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
May 2, 2014
One of the oddest moments of my youth came soon after I bought the LP pictured above. I ran out to get it after I heard on the radio a song from it, called “Vincent,” which struck my fourteen-year-old self as the most profound and artful and insightful and poetic thing I had ever encountered. And then, listening to the whole...
May 1, 2014
Recently, I’ve been reading a number of thoughtful posts and articles that explore what’s becoming of the self under our current technocracy. This Judith Donath piece on pseudonymity is smart, as is this more expansive meditation by Rob Horning. And then there’s a new series by Josh Glenn on codes: Each post in this series will...
April 30, 2014
Here’s an excellent post by the redoubtable AKMA on desire and interpretation, with particular reference to the “Jesus’s Wife Fragment” (JWF): For instance, why did anyone think the fragment was genuine in the first place? I am not a papyrologist, a palaeographer, or a reader of Coptic — but the early photos of the fragment...
April 23, 2014
A great many of our social ills are caused, or at least intensified, by a lack of historical imagination. Imagination looks ahead to what might be, but is always informed, whether we realize it or not, by what we think has happened up to this point. Any image of what’s to come will necessarily trace a line that extends the vector of...
April 23, 2014
The other day Vox.com ran an article claiming that the pace at which technological innovations are accepted is speeding up. The problem is, as Matt Novak pointed out, that really isn’t true. Not true at all. And then things started getting a little weird. Vox began silently to make changes to the story, at first making slight...
April 18, 2014
Yesterday Gabriel Garcia Marquez died, and suddenly my Twitter feed was full of tributes to him. Person after person recalled how deeply they had been moved by his novels and stories. And yet, I don’t believe that in the seven years I’ve been on Twitter I had ever before seen a single tweet about GGM. This has happened often on...
April 17, 2014
This essay on scholarly documentation practices lays down some very useful principles — for some scholars working in some circumstances. Unfortunately, the author, Patrick Dunleavy, assumes a situation that doesn’t yet exist and may not for some time to come. Dunleavy presents as normative, indeed nearly universal, a situation in...
April 14, 2014
I hate to be a party pooper — no, really: I hate it — but I just don’t think Levi Stahl has found an emoticon in a seventeenth-century poem — nor, for that matter, that Jennifer 8. Lee found one from 1862. About Stahl and Robert Herrick. If we were really serious about finding out whether Robert Herrick had used an emoticon,...
April 13, 2014
Recently Quentin Hardy, the outstanding technology writer for the New York Times, tweeted this: Why machine-led systems thinking is destroying the culture: A talk with Simon Head http://t.co/2NGe2qORTf — Quentin Hardy (@qhardy) April 13, 2014 If you follow the embedded link you’ll see that Head argues that algorithm-based...
April 13, 2014
Auden on Ischia, by George Daniell From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, W. H. Auden spent part of each year on the Island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. When he bought a small house in Austria and left Italy, he wrote a lovely and funny poem called “Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno” in which he reflected on how he, as the child...