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
July 20, 2015
Sarah Jeong’s short book The Internet of Garbage is very well done, and rather sobering, and I recommend it to you. The argument of the book goes something like this: 1) Human societies produce garbage. 2) Properly-functioning human societies develop ways of disposing of garbage, lest it choke out, or make inaccessible, all the things...
July 16, 2015
In the first five pages of The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters says that media are “devices of information” “agencies of order” “constitutive parts of … our ecological and economic systems” “vessels and environments” “containers of possibility that anchor our existence” “vehicles that carry and...
July 13, 2015
Ivan Illich, “Philosophy… Artifacts… Friendship” (1996): The person today who feels called to a life of prayer and charity cannot eschew an intellectual grounding in the critique of perceptions, because beyond things, our perceptions are to a large extent technogenic. Both the thing perceived and the mode of...
July 13, 2015
Every few days, it seems, I come across a rueful, even mournful citation of T. S. Eliot: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” But it’s possible to make these distinctions in ways that are not so tendentious. One might think along these lines: information: “A...
July 8, 2015
One way to pursue the technological history of modernity is to try to understand how news and ideas got around at any given time. For instance, I wrote a short piece last year about Baron von Grimm, who created, helped to write, and distributed a newsletter that kept wealthy and literate citizens of 18th-century France informed about...
July 7, 2015
Here’s a response from John Durham Peters to my 79 Theses on Technology. However, I’m not quite sure what sort of a response it is. It could be a dissent, or it could be just a riff on some of the themes I introduced. For instance, Peters writes, “We humans never do anything without technique, so we shouldn’t pretend there is any...
July 3, 2015
How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement, by Lambros Malafouris, is a maddening but also fascinating book that is seriously helping me to think through some of the issues that concern me. Malafouris wants to argue that the human mind is “embodied, extended, enacted, and distributed” — extensive rather than...
July 1, 2015
If there is any one general topic that has preoccupied me in the last decade, it’s … well, it’s hard to put in a phrase. Let’s try this: The ways that technocratic modernity has changed the possibilities for religious belief, and the understanding of those changes that we get from studying the literature that has been...
July 1, 2015
So far there have been three widely influential stories about the rise of modernity: the Emancipatory, the Protestant, and the Neo-Thomist. The Emancipatory account argues that modernity is fundamentally about the use of rediscovered classical learning, especially the Skeptics and Epicureans in their literary and philosophical modes, to...
June 29, 2015
This is the Widows Creek power plant on the Tennessee River in Alabama, soon to become a Google data center. Or Google will use the site, anyway — I’m not sure about the future of the buildings. Big chunks of riverfront land are highly desirable to any company that processes a lot of data, because the water can be circulated...