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
October 31, 2013
Even at my advanced age, I can still never quite predict what’s going to agitate me. But here’s something that has me rather worked up. In a reflection on Ender’s Game — a story about which I have no opinions — Laura Miller relates this anecdote: There’s a short story by Tom Godwin, famous in science fiction circles, called...
October 30, 2013
The bigger your writing project, the less likely it is that you’ll find a writing environment that’s adequate to your needs. When you’re writing a book, you need to find some way to juggle research, ideas, notes, drafts, outlines … which is hard to do. As far as I know — I’d be happy to be corrected — the only product...
October 29, 2013
Reading this lovely and rather moving profile of Douglas Hofstadter I was especially taken by this passage on why artificial intelligence research has largely ignored Hofstadter’s innovative work and thought: “The features that [these systems] are ultimately looking at are just shadows—they’re not even shadows—of what it is...
October 28, 2013
An oft-quoted remark by Steve Jobs has been in my mind lately. It’s been cited in many different forms, and who knows what the original words actually were, but it goes something like this: People tend to think of design as how something looks, but it’s really a matter of how it works. It seems to me that Apple is in real danger of...
October 28, 2013
If you haven’t read Anne Trubek’s essay on what’s great about Twitter, you should: Twitter has offered me an intellectual community I otherwise lack. It cuts the distance, both geographic and hierarchical. Not only can I talk with people in other places, but I can engage with people in different career stages as well. A sharp...
October 25, 2013
The Quantified Self (QS) movement is comprised of people who use various recent technologies to accumulate detailed knowledge of what their bodies are doing — how they’re breathing, how much they walk, how their heart-rate varies, and so on — and then adjust their behavior accordingly to get the results they want. This is not...
October 25, 2013
So when I think about software that could seriously alter the way I write, one of the first examples that comes to mind is Workflowy. Now, Workflowy seems to have been designed largely as a task manager, but I’m intrigued by it because its design brings a certain degree of desirable structure to what Giles Turnbull once memorably...
October 23, 2013
I’ll admit to some disappointment with this essay on new writing tools by Paul Ford — Ford is a smart writer and the topic seems a good fit for him, but I don’t think he gets as deeply as he could into the legitimacy of the claims made by the makers of some of these writing tools. As far as I can tell, the tools that he...
October 22, 2013
This project — to redesign all the state flags in a single visual language — seems to me to combine rather remarkably the features of today’s techno-liberalism: An active disdain for historical, cultural, and aesthetic difference: “I was immediately bothered by how discordant they are as a group”; The easy assumption that unity...
October 21, 2013
Ah, the poetry MOOCs are coming — the exciting world of online education is spreading beyond the STEM disciplines and into the humanities! Let’s investigate. Elisa New of Harvard is offering one on Poetry in America. It appears that the course is quite consciously Harvard-centric: “I wanted to do this course using all of the...