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
February 20, 2014
This article by Jennifer Howard on the barriers to lending e-books via ILL (InterLibrary Loan) gives an interesting little glimpse of the future, or a future. ILL is a pain in the neck for libraries, though a necessary one. It has existed in one form or another for a long time, but could only become truly effective first with the...
February 17, 2014
The one book for which Thomas de Quincey is known today is his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in which he details, in a style owing much to writers of the seventeenth-century Baroque, “the pleasures and pains of Opium” — though with, it seems to many readers, more emphasis on the pleasures. He says at the outset that he...
February 14, 2014
There’s probably not much point in responding to this post, with its rhetorical strategy of huffing and puffing and blowing my house down by intoning words like “nonsensical.” The best response to such stuff us almost always this. But then there’s precedent for this, also. So here’s the key passage, I think:...
February 11, 2014
The last year or so has seen an intriguing renewal of a genre from the early years of the internet: the email newsletter. A couple of months ago Alexis Madrigal described this development as a natural and healthy response to a never-ending and increasingly vast stream of online data: “My newsletter is finite (always less than...
February 9, 2014
Nicholas Felton, who has for some years now been documenting his life in exhaustive detail and issuing annual reports on his data, want to help us do the same. So he has created the Reporter app, which is all about helping us towards self-knowledge. Reporter works by buzzing you several times per day with a brief quiz based on the...
February 8, 2014
George W. S. Trow’s “Within the Context of No Context” was a really famous essay at one time, and thought to be precisely diagnostic of a culture shaped and sustained by television, but no one talks about it much anymore because we feel that the internet is the thing now and TV (while still powerful) secondary and...
February 5, 2014
I enjoyed this brief interview with Rob Horning of The New Inquiry, and was particularly taken with this passage: What do you think is good about the way we interact with information today? How has your internet consumption changed your brain, and writing, for the better? I can only speak for myself, but I find that the Internet has made...
February 3, 2014
Clay Shirky says that the “Golden Age” of American higher education, when our universities were flush with money, “was a nice time, but it wasn’t stable, and it didn’t last, and it’s not coming back,” and that, therefore, “If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they...
February 3, 2014
A recurrent problem for those of us who suffer from chronic logorrhea is our tendency to forget what we have and have not written. There’s a point about C. S. Lewis that I have spoken many times over the years but — I now, after some Googling, suspect — may never have written down in any detail. So here we go: I don’t think...
January 31, 2014
Here: I started blogging in 2002, hanging out my own shingle on blogspot. I did it primarily as a belated response to the trauma of 9-11: I had been emailing news items to a variety of friends and family with an obsessiveness that nearly deserved a DSM number, and one of them finally told me I should stop emailing him and start a blog if...