Increasingly the conversion of smilies into cute little graphics by various software programs is looking juvenile, like an incorrect solution to what is clearly a problem based in punctuation. Consider the way that punctuation is essential to the creation of meaning in this singular statement:
Mary Ellen Bute (1906 1983) was originally trained as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. After graduating in the early 1920s, she moved to New York and became involved with the same concerns with movement, rhythm and synaesthetic form that were common to the European avant-garde before World War II. Her engagement with these issues is apparent through her associations: she was closely involved with the community of visual music inventors and musicians in New York in the 1920s and early 1930s. During this period, she worked in the studio of Leon Theremin, and it is likely that through this connection she encountered Schillinger who was collaborating with Theremin on the development of the electronic musical instrument that bears his name; Bute read the paper about this instrument while Theremin demonstrated it to the New York Musicological Society. She would later also work in Thomas Wilfreds studio, learning to perform on the Clavilux.
The on-demand delivery of media via streaming downloads is the digital analogue to the shift from inventory to production as needed. This appeared first in publishing with the development of digital presses and the ability to economically produce just one copy of a publication, eliminating the need to actually stock books in physical form. As this model of production spreads, expect ever greater dislocations of traditional production, but also expect the loss of the store where one can actually browse and inspect manufactured products prior to purchase.
