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
June 19, 2017
Q: Why are you reading all this stuff, anyway? It seems pretty obvious that you don’t have much sympathy for it. A: That’s a good question. I could give several answers. For one thing, I’m not as lacking in sympathy as you think. I have respect for any good-faith attempts to reckon with the immensely vexed question of what it means...
June 17, 2017
Lately I’ve been reading the philosopher Timothy Morton, who has a lot to say about living in the Anthropocene, and I see that he has a forthcoming book called Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People. On his website the book is described thus: What is it that makes humans human? As science and technology challenge the...
June 16, 2017
This is a fabulous idea by Mark Sample: studying digital culture through file types. He mentions MP3, GIF, HTML, and JSON, but of course there are many others worthy of attention. Let me mention just two: XML: XML is remarkably pervasive, providing the underlying document structure for things ranging from RSS and Atom feeds to office...
June 16, 2017
The New York Times is wrong about a great many things these days, but it’s certainly right about this: men really do interrupt women All. The. Time. (And the NYT has covered this story before.) I have seen the phenomenon myself in many faculty meetings over the years, and it’s especially painful when a woman sits in silence...
June 16, 2017
Google Scholar has just added a set of what it calls Classic papers: “Classic papers are highly-cited papers in their area of research that have stood the test of time. For each area, we list the ten most-cited articles that were published ten years earlier.” The problem here is the equating of frequent citation with...
June 15, 2017
This provocative post by Alec Ryrie asks an important question: Why is our culture’s dystopian imagination so absolute? Drawing on a recent history thesis by Olive Hornby that describes outbreaks of plague in early-modern England during which between a third and half of the people in some communities died. Not all but a handful, not...
June 14, 2017
Here we have Siddhartha Deb making precisely the same inexplicable error that Amitav Ghosh, whom he quotes, made last year — a mistake on which I commented at the time. The thought sequence goes like this: 1) Declare yourself interested only in “literary” fiction; 2) Define literary fiction as a genre concerned only with the...
June 14, 2017
Peter Suderman writes about playing the video game Mass Effect: Andromeda, The game boasts an intricate conversation system, and a substantial portion of the playtime is spent talking to in-game characters, quizzing them for information (much of which adds color but is ultimately irrelevant), asking them for assignments, relaying details...
June 13, 2017
Another music post… Nearly thirty years ago now I bought a CD on pure impulse, knowing almost nothing about the performers: When in Rome, by the Penguin Café Orchestra. You’ve probably heard some of their songs: “Perpetuum Mobile” — in 15/8 time! — or “Telephone and Rubber Band”, though maybe not my favorite of their...
June 12, 2017
A few years ago the German pianist/composer/producer Nils Frahm fell out of bed and broke his thumb. As he later recalled, All of a sudden I had so much time, an unexpected holiday. I cancelled most of my schedule and found myself being a little bored. Even though my doctor told me not to touch a piano for a while, I just couldn’t...