Today, we are excited to present the pilot edition of a new Patrol feature: “Web Patrol,” a collection of last week’s best cultural writing on the web. We’ll troll for the best essays, columns, and reviews that you don’t have time to read, and neatly summarize them so you don’t have to.

We’ll kick off with an essay on the personalization of art by New Republic music critic David Hajdu, in the June 25 issue of TNR. Calling upon the usual suspects involved in discussions of music and technology—Radiohead and Trent Reznor—Hadju doubts that the new era of mass remixing is a progressive direction for recording. The popularity of do-it-yourself recording and the powerful capabilitiy of Apple’s GarageBand “has helped fill the pages of MySpace with fragmentary sound-alike songs, while providing countless musical neophytes with gratifying quasi-creative experiences and inflated conceptions of their musical talent.” Radiohead’s “Nude” remix project and Reznor’s solicititaions for his planned remix collection The Limitless Potential have produced tracks that are clinically modified, petri-dish concoctions that differ in only in kind, and do not create a new piece of expression or genuinely aesthetic interpretation. But most troubling, Hajdu concludes, is “the narcissism at the heart of the phenomenon of home remixing—the notion that to take a work of creative expression and make it ‘ours’ is to improve it.”

On Salon, Judy Berman hunts down the “post-college, pre-marriage” 20-something television viewer, and finds us, not surprisingly, on the internet. Not only does this demographic watch traditional television online, they are increasingly rejecting it for internet TV, a growing industry that thrives on unadorned, uncensored reality. Berman compares “Young American Bodies,” a long-running series of short episodes chronicling the entangled lives of young Chicagoans. Filled with lame, naturalistic dialogue and fly-on-the-wall (not necessarily sexual) nudity, “Young American Bodies” strikes some as an achievement, others as a bore. “It’s true that Swanberg’s plots aren’t thrilling, but they also aren’t the point. He has set out to document the lives of people like him and his friends, and at that he is wildly successful. The dialogue is so realistic that, for days after watching an episode of “Young American Bodies,” I often find myself musing that I’ve just had a very ‘Joe Swanberg’ conversation.” Berman contrasts Swansberg’s series with other less successful internet television shows, concluding that pulling off his unscripted realism is much more difficult than it seems.

In the July/August Atlantic Monthly Virginia Postrel collects the facts on “conspicuous consumerism”, or in the parlance of the demographic best known for exhibiting it, “bling.” Studies reveal that the more money you have, the less likely you are to strut about in it— that is, wealthy members of notoriously poor demographics spend a higher percentage of their income on showy wealth like overpriced clothing, gaudy jewelry, and luxury vehicles. Black families, thus, are more likely to spend their money on ostentatious displays of wealth than white families of the same income and social status. But that’s only part of the story: for any demographic, conspicuous consumerism is a developmental phase that subsides as the group gets collectively wealthier. Eventually, the luxurious purchasing power shifts from goods to services and experiences.

In Slate, Paul Collins, a nonfiction prof, wonders if modern life has killed the semicolon. After a brief history of its usage, charting its passage in and out of fashion, Collins reveals that it was ultimate the telegraph that killed the semicolon: “Perusing telegraph manuals reveals that Morse code is to the semicolon what weedkiller is to the dandelion.” You can probably skip the piece, as long as you memorize this priceless punctuation standard from the 1737 Bibliotheca Technologica: ““The comma (,) which stops the voice while you tell [count] one. The Semicolon (;) pauseth while you tell two. The Colon (:) while you tell three; and then period, or full stop (.) while you tell four.”

David Sessions is the editor of Patrol. Send suggestions for next week’s Web Patrol to editor@patrolmag.com.