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
August 26, 2013
“Well,” as a great man, or hobbit, once said in a very different context, “I’m back.” Since we last met, I’ve been relatively busy. I wrote a biography of the Book of Common Prayer, I published a critical edition of W. H. Auden’s long poem For the Time Being, I blogged for a while at The American Conservative, and I moved...
August 16, 2011
This will be, I think, my last Text Patterns post. It’s been a great run, for me anyway, and I am immensely grateful to Adam Keiper and the rest of the staff at The New Atlantis for hosting my random reflections. But over the past few months I have become increasingly uncomfortable with what I’m doing here, largely because...
August 14, 2011
Jonah Lehrer produces and links to lots of interesting stuff, and here’s a recent example: Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt of UC San Diego gave several dozen undergraduates 12 different short stories. The stories came in three different flavors: ironic twist stories (such as Chekhov’s “The Bet”), straight up...
August 13, 2011
Sarah Werner offers a thoughtful, informed take on some issues I’ve raised here in, well, thoughtless and uninformed ways: “The digitization folks talk about access and the book folks talk about being in the presence of the object. Neither side tends to present a more nuanced sense of how they might each have something to...
August 12, 2011
And then just as I’m complaining about the invocation of the great god Relevance, here comes Mark Bauerlein to preach Against Relevance: As any trainer in sports, in the military, or in martial arts will report, however, to make the experience successful, training for it has to go well beyond it. In martial arts, for instance,...
August 12, 2011
This kind of thing just makes me sad. Sad, sad, sad. It seems that whenever any event causes people to think about how “young people today don’t read” — in this case, bizarrely, it’s the failure of English looters to break into Waterstone’s — the worn old words get dragged out and dusted off, as Nikesh...
August 11, 2011
When Jeremy Bentham came up with the idea of the Panopticon, and much later when Michel Foucault described the gradual, accretive creation of a “panoptic society,” many of us thought that this would necessarily happen through the expansion of governmental infrastructure. How else could it happen? Well, it turns out that...
August 10, 2011
Rachel, the Velveteen Rabbi, says people should be free to choose the names they are known by, online and offline. Well, we’ve been around this block a few times here at Text Patterns, but as I read that post a little thought experiment occurred to me. Imagine a person who comments regularly on certain blogs under a pseudonym, and...
August 9, 2011
I greatly enjoyed and learned from Alex Ross’s lovely essay on Oscar Wilde in the New Yorker, but I want to pause to register a quibble. Ross writes, Last spring, I spent a few hours looking at the autograph manuscript of “Dorian Gray,” at the Morgan Library. When Dorian attempts to destroy his portrait, the manuscript has him...
August 1, 2011
Jonah Lehrer writes in praise of vagueness: The problem with precision, though, is that it can often be discouraging. Let’s say you want to lose 10 pounds. After following a strict diet for a few days, you then decide to weigh yourself. The good news is that you have lost weight. The bad news is that you’ve only lost 4 pounds. While...