e-Pages: Why?

[barclay_barrios]

So I’m about to try something new this semester—new for me, new for the second edition of Emerging, and (I think) new for many other Bedford texts as well: e-Pages.  E-Pages are readings that exist only online, like chapters of a textbook that only exist in virtual space but are nevertheless connected to the rest of the print edition.  My students and I are about to read one of these selections, Susan Rubin Erdely’s “Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played with Fire.” Why have e-Pages at all?  For some of the selections we’ve included in the new edition, it’s simply necessary (such as the video from Wired.com); for others, hosting them online preserves rich features such as images and links (such as Erdely).  I’ve already covered why there isn’t an entire “e” version of Emerging in a previous blog post; e-Pages is a start. This selection in particular is also doing double duty for us in class.  We’ve been using Rachel Kadish’s “Who Is This Man and Why Is He Screaming?” and Peter Singer’s “Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets” to think about issues of privacy and property in the online world.  Not only does Erdely’s piece advance this discussion but reading it online itself raises questions of privacy and property, permissions and access, protections and openness. I’m not sure how it’s going to go.  Reading online is, from my experience, different from reading print.  But honestly I chose the piece because I wanted to give this e-Pages thing a good test drive.  I’ll let you know how it goes.