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
September 24, 2010
Conor Friedersdorf sends me a link to this story about attempts to recover and reassemble the libraries of dead writers. Sad and curious. . . . But of course — someone has to ask this question, so it might as well be me — what about future writers whose libraries are partly or largely contained in their e-readers? You could hold in...
September 23, 2010
Please watch this video about the future of the book. (I could embed it, but it would be too small.) Did you see it? Okay, then, some thoughts: 1) Nelson is for people who don’t know what they think about something until they know what other people think. Note that there’s no reading involved, but rather assessments of value,...
September 22, 2010
I’m not so interested in the question of how Wikipedia reveals the ending of The Mousetrap, but I am interested in how Ruth Franklin, in her eviscerating but largely accurate review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom in this week’s New Republic, reveals pretty much everything that happens in the book, even quoting its powerful final...
September 21, 2010
And from the same issue of the New York Times Magazine, these important thoughts from Jaron Lanier: We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen. What is wrong with this is not that students are any lazier now or learning...
September 20, 2010
I tend to get frustrated by Kevin Kelly’s technophilia, but this account of his experiences teaching his son at home (a) resonates with my own homeschooling adventures and (b) makes a ton of sense. I especially like this set of principles about technology that he and his wife tried to impart to their eighth-grader: Every new technology...
September 16, 2010
Yes, the desk is made of books! (Via Survival of the Book.) (Not really the kind of survival we book-lovers want, but still: awesome.) I’ll be traveling for the next few days, so please forgive the upcoming radio silence.
September 15, 2010
I think a lot about — and probably will be writing more about — my feeling that what literary types like to call “genre fiction” is, pretty inexorably, displacing conventional realistic literary fiction as “the abstract and brief chronicle of our time.” In a recent interview, William Gibson gives a partial explanation for...
September 14, 2010
September 14, 2010
Kevin Kelly has a book coming out soon called What Technology Wants. Kevin, meet Leo Marx: We amplify the hazardous character of the concept by investing it with agency — by using the word technology as the subject of active verbs. Take, for example, a stock historical generalization such as: “the cotton-picking machine transformed...
September 13, 2010
In my last post about Infinite Jest I mentioned the philosophical-theological-spiritual problem of the interesting. With that in mind, it’s . . . um . . . interesting? — no, let’s say it’s thought-provoking to note this excerpt from The Pale King, the novel Wallace left unfinished at his death. Here Lane Dean, Jr., a worker for...