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
January 31, 2014
January 30, 2014
This is one of the first references I can find to the word “technocracy.” (The only earlier one that seems to have the same feel is from one W. H. Smyth, who in an issue of a magazine called Industrial Management in 1919 wrote, “For this unique experiment in rationalized Industrial Democracy I have coined the...
January 27, 2014
In Mark Edmundson’s essay about his graduate-school days at Yale, there’s a passage that plucks my own chords of memory: The Yale English-department faculty was mostly white, male, and bald or graying. They wore ties, tweed jackets, thick glasses, and sensible shoes. Some of them even smoked pipes. It was the most aggressively senior...
January 25, 2014
For the print version of my review of Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge I added a sidebar on Pynchon and literacy. Here it is: None of the major characters in Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, and few of the minor ones, read books. References to television, music, consumer brands, and (in Edge) web-sites abound, and those references are...
January 25, 2014
I’m suffering with a rather nasty cold at the moment, which, along with the typical craziness of the start of an academic term, has slowed the pace of writing around here; but I can’t resist trying, even in this befogged condition, to say a few words in response to this typically smart post by Adam Roberts on the Narnia...
January 20, 2014
A few days ago I wrote, “Between the writers who desperate to be published and the editors desperate for “content,” the forces militating against taking time — time to read, time to think — are really powerful.” If you want evidence for that claim, you couldn’t do better than read this interview with cartoonist and writer...
January 16, 2014
In my last post I explained that I’m thinking of moving away from my Tumblr because its frictionlessness, its ease of posting and re-posting, has become somewhat problematic for me. And I said there was another reason for moving away from it, but in fact I have at least two. In my view, the number one thing that all the major social...
January 15, 2014
I’ve been writing lately about thinking — about, especially, the conditions under which thinking happens. Previous posts are, in order, here, here, here, and here. Now for another installment. I started what was used to be called a tumblelog but now is usually just called a Tumblr in March of 2007, so I was a fairly early adopter of...
January 14, 2014
There are some minds which give us the impression that they have passed through an elaborate education which was designed to initiate them into the traditions and achievements of their civilization; the immediate impression we have of them is an impression of cultivation, of the enjoyment of an inheritance. But this is not so with the...
January 13, 2014
Right after I wrote my last post I came across an interestingly related one by Tim Parks: No one is treated with more patronizing condescension than the unpublished author or, in general, the would-be artist. At best he is commiserated. At worst mocked. He has presumed to rise above others and failed. I still recall a conversation around...