Humane Ingenuity newsletter: Bookwork and Cloud Labs

I found Whitney Trettien’s wonderful new book Cut/Copy/Paste to be perfect reading for those of us trying to understand and design the new forms of writing, like newsletters, that have surfaced in digital media.

How do early modern media underlie today’s digital creativity?

There is no model consciously shaping the form of this newsletter, or some of the other free newsletters that I read. Obviously that’s not the case for Substackers and big media newsletters. Yet there does seem to be a fairly common format in the genre of the newsletter — one of assemblage and pastiche with commentary, shown here.

For that reason I found Whitney Trettien’s wonderful new book Cut/Copy/Paste to be perfect reading for those of us trying to understand and design the new forms of writing, like newsletters, that have surfaced in digital media. Trettien’s book is a diverse collection of assemblages, including religious books that have been spliced together, reimagined works of poetry, and scrapbooks.

Full newsletter at DanCohen.org