothing new in 2007 that I didn’t have access to in 2006. I will venture that one bit of technological brilliance that I discovered this year (though it has been around for a while) is Extract Now. Simple, elegant, compact, this program cleanly and effortless extracts compressed data. I still wake up nights in a cold-sweat dreaming about the terrible days of yore in which I had to use awful programs like StuffIt and WinZip on my Mac. Ugghhh.

Bobby - The Gmail Java application for my phone is actually something I don’t think I could live without. It loads my mail quickly, giving me on-the-go access to important information. Some people do this with fancy phones and e-mail services, but to be able to do it on a crappy Motorolla phone is what makes it so special. Combined with IM forwarding from AIM, my cell phone became a more useful piece of communication technology this year. I’ll e-mail myself directions or phone numbers I might need when I’m out and about. It helped keep me in touch with all the people I was e-mailing about housing when I was moving down to Atlanta. I’m not the kind of person who feels they need to be tethered to their e-mail, but I do like having the option of being there when I want to.

2007 Will Go Down as the Year…

Kevin - …of the “bad idea.” Lots of things that were started in previous years have been found to have been terrible ideas. Americans finally realized that their mortgages, which seemed too good to be true, really were too good to be true. Political discontent (with no viable outlets, just a public fiasco of an election) ruled the day, HD broadcasting ruled the night, and consumerism worked around the clock in its upward spiral to outdo itself. If this warning sounds pessimistic, it is for a reason. Out with 2007. Towards 2008. Onwards!

Bobby - …of the microcosm. Technology once shrank the Earth. We could get to far new reaches of the world in boats. We could send letters across the seas and land. We could telegraph and then call. We could transmit images and information via satellite. Then we laid a network of phone lines and Internet lines which could connect every computer to every other computer. Then the consumer got bored with expanding their horizons and turned inward. And the content producers said, “we want to keep you here so we can have your undivided attention.” I’m as guilty as anybody else, I’ll admit it. I have the news I want to read delivered to me directly and ignore the rest. I use a ton of web services that operate independently of each other. I use Xbox Live which only talks with Microsoft products. I instant message and chat with far fewer people these days than in the past. I even wrote an article talking about the need to break up the conflation of Facebook and MySpace. This wasn’t the first year of the microcosm, obviously. But it will probably be a good average year when we look back on it. Here’s to the future, whatever it may bring.

The people I want to follow are my friends and colleagues, but nobody is interested in these services. Instead people like me are left tracking folk we don’t necessarily have an investment in and basically talking to ourselves. Is there something about these services that fill a void in my life that other people have filled already? Most of my friends aren’t “all up on technology” so it’s not surprising. Is there something narcissistic about all this? It was a question raised in one of my classes recently. I’m inclined to just shoot it down, until I compare myself to my friends. Or is there something about my desire to read other people’s items that somehow validates all this?

Google just announced a new feature in Google Reader in which your friends’ shared items are made available for you to check out in your own Reader. Pretty cool, assuming your friends first have a Gmail account, and know what RSS is, and subscribe to anything to read, and share items as well. It’s an awesome feature assuming you know people who care.

I have a long history with Winamp. About as long as most people can claim. I still have the first version of Winamp that I installed on my Windows 95 Compaq a decade ago: 1.54. The exact day still appears in the “date modified” information on my current computer: September 30, 1997. My best friend at the time introduced me to this thing called an “MP3,” which I used to describe to people as “a CD quality sound file that’s not huge like WAV.” I still remember the first MP3s I downloaded. EMPD – Da Joint and Jamiroqoui – Virtual Insanity. Back then I got MP3s by going into AOL chatrooms, asking a serv to send me list of the available files, requesting songs by their number on the list, and then they’d send them to me in an e-mail. I’d leave AOL connected all night (thank God for unlimited minutes!) and let the files download. Excitedly I’d wake up in the morning and rush to my computer. “YES! Finally got Aaliyah’s ‘Are You That Somebody’ and Ginuwine’s ‘My Pony’ made it! Alright! Now I have that Blink 182 Damn’t song!” You had to work for them, but the pay-off was fantastic. Those Napster kids had no idea how easy they would get it.Napster, KaZaA (Lite), WinMX… The Wild West of MP3 file sharing. But through it all Winamp was there. It wasn’t until recently that I’ve come to grips with only having digital copies of my music. I’ve been an eMusic subscriber for the past year and am willing to buy non-DRM digital file formats. As my collection increased I outgrew Winamp a bit. I started using iTunes once I got an iPod and began using it as my primary music player once I had a computer fast enough to run it without affecting the rest of my system. It pretty much boils down to liking Cover Flow, which works for me because I like to flip through my albums visually. But though Winamp is number two on my PC, it’s still is number one in my heart.

I think I’ll download the anniversary edition of Winamp and give it a whirl. I owe it to old Nullsoft and myself. It really does whip the Llama’s ass.

So I’ll focus on the two big ones that I actually know people on. Facebook and MySpace. I’ve had Facebook for a long time since — my second year of college. As best my memory serves me, my school, the University of Virginia, was included in the third wave of schools that could register in April of 2004. First it was just Harvard, then Boston area schools, then Ivy League plus UVA and Berkley. I don’t know about non-University students, but people who signed up while in college can get a relative idea as to when they registered by looking at their profile URL. “profile.php?id=1501220″ means that UVA was the 15th school in the database and I was the 1220th person to register. This is all just to say that I’ve been using a long time and am somewhat of a Facebook (or The Facebook) traditionalist.

