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
December 10, 2009
When my colleague Adam Keiper wrote his incisive review of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, little did he or Mr. Mayer-Schönberger know that Tiger Woods would show up to illustrate the dangers of an environment in which everything is remembered. Or did they know . . . ?The fear of losing...
December 9, 2009
As I have commented on several occasions, errors like the ones noted in my previous post often occur because people are working with a reductive and simplistic notion of what “the screen” is like. But as I have said before, often, there are may different kinds of screens, and we interact with them in different ways.Let’s keep that...
December 9, 2009
James Higgs writes: When I buy a book, I’m buying a physical, real world object that has properties that can be appreciated beyond the words it contains. It can be beautifully bound, use attractive design elements, have respect for typography, and use the physical properties of the medium as part of the content.For this last, I direct...
December 8, 2009
while we’re on the subject of the difficulties of the writing life, here’s another great Letters of Note entry, this one reproducing the form letter that Robert A. Heinlein sent in reply to every letter he received: Robert A. HeinleinCare of Mr. Lurton Blassirigame60 East 42nd Street, Suite 1131New York, N.Y. 10017 Dear...
December 8, 2009
Two years ago, soon after the release of her novel The Maytrees, Annie Dillard said — it wasn’t a formal announcement, just a comment, but apparently a thoroughly considered one — that she was retiring from writing, and from all the . . . stuff that accompanies the life of a writer: book tours, public readings, and so on. “I’m...
December 7, 2009
Continuing the email theme, here’s a familiar lament from Megan Marshall: email is so impersonal in comparison to handwritten letters: “Please keep me alive with letters,” wrote V.S. Naipaul in 1952 from Oxford to his sister Kamla in Trinidad. Nineteen and devastated by the rejection of his first novel, he was suffering from a...
December 7, 2009
Nick Bilton’s “10 Proposals for Fixing the E-mail Glut” is mostly silly — limit emails to 140 characters? — but has one legitimately interesting idea: Clay Shirky, author of the book “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” believes that “we don’t have information overload; we have...
December 3, 2009
If any of you are trying to comment but having difficulties, please let me know by posting a comment below . . . Wait, that won’t work. Okay, so try sending me an email at “jacobsar” followed by the “at” symbol followed by gmail.com. When I try to post a comment, using my Google ID, and click...
December 2, 2009
Lisa Galarneau has recently completed a doctoral dissertation on (I think — some broken links prevent me from being sure) the culture of video gaming, and she’s not happy with her defense committee: some of them think she’s too purely celebratory of online/digital life, and want her either to be more critical or to take potential...
December 1, 2009
The recovery of an ancient European culture, described here. Wonderful stuff. (But I never have liked this kind of graphic: no logical connection between the information presented and the organization of the visual field. Dorling Kindersley books do a lot of this kind of thing, and while it’s often very pretty to look at, it...