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 24, 2011
I’m finding Winner’s core arguments rather elusive. I am not sure whether that’s my fult as reader or his as writer, but I think that he’s trying awfully hard not to settle for simplistic answers and as a result ends up offering no clear answers at all. As best I can understand it, the chapter “Techne and Politeia” is...
January 24, 2011
I don’t think Apple will be able to continue its string of glorious successes without Steve Jobs at the helm. First, Jobs has the highest imaginable standards for product usability: he listens to that little internal voice which most of us, if we ever hear that voice at all, try to suppress — the voice that says, “This...
January 21, 2011
Just a couple of brief points from Winner’s second chapter. First, he argues very compellingly that we would be wrong to think that new technologies are adopted wholly, or even largely, for reasons of efficiency. For instance, he points out that in the 1880s, in Cyrus McCormick’s reaper manufacturing plant in Chicago,...
January 19, 2011
The second chapter of The Whale and the Reactor is titled “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, and it is concerned with the relations between technology and various forms of political life. Winner rightly points out that skeptics and celebrants of technology alike have often insisted that there is a tight bond between technology and...
January 18, 2011
Mandy Brown: A leaked slide suggests that Yahoo will shutdown Delicious. Gary Vaynerchuk announces that Cork’d will come to an end. Two years ago, Ma.gnolia experienced catastrophic data loss, taking thousands of bookmarks with it, mine included. Around the same time, Yahoo (sadly, a recurring player on this stage) killed Geocities....
January 17, 2011
Lorrie Moore says, “Send Huck Finn to College“:There are other books more appropriate for an introduction to serious reading. (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” with its social-class caricatures and racially naïve narrator, is not one of them.) Sherman Alexie’s “Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time...
January 17, 2011
I want to agree with part of a recent post by Nick Carr and disagree with another part. Here’s the part I agree with: Kirsch says that T. S. Eliot “had to include notes” to “The Waste Land” in order to enable readers to “track down” its many allusions. The truth is different. The first publications...
January 15, 2011
Have you ever looked at the sheer number of works available at Oxford reference Online? It’s staggering — and this is first-rate stuff, too. However, subscriptions are quite expensive, beyond the reach of most individual users: obviously Oxford is selling these resources primarily to libraries, especially university libraries. Fair...
January 15, 2011
January 13, 2011
When Winner wrote The Whale and the Reactor, in the mid-1980s, personal computers were not yet ubiquitous. I had bought my first computer — the original Macintosh, which still sits in my basement — in the spring of 1985, so that I might have a chance to finish my dissertation while I still had a job. (It was a full-time but temporary...