Michelle Quinn of the New York Times writes on her Bay Area Blog that the Sabbath Manifesto’s National Day of Unplugging finally hooked her with its Yelp poem:
“I am typing fast because at sundown (7:20 p.m.), I plan to join in the first National Day of Unplugging and turn my electronic devices off until sundown Saturday. The effort, reported in The New York Times and elsewhere, is the brainchild of Reboot, a nonprofit organization of Jewish professionals who want to adapt the concept of Sabbath traditions to the digital age.
I thought at first, yadda yadda yadda. Go ahead and unplug, everyone. But then I saw “Yelp,” the YouTube video above by Ken Goldberg and Tiffany Shlain. It uses Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as the muse for a short video promoting the day of unplugging. Having just reread “Howl” for a post on the movie about Mr. Ginsberg’s life, I felt “Yelp” kept somehow true to the poem, even if the creators mixed Mr. Ginsberg’s visceral words with the less-visceral brand names of the soon-to-be-disconnected digisphere: Google, iPhone, Facebook.
Read the entire posting here.