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
June 2, 2009
I read this some months ago but have unaccountably neglected to link to it — an essay by John Parker on why we should be hopeful about what he calls "the expanding market for intelligence": One of the commonest complaints by cultural doomsayers is that nobody reads good books any more. Yet in the past two years, the Oprah...
June 1, 2009
Some doubts about Google Wave. The estimable Ted Striphas asks whether Google’s foray into e-book sales is likely to succeed. David Kelly asks about re-reading classic books only to be disappointed. Enjoy!
June 1, 2009
I just finished reading David Post’s quirky book In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, and I’m not quite sure what to say about it. At the end of the book Post confesses that his editor wanted him to clarify whether he was writing a book about Thomas Jefferson or about the Internet, and...
May 29, 2009
Mark Helprin's new book Digital Barbarism is shockingly bad; Larry Lessig explains why here.
May 29, 2009
Tim O'Reilly has a post up today about Google Wave, the new project-in-development by Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the primary creators of Google Maps. According to O'Reilly, Lars describes the project in this way: "We set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?"...
May 28, 2009
Could e-books provide a way of getting expansive intellectual resources into the hands of poor and historically deprived people — say, in South Africa? Over at The Digitalist, Michael Bhaskar says . . . Maybe. A great idea, but one fraught with challenges. And if the possibilities are so iffy in South Africa, which has a stronger...
May 27, 2009
Sam Anderson’s argument that “unwavering focus . . . can actually be just as problematic as ADHD” is the conclusion that follows from this paragraph: My favorite focusing exercise comes from William James: Draw a dot on a piece of paper, then pay attention to it for as long as you can. (Sitting in my office one...
May 26, 2009
“The Internet is basically a Skinner box engineered to tap right into our deepest mechanisms of addiction.” — Sam Anderson Anderson continues: As B. F. Skinner’s army of lever-pressing rats and pigeons taught us, the most irresistible reward schedule is not, counterintuitively, the one in which we’re...
May 25, 2009
Richard Fortey is a fine writer of books for laypeople about science, and for many years was the “trilobite man” at the Natural History Museum in London. I love museums in general, and natural history museums in particular, and Fortey’s home institution perhaps best of all (though I also have a great fondness for...
May 22, 2009
To John McWhorter's suggestion that we should start performing Shakespeare's plays in translation, D. H. Lawrence has the best answer.