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 6, 2015
I bought my first Apple product — the original Macintosh — almost exactly thirty years ago. I have never been as frustrated with Apple products as I am now. Not even close. A great many of these issues involve communications among machines: on the Mac, Yosemite brought a host of wifi problems; on iOS, Bluetooth has been borked for...
May 5, 2015
A few random thoughts about Avengers: Age of Ultron: It’s fun. It needed two fewer massive battle set-pieces. James Spader’s Ultron voice is wonderfully creepy and sleazy. (By the way, don’t we live in the Golden Age of voice acting? I think Pixar is largely responsible for this.) Joss Whedon knows that his job as director is...
May 4, 2015
Matt Gemmell: The problem with notifications is that they occupy the junction of several unhealthy human characteristics: social pressure of timely response, a need for diversion, and our constant thirst for novelty. Mobile devices exacerbate that issue by letting us succumb to all of those at any moment. That’s not a good thing. I’m...
May 4, 2015
One of the stories often told by fans of the Inklings — C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and their friends — is that their great success is a kind of “revenge of the outsiders” story: writers whose ideas were rejected by the cultural elite end in triumph. The story’s origins lie with the Inklings themselves: so they conceived...
May 2, 2015
This is a kind of thematic follow-up to my previous post. A few weeks ago Nick Carr posted a quotation from this 1969 article by Paul Goodman: “Can Technology Be Humane?” I had never heard of it, but it’s quite fascinating. Here’s an interesting excerpt: For three hundred years, science and scientific technology had an...
May 2, 2015
Erik Davis has written a new afterword to his 1989 book TechGnosis, and it’s very much worth a read. It’s a reminder of that wing of contemporary tech culture that grows quite directly out of Sixties counterculture, with Steward Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog as one of the chief midwives of the transition. I think TechGnosis continues...
May 1, 2015
About e-reading: a kind of Standard Model has emerged among book-lovers. For example: One of the most imperishable notions ever set down about a personal library can be found inside Sven Birkerts’s essay “Notes from a Confession.” Birkerts speaks of “that kind of reading which is just looking at books,” of the “expectant...
April 30, 2015
I don’t know the source of the above image — it came from this tweet — but if it’s accurate it makes nonsense of the claim, made by writers protesting PEN’s award to Charlie Hebdo, that by giving the award “PEN is not simply conveying support for freedom of expression, but also valorizing selectively...
April 29, 2015
I’ve written before, in these digital pages, about Facebook, for which I have … I started to say “an irrational hatred,” but I think it’s actually a very rational hatred. The great Warren Ellis helps us understand why Facebook is so eminently and rationally hateable.
April 28, 2015
A does something to B. (Maybe A shoots B; maybe A refuses to bake a cake for B. It doesn’t signify.) Social media pick up the story of what A did to B. Some members of Group Y are outraged at what A did to B, and demand swift retribution. Some other members of Group Y to are also outraged by what A did to B, but hesitate to commit...