Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
September 7, 2009
September 5, 2009
See those four numbers? Those are the four beats. Four stresses, as we say in the meter business. Tetrameter. Four. “Tetra” is four. Like Tetris, that computer game where the squares come down relentlessly and overwhelm your mind with their crude geometry and make you peck at the arrow keys like some mindless experimental...
September 4, 2009
September 4, 2009
Marshall McLuhan by Yousuf Karsh, from an interesting site introducing the work of McLuhan and Harold Innis. The descriptions of their ideas are rather basic and in some respects inaccurate, but the site is worth checking out all the same.
September 4, 2009
Whatever I do as a writer, it seems that as a reader I am going to be forced to choose between Google and Amazon. I think here of Hamlet’s words: 'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes Between the pass and fell incensed points Of mighty opposites. Guys, whatever you do, just don't be evil, okay?
September 4, 2009
Sorry for the light posting — I’ve been a bit under the weather. Here are a few links to keep you occupied: The British Library’s Sound Archive is amazing. Cushing Academy in Massachusetts is getting rid of its books. Who needs a library when you can have a “learning center” with big-screen TVs and a $12,000...
September 2, 2009
September 2, 2009
Peter Wood wants some help. On behalf of the National Association of Scholars, he is asking, Who are the key authors and what are the key books in the liberal, conservative, libertarian and radical traditions? The National Association of Scholars is designing a project to examine how political theory is conveyed in the American...
September 2, 2009
Welcome to the new Text Patterns, with fluffier pillows and a mini-fridge in every room! Our new platform (Blogger) will make it easier and more fun for me to post here, and will make commenting much less painful as well. Many thanks to Adam Keiper and Ari Schulman for their hard and good work in making this transition happen. In other...
August 31, 2009
Eyal Ophir, the study’s lead investigator and a researcher at Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, said: "We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out,...