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
February 3, 2011
Reading the first few pages of The New Atlantis, I was surprised by its effusive piety. God is invoked at every turn, and our narrator places particular emphasis on the Christian orthodoxy of the people of Bensalem. I was surprised because not only is Bacon not noted for his devotion to Christianity, but he was often in his own day...
February 1, 2011
I’ve been teaching The Lord of the Rings pretty much every year for the past decade, and as a result my old copy of the one-volume paperback edition has gotten quite battered. Moreover, I shouldn’t even be using it, since a revised edition, with many (mostly minor) corrections to the text, came out a few years ago. That’s the one I...
February 1, 2011
I think I may continue, at least from time to time, this practice of book-blogging. I hope no one minds. But even if you do mind, I’ll probably do it anyway. I am an independent-minded blogger. Anyway, I was thinking that if I can blog my way through a book that’s twenty-five years old, why not blog my way through one...
January 31, 2011
The Mississippi river system as an Underground-style map. More info here; thanks to Matt Frost for the tip.
January 30, 2011
As I mentioned the other day, the Shirky/Doctorow thesis is that the internet in general and social media in particular tend to generate political freedom; the Evgeny Morozov thesis is that those media tend to enable governmental surveillance and control of protestors and dissidents. My question is: why are we so determined to speak in...
January 28, 2011
Let me conclude these posts on Winner’s book by looking at its third and last section, “Excess and Limit.” Winner’s approach throughout the book has been to pursue (as the book’s subtitle has it) “a search for limits in an age of high technology”; his assumption throughout has been that limits on technology are indeed...
January 27, 2011
It was a remarkable experience to read Winner’s sixth chapter, “Mythinformation,” in the light of some recent online debates. Continuing his attempt to think in a seriously political way about technology, Winner is here concerned with the technological uses of the language of revolution: It seems all but impossible for computer...
January 26, 2011
The idea that Reagan Ruined Everything seems to dominate, silently, the next chapter, “Decentralization Clarified.” I take this passage from its last paragraph to be its central idea: In Kropotkin’s of G. D. H. Cole’s time it was still possible to imagine an entire modern social order based upon small-scale, directly democratic,...
January 25, 2011
Tim Spalding: We used to own our books. With most ebooks we own them in name, but effectively we lease them. As Jane documents, the slide toward more and more attenuated concepts of ownership continues. The process is gradual. Mental models change slower than technology. If the Kindle had debuted with an access-based “faucet” model,...
January 25, 2011
Winner’s chapter “Building a Better Mousetrap” contains a wonderful brief history of “appropriate technology” movements — especially since the rise of the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s. It is as a history that the chapter is best read, because Winner’s summary of these fascinating movements ends with this ludicrous...