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
March 21, 2011
Oliver Burkeman writes: [Seth] Priebatsch’s declared aim is to “build a game layer on top of the world” – which at first seems simply to mean that we should all use SCVNGR, his location-based gaming platform that allows users to compete to win rewards at restaurants, bars and cinemas on their smartphones. (You can...
March 21, 2011
One of my favorite passages in The Information comes when Gleick describes a series of conferences held, starting in the late 1940s, at the Beekman Hotel in New York. “A host of sciences were coming of age all at once — so-called social sciences, like anthropology and psychology, looking for new mathematical footing; medical...
March 18, 2011
March 18, 2011
In the past year or so, as more and more websites — of all kinds — have acquired Twitter feeds, my daily newsreading habits have shifted: whereas I once began the day by going through a large collection of RSS feeds, now I start with Twitter. And as I have added Twitter feeds, I’ve noticed a good deal of redundancy: sites...
March 17, 2011
In the early pages of The Information, Gleick writes a good deal about communication: African talking drums, for instance, and telegraphy. Someone wants to say something to another person, perhaps a distant person; how can that be accomplished? Only over much time, Gleick (implicitly) argues, does it become clear that the problem is one...
March 15, 2011
Increasingly often, these days, I find myself picking up a magazine I subscribe to, starting to read, and then putting it aside with a sigh. The problem is simply that I do not see as well as I used to: as I’ve gotten older my eyesight has gotten worse in complicated ways, and the optometric arts only imperfectly compensate for...
March 14, 2011
Why do social media always have to be about social competition? Everyone on Facebook is aware of how many friends they have in relation to how many friends their friends have. On Twitter people celebrate follower milestones: five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. For a while Tumblr was defaced by a comparative ranking called Tumblarity,...
March 14, 2011
As I understand it, the principal virtue of popular science writing — indeed writing for a general audience about any technical subject — lies in its ability to take the work of scholars and make it accessible to non-scholars, without fundamentally falsifying it. Twenty percent of the way into The Information, I find that James...
March 12, 2011
Disturbances in the Twitterverse: first Twitter releases a new iPhone client that prominently features trends — including “promoted” trends, that is to say, ads — and offers no way to hide them. (A new release makes the trends appear in a slightly less annoying way, but they are still mandatory.) Then Twitter issues new...
March 10, 2011
My colleague Heather Whitney has a post up at ProfHacker about one aspect of student evaluations: their occasional lack of truthfulness. Let me add my two cents:A year ago, as some readers of this blog may recall, I spent some time in the hospital. My classes that semester met on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and as a result of illness I...