Book cover: Serfaty's The Mirror and the VeilThis sounds like a book I’ll enjoy reading: The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs, by Viviane Serfaty, who teaches American studies at the University of Strasbourg. Hunting around I find that in 2002 she gave a talk at that conference in Paris I wished I’d been at. From the trip report at Hypertext Kitchen:

“Online diaries: Towards a Structural Approach” was an extremely interesting paper by Viviane Serfaty, in which she proposed a description of the structural characteristics of online diaries or Web logs, based in the four parameters of accumulation, open-endness, self-reflexivity and co-production.

She’s also done work on women’s creation of identity in anonymous diaries and on the Aesthetics of Al Gore’s and George Bush’s Campaign 2000 Websites. She has published a book on internet politics, which grew out of her doctoral thesis, and yet her earlier grad work was in literature. She sure sounds like someone whose work I will enjoy.

2 thoughts on “mirror and veil

  1. William Wend

    This sounds like someone I will enjoy also! Thank you for posting this.

  2. Anders Fagerjord

    Fun thingy, but it censored the three first letters of my last name: Anders ***erjord!
    Seems my name isn’t politically correct 🙂

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