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 28, 2014
I often have to remind myself not to think in terms of what’s happening on Twitter, but rather what’s happening in my Twitter feed. I only follow around 200 people — more than that and I get disoriented — and those people are scarcely representative of Twitter users as a whole. So take the thoughts that follow for what they’re...
May 22, 2014
Metafilter is in financial trouble, largely because it can’t stay in good favor with Google. Here’s more on the current internet: Metafilter came from two or three internets ago, when a website’s core audience — people showing up there every day or every week, directly — was its main source of visitors. Google might bless a...
May 21, 2014
Via Roberto Greco’s wonderful Pinboard collection, some interesting thoughts from a person whose name I can’t seem to discover: this is probably stupid, but: given Twitter’s new mute functionality, which follows Facebook’s addition of the same, it seems clear that individual user control over feed content is now more important to...
May 21, 2014
So, to continue my earlier post: Last semester I taught a course called “Confession and Autobiography,” which covered some of the many types of self-writing from Augustine to … Well, where should you conclude a course on that topic? After considerable reflection, I decided that I would choose Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. I knew...
May 19, 2014
David Graeber comments, in a brief follow-up to this essay, If you look at the lives and personalities of almost any of the Great Thinkers currently lionized in the American academy, certainly anyone like Deleuze, or Foucault, Wittgenstein, Freud, Einstein, or even Max Weber, none of them would have lasted ten minutes in our current...
May 19, 2014
I was recently telling a friend on Twitter who had just read Bleak House that when I first read it and got to the end I thought, “Is it over already?” Bleak House is 900 pages long. Why do I love it so much? This is hard to say. It’s a book with a deep passion for social reform, and especially cries out against the condition of...
May 7, 2014
This reflection by Virginia Heffernan defies quick summary, but let me give it a try: Proponents and critics of new reading technologies alike defend their positions by appealing to Science, but usually in sloppy and superficial ways. At least that’s where the essay seems to be going, for a while, but by the end it seems to have...
May 7, 2014
In an essay that’s received a lot of critical response from my digital-humanist friends, Adam Kirsch writes, The best thing that the humanities could do at this moment, then, is not to embrace the momentum of the digital, the tech tsunami, but to resist it and to critique it. This is not Luddism; it is intellectual responsibility. Is...
May 5, 2014
I can’t count the number of times over the years I have shaken my fist — usually metaphorically — at people who write in library books. But in this matter as in so many others time alters one’s perspective. Book Traces is a fascinating project devoted to collecting the writing people have done in old books — especially...
May 5, 2014
I recently stopped reading the much-acclaimed comic The Manhattan Projects largely because of its mindless violence — and I really do mean mindless: a ceaselessly repetitive proliferation of amputations, decapitations, and (especially!) acts of cannibalism that do nothing to advance the story or contribute to characterization but...