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
August 22, 2014
Last night I posted to my tumblelog some thoughts about what Rod Dreher calls the Benedict option: a kind of Christian retreat from engagement with the larger world. Among other things, I said that the life of Jesus embodies a kind of systolic/diastolic alternation between public ministry and private retreat — with intermediate...
August 21, 2014
The Flight of the Conchords’ “Carol Brown (Choir of Ex-Girlfriends)” is an exemplary case study in the intertextualty of the comic song, or rather, the parodic-travestying song (see Bakhtin, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”). Its major and obvious debts are to two previous popular songs, one American and one...
August 20, 2014
Ever since the Harry Ransom Center acquired the papers of David Foster Wallace and started posting photos of his annotated books, there has been a great deal of fuss about them. I think I even posted a few images myself on my Tumblr and/or here. People really started going into rhapsodies when someone posted what he said was DFW’s copy...
August 19, 2014
Here (PDF) is some interesting — or depressing, or unsurprising, or all of the above — research on how people in online communities respond to feedback from their peers. The chief emphasis here is on how the more aggressive and hostile members of such communities respond to being called out for their bad behavior, especially when...
August 15, 2014
Net neutrality not an issue for you? You find Facebook’s algorithmic selectivity non-problematic? Read Zeynep Tufekci : And then I switched to non net-neutral Internet to see what was up. I mostly have a similar a composition of friends on Facebook as I do on Twitter. Nada, zip, nada. No Ferguson on Facebook last night. I scrolled....
August 14, 2014
What world does Michael Solana live in? Apparently, a world where Luddites have taken power and have driven our kind and benevolent technologists into some pitiful hole-and-corner existence, where no one dares to suggest that technology can solve our problems. “Luddites have challenged progress at every crux point in human history....
August 14, 2014
A few nights ago at the movies I saw a trailer for the last installment of The Hobbit, and caught a brief glimpse of a scene in which someone is driving a cart — pulled by mountain goats? Were those mountain goats?? — along a frozen river, sliding around and knocking into rocky walls. Oh right, I thought, that’s like the glacier...
August 13, 2014
“Robo-readers aren’t as good as human readers — they’re better,” the headline says. Hmmm. Annie Murphy Paul writes, Instructors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have been using a program called E-Rater in this fashion since 2009, and they’ve observed a striking change in student behavior as a result. Andrew Klobucar,...
August 9, 2014
What you see above is the portrait of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, painted in 1545 by Gerlach Flicke. It’s now in the National Portrait Gallery in London. My friend Betsy Childs was recently looking at this picture and noticed something curious: tiny pieces of broken glass, or perhaps chipped glass-coating, in the...
August 5, 2014
Freddie deBoer is exactly right about how annoying this Hillary Kelly post is. As Freddie points out, it assumes the absoluteness of a distinction that just doesn’t apply absolutely in many places — and, I might add, even when it does apply it doesn’t always apply in the same way. In America we tend to think of the suburbs as...