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 19, 2016
The tragically naïve idea that algorithms are neutral and unbiased and other-than-human is a long-term concern of mine, so of course I am very pleased to see this essay by Zeynep Tufecki: Software giants would like us to believe their algorithms are objective and neutral, so they can avoid responsibility for their enormous power as...
May 17, 2016
My good friend and former colleague Richard Gibson has recently started a blog on books and textuality and reading and all that sort of thing, and this new post is fascinating. Read it with care, but in brief Richard is exploring the contrast (made much of by Ivan Illich) between the monastic book and the scholastic book, and how that...
May 16, 2016
The intimate relationship between the printing press and the Reformation has long been understood, and if anything has been overstressed. What has been comparatively neglected, in part because it has left so faint a historical record, is what for lack of a better phrase we might call the European postal system. That phrase is not ideal...
May 13, 2016
[SPOILER ALERT, I GUESS, EVEN THOUGH I DON’T REVEAL ANY DETAILS] I just finished reading Paul McAuley’s Confluence trilogy and now I’m extremely annoyed. The reason? Very, very close to the end of this 900-page novel it turns into a time-travel story, and I really, really hate time-travel stories. If I know in advance that a story...
May 10, 2016
Many people writing about the new Captain America: Civil War have commented on what seems to them a fundamental irony driving the story: that Tony Stark, the self-described “genius billionaire playboy philanthropist” who always does his own thing, agrees to the Sokovia Accords that place the Avengers under international political...
May 9, 2016
A good many people — some of them very smart — are praising this post by Steven Sinofsky on “platform shifts” — in particular, the shift from PCs to tablets. I, however, think it’s a terrible piece, because it’s based on three assumptions that Sinofsky doesn’t know are assumptions: Assumption the first: “The reality...
May 7, 2016
Over the past few months I’ve thought from time to time about this Planet Money episode on A/B testing. The episode illustrates the power of such testing by describing how people at NPR created two openings for an episode of the podcast, and sent one version out to some podcast subscribers and the second to others. Then they looked at...
May 2, 2016
Disclosure: IANADH (I am not a digital humanist), but I did get my PhD from the University of Virginia. There’s a good deal of buzzing in the DH world about this critique of the field by Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, David Golumbia — hereafter ABG — whose argument is that DH’s “most significant contribution to academic...
April 22, 2016
I recently gave some talks to a gathering of clergy that focused on the effects of digital technology on the cultivation of traditional Christian practices, especially the more contemplative ones. But when I talked about the dangers of having certain massive tech companies — especially the social-media giants: Facebook, Twitter,...
April 22, 2016
Remember me? I used to blog here, back in the day. I stepped away because I was working on a book that overlapped a bit too much with the typical subjects of this blog; but things have changed a bit. A good bit. The plan then was to write a short book that expanded on these Theses for Disputation — but it proved to be impossible...