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
September 5, 2013
Nick Carr: Frankly, tweeting has come to feel kind of tedious itself . It’s not the mechanics of the actual act of tweeting so much as the mental drain involved in (a) reading the text of an article and (b) figuring out which particular textual fragment is the most tweet-worthy. That whole pre-tweeting cognitive process has become a...
September 4, 2013
In a typically superb post, Tim Burke explains the problem with trying to apply a rational-choice model to the decisions college students make about their education: There is a lot of information that you could acquire about courses or about colleges that you could reasonably use to assemble a decision matrix. What size is the class or...
September 3, 2013
Now I want to take the thoughts from my last post a little further. Just as it is true in one sense to say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” though only at the cost of ignoring how much easier it is to kill someone if you’re holding a loaded gun than if you can’t get one, so also I don’t want my previous post to...
August 31, 2013
Rebecca Solnit is right when she points to good things lost in a technological rush, lost by most and sought again by at least a few: There are also places where human contact and continuity of experience hasn’t been so ruined. I visit New Orleans regularly, where the old leisurely enjoyment of mingling with strangers in the street and...
August 30, 2013
Rebecca Solnit writes, Those mail and newspaper deliveries punctuated the day like church bells. You read the paper over breakfast. If there were developments you heard about them on the evening news or in the next day’s paper. You listened to the news when it was broadcast, since there was no other way to hear it. A great many people...
August 30, 2013
In the first section of his great elegy for William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden shows us a world in which the great poet dies quietly, away from the noise and bustle of lives that go on and on: But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, And the poor have the sufferings...
August 29, 2013
Buried in the midst of reports on all the various doings at Christ’s College, Cambridge in that fine institution’s 2010 magazine there’s a fascinating essay by the historian Lisa Jardine — one of my favorite scholars, by the way. It concerns the seemingly endless controversy over C. P. Snow’s famous 1959 lecture on “The...
August 28, 2013
August 28, 2013
This is going to be an off-on-a-tangent post, but anyway…. I was reading this typically smart post by Ian Bogost on the idea of the “flipped classroom” and the right and wrong ways to think about it, and my eye was caught by this passage: More recently, Duke professor Cathy Davidson has reminded us that the lecture-style...
August 27, 2013
Ashley Thorne in the Guardian: One summer when I was an undergrad, my college assigned The Pilgrim’s Progress to all the students. It was, so to speak, a mandatory beach book, not for credit in any course, but meant to be the basis for a campus-wide discussion on the theme of “difficulty”. Reading Bunyan’s 1678...