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
April 10, 2014
Minding the Campus sets forth a question: As students and their families rethink the value of the liberal arts, defenders of traditional education are understandably ambivalent. On the one hand, the diminished stature of the liberal arts seems long overdue, and this critical reevaluation might lead to thoughtful reform. On the other,...
April 9, 2014
This is not a topic to which I can do justice in a single post, or even, I expect, a series of posts, but let me make this a placeholder and a promise of more to come. I want to register a general and vigorous protest against thought-experiments of the Turing test and Chinese room variety. These two experiments are specific to debates...
April 8, 2014
My ideal e-reader would have the battery life of a Kindle Paperwhite the weight of a Kindle Paperwhite the screen resolution of a Kindle Fire (I won’t even ask for it to be color) the (free!) cellular connectivity of a Kindle Keyboard the hardware keyboard and navigating system of a Kindle Keyboard the highlighting/note-taking UI of...
April 8, 2014
Tim Wu suggests an experiment: A well-educated time traveller from 1914 enters a room divided in half by a curtain. A scientist tells him that his task is to ascertain the intelligence of whoever is on the other side of the curtain by asking whatever questions he pleases. The traveller’s queries are answered by a voice with an accent...
March 20, 2014
A good many people in my Twitter feed really like this reflection on unplugging by Casey Cep, whose writing I too usually enjoy a lot. But this piece is making me scratch my head. Let me go through the end of the piece and I’ll see if I can explain my confusion: This is why it’s strange to think of these unplugging events as anything...
March 20, 2014
The tl;dr version of this post: In late capitalism, “Useful Knowledge” can take care of itself, and does. Let’s concern ourselves with other things. In my earlier post on the value of knowledge I said I would return to some questions raised there. About some recent academic research Aaron Gordon had said, “Two questions come...
March 20, 2014
Here’s a post on a familiar theme: academic papers that no one reads. Let’s take it as a given that there is too much academic publishing, that academic writing is often used to achieve or mark status rather than to add to or disseminate knowledge, and so on. Duly noted, once more. But there’s another point in the post I want to...
March 18, 2014
Emily Bell recently argued that some hot new tech/journalism/etc. companies that are positioning themselves as radical alternatives to business-as-usual are, in the matter of hiring women and minorites, totally business-as-usual: a bunch of white guys with a slight scattering of women and minorities.Nate Silver, one of those whom Bell...
March 18, 2014
March 17, 2014
Chloe Schama writes about silence as a “luxury product”: But the impossibility of silence says something about why it remains so alluring. Noise-related annoyances stem from emotion—frustration, disorientation, fear—as much as actual audible irritation. During late nineteenth-century industrialization, “The noise of [the...