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
May 7, 2009
Brian Appleyard: "The truth is that if the web makes no money or, at least, not enough to sustain proper news operations – and it doesn't – then you will either get no proper news or just none on the web. Think on, as they say where I come from, you need Ink, all of you, and one way or another you will have to pay...
May 7, 2009
Brendan has it exactly right: "The trend right now is smaller and smaller devices that allow you to multitask anything anytime from one device. Having a device that’s locked down to a single purpose really doesn’t help students achieve what they want. There’s a reason no one carries around 1) an MP3...
May 6, 2009
May 5, 2009
Courtesy of my New Atlantis colleague Ari Schulman I see this article by Alastair Croll lamenting that his "inbox is broken . . . in a fundamental, inboxes-will-never-be-the-same-again kind of way." Only a minority of items in his recent email inbox, he says, were conversations he had with other folks; the rest...
May 5, 2009
Book from the Sky, by Xu Bing:What's on those sheets on the floor? Here's a close-up:Well, those certainly look like traditional Chinese characters to me. But since I can't read Chinese, I'm not really in any position to know that they're not.
May 4, 2009
Though this is an excellent Q&A on the Google Book Settlement from Wired, I am as far as ever from understanding what I should do about my own books. I don't understand what the consequences will be if I sign up with Google, and I don't understand what the consequences will be if I don't. On a rather different note, some...
May 4, 2009
Following up on two earlier posts about the realtive merits of the traditional and simplified Chinese characters, I'd like to note this debate in the Paper of Record. I don't see any consensus emerging here. It's hard for me not to be sympathetic with the proponents of traditional characters, given how intricately they are...
May 3, 2009
The pleasures of the new World Digital Library are many and immensely varied. Check out this picture: “Indian Demons Attacking Fort Defended by European Troops.” This unsigned watercolor by an unknown Indian artist depicts the events of the Third Mysore War (1790-92). Or how about this, from a section called “Romance...
April 30, 2009
Steven Frank, on the recently released screenshots of Office 2010: Part of the reason my reaction was so negative was that, in my mind, I was trying to walk through a phone conversation with a hypothetical family member who was struggling with that window. It’s not hard to imagine: “OK, now click on the delete button....
April 29, 2009
One small but, to me, significant point that Steven Johnson raises in his recent essay on e-reading is the increasingly evident need for something like a URL — a Universal Record Locator — for books. Without this, the utopian dreams of connecting the world of readers are bound to failure. For centuries, we've had an...