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 22, 2010
I’ve written elsewhere, once or twice, about the experience of homeschooling my son Wesley. We’re still at it, and now, in the humanities portion of his curriculum, studying Dirty London — sanitation and social class in the Victorian era. He finished reading Dickens’s Bleak House last week, and today will be wrapping up Steven...
January 22, 2010
Mark Zuckerberg is probably right when he says that privacy is ceasing to be a value; and then of course there’s Scott McNealy’s notorious — and now long-ago — comment that “You have no privacy anyway. Get over it”. But I tend to think that there are degrees in these matters, and distinctions to be made. A...
January 19, 2010
Speaking of text patterns, how about these beautiful videos in text? And note the related iPhone app. (Hat tip to Matt Frost.)
January 19, 2010
Normally I think such resolutions are bad ideas, but these by Wayne Gooderham are sufficiently anti-resolutional that I like them: My Reading Resolutions are important to me for the simple reason that if I’m not reading something in which my full interest is engaged, the feeling of disaffection tends to encroach upon all other...
January 19, 2010
Nick Carr is grumpy in ways I find consistently interesting. I’m going to quote a big chunk here and commend it to your thinking apparatus: Never before in history have people paid as much for information as they do today.I’m guessing that by the time you reached the end of that sentence, you found yourself ROFLAO. I mean, WTF,...
January 18, 2010
Friends, I’ve been traveling the past few days — visiting family in Alabama, driving around in my daddy’s old pickup, eating at Chick-fil-a and Jim ‘n’ Nick’s — yeah, they’ve gotten kinda fancy and above their raisin’, what with slick websites and Twitter feeds and all, but they still serve...
January 18, 2010
Evan Maloney writes thoughtfully about how inconsistent our memories of books can be. “Are our memories of books determined by how much we enjoy them? Not for me. I read Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late in the mid-90s. I thought it was fantastic, and I never thought of it again until someone mentioned it last year....
January 14, 2010
Here’s a curious story: Three U.S. universities will stop promoting the use of Amazon.com’s Kindle DX e-book reader in classrooms after complaints that the device doesn’t give blind students equal access to information.Settlements with Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Pace University in New York City and Reed...
January 13, 2010
Kevin Kelly seems to be confused. About the (supposedly) emerging Brave New World he calls the Technium, he says, “I acknowledge the fact that multitasking and BlackBerrys and iPods and Twitter can be distracting. But we don’t really have the option of ignoring it.” But then, immediately afterwards, he says, “I think it’s...
January 12, 2010
From Christopher at Survival of the Book I learned that the last B. Dalton bookstores are closing. I can’t help but feel some nostalgia about this, because B. Dalton is one of the three employers I have had in my entire life. And my first employer. B. Dalton came to Birmingham, Alabama in the summer of 1975, when I had just...