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
April 20, 2009
Nicholas Carr: Hashmobs [transfer] the flashmob concept into a purely realtime environment. A hashmob is a virtual mob that exists entirely within the Twitter realtime stream. It derives its name not from any kind of illicit pipeweed but from the "hashtags" that are commonly used to categorize tweets. Hashtags take the form of...
April 20, 2009
You may recall that there was a significant controversy (I think technically it was a "kerfuffle") a while back about Dmitri Nabokov's decision to have his father's final, unfinished novel published — in defiance of his father's explicit request that the notes for the book be destroyed. But here's...
April 20, 2009
My friends and former students David Michael and Kristen Scharold, along with some other smart folks, have started an online magazine: Wunderkammer Magazine. It debuts today, so check it out.
April 20, 2009
I really love Scott McCloud's seminal guide Understanding Comics, but in general I'm not a big fan of McCloud's work. And that work hasn't gotten better as, for the last decade or so, he has explored web-based and other post-print media in what seem to be uncertain and half-hearted ways. A case in point is his...
April 18, 2009
In one of my classes we've been reading and discussing three autobiographical stories — three versions of memoir, you might say: Augustine's Confessions, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. The other day I remarked to the class that all three of these authors are, in their varying...
April 17, 2009
I commend to you all the excellent comments by — darn these pseudonyms! — some Biblical verse and nadezhda on this post . You will be glad you invested the time.
April 16, 2009
This has been an overwhelmingly busy week, so posting has been light, but I have to pause in the midst of the uproar to commend to you Ted Striphas's website The Late Age of Print — and to point out that the book of that name, published by Columbia University Press, is now available as a PDF download under a Creative Commons...
April 14, 2009
A great idea from Michael Bhaskar: I’m convinced that all reading relies on rhythm in some way, a rhythm that is signified by breaks in the text. Turning the page establishes a certain rhythm, just as swiping a page on the iPhone does, or even the lines between tweets. Nonetheless what remains consistent is that we rely on the...
April 14, 2009
Mark Bauerlein of Emory University is concerned about the “production line” of little-read and little-noticed scholarship in the humanities, and the extent to which it distracts from teaching — especially the teaching of undergraduates. (PDF here.) He makes the following recommendations: • The Modern Language...
April 11, 2009
Interesting stuff : When it comes to Google and other aggregators, newspapers face a sort of prisoners' dilemma. If one of them escapes, their competitors will pick up the traffic they lose. But if all of them stay, none of them will ever get enough traffic to make sufficient money. So they all stay in the prison, occasionally...