When Facebook started it was a way for college students to link to each other, create a profile with contact information, list (and connect through) their interests, connect through classes, leave messages on a virtual wall, and “poke” each other. Some Facebook friends were people you hung out with every day, some were classmates or people you met at an event. I remember that May when I’d walk into a computer lab to do some work and at least 10 of the screens were people checking their Facebook profiles. This was before that was even that much to do on Facebook! Before Facebook, not even MySpace was that popular on my campus. In fact, for most people I went to school with, Facebook was the first social network because it was the first that addressed their immediate circumstance of my peers — connecting with all the new people you’ve met.

Despite all the features that have been added and all the people that have been added to Facebook, I still use it for the same thing I used it for back the: staying connected and sharing information with my friends. This is something that a lot of people do not understand. Take a look at the right-hand column on the front page of Virtual Fools. You’ll never see the Facebook icon there with my other social networking sites. If you’re somebody I want to connect with I will know how to get to your Facebook profile other ways. Likewise, I will offer my connection to you if I’ve met you and spent time with you. Don’t take this as an insult, it’s just a division I’ve made to keep my life organized.

I’ve even “defriended” people who I just don’t need to keep in contact with any more. Robert Scoble, the ever-present blogger, has hit the 5,000 friend wall in Facebook. On a recent This Week in Tech, Scoble claimed that his massive amount of friends on Facebook and Twitter are all a part of the reciprocal nature of social networking. Alex Albrecht of Diggnation and the Totally Rad Show complained about the difficulty to navigate friend requests on Facebook because there’s no way to mass confirm or deny groups — a problem for Internet celebrities, not so much the average Joe. In the same episode, Kevin Rose says he switched backed to MySpace for his extrapersonal contacts. I agree with this division.

“Facebook for friends, MySpace for fans,” I say. This makes a lot of sense because MySpace has traditionally had more than just personal contacts. Until recently, MySpace was the one place where you could befriend a band or an organization or product. In doing so, you’re not really declaring that you’re friends with Hawthorne Heights, but rather that you’re a fan of theirs. The same can be true for actual people you’ve befriended on MySpace. It’s not to say that you’re not actually friends with these people, but a way to associate yourself with them that doesn’t involve needing to stay in close contact or exchanging personal information. It’s just to say, “I want to be associated with you because I think you’re worth connecting with.” “I’m a fan of you.” (Or “I will allow you to be a fan of me.”) And there’s nothing wrong with being a fan of your friends either!

Obviously this scheme doesn’t work for everybody. A lot of people have been using MySpace as their primary social network and can’t make the switch. Same goes for Facebook. But I would just like to recommend this division to simplify your life. And if we can all agree on it, nobody’s feelings get hurt.  Now this whole “fan” thing has been complicated by the recent Facebook announcement of its new “fans” feature, but really it just highlights the thing that MySpace was doing that Facebook wasn’t.

I had responded to a few things in the video in Paul’s comment section, but my comment never appeared and it wouldn’t let me double-post it.  Good thing I saved it in a text document before posting.  I decided to bring it back home and make a few of my points here.

I would be interested to compare this “study” to trends in the past.  Students have always been distracted, they just now have something else in front of them to which they turn their attention.  I won’t blindly defend laptop use in class, even though I’m a laptop person myself.  I first started using it not to take notes, but to bring PDF readings to class so that I could save paper and ink.  Pencil in hand, I would sit with the laptop out and a spiral notebook on top of the keyboard.  I also like being able to look up related information. Don’t remember who pioneered structuralism? Turn to Wikipedia for a fast fact.  Laptops don’t have to be a distraction as long as the student has self control.

Let me preface my next point by saying that I’m speaking from a humanities perspective and I know the issue changes based on which discipline you’re studying.

I know I’m in the minority: during my undergrad years and my current GT grad tenure I have done at least 90% of my reading.  I do it for a number of reasons. Firstly, I do it to expand my horizons and to focus on more than what I would need to know for an exam. Secondly, I like to be able to participate in class discussion in an informed way.  The numbers given in the video don’t really say if doing x% of the reading means that amount from all the materials assigned or only that percentage of the individual texts.  When I read I need to read it all. I feel like I’ve been assigned the reading for a reason and it’s my responsibility to take on that task — and this is where I feel a lot of people get lost.

Judging by the multitude of students I’ve chatted with in the many classes I’ve taken in my life, people who aren’t doing the reading aren’t lazy, but rather they don’t feel that the effort is equal to the results. This takes many forms: “we don’t talk about it,” “we learn everything from the readings in our lecture,” and “there’s too much given what we’re supposed to take away from it.”  I can understand these arguments. The one’s I can’t understand and can’t support are “we’re not going to be tested on it” and “this doesn’t apply to what I want to do.”

Professors and students need to meet each other half-way on the issue of reading.  Professors need to to understand that time and money are two of the most valuable things for students.  Please don’t ask us to buy a $26 book just to read one chapter out of it.  And don’t assign 200 pages of reading when 90 will produce the same result.  Also, make the reading worth our time by discussing it in class.  Students: realize that you’re professors are teaching the class for a reason and doing the assigned work can be a valuable thing. Also, reward the professors that assign reasonable amounts of work by actually participating.  A successful professor with a working teaching model might just influence other people in the department.  Most importantly, don’t be lazy and don’t forget what you’re paying thousands of dollars a year to do: learn.