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 7, 2011
So, remember when I was saying that I might just re-read books for the rest of the year? Seemed like a good idea — but I had forgotten that I had pre-ordered Crazy U for my Kindle. And when it showed up I couldn’t help devouring it. Ah, well, some kind of road is paved with good intentions, I don’t remember exactly what...
March 7, 2011
Let me tell you a few things about Andy Ferguson’s new book Crazy U: it’s well-researched, insightