Against Cool
Anja Rau weighs in on the this week's hypertext crit silliness, especially Henning Zielger's "When Hypertext Became Uncool".
When did academics like Mr. Ziegler start to worry about being cool? Did he hang out with the popular kids in high school, and does he now long to regain that feeling of being pretty and special as he walks down the hall of the JFK Institute in Berlin? Is he afraid the other kids will make fun of him if he's not cool?
Where I come from, scholars don't care about being cool: they care about being right.
Ziegler describes Storyspace as an extension of the American military-industrial complex, and casts Moulthrop as its instrument. Stuart Moulthrop?! This is, literally, idiotic.
Where do grad schools find these people, anyway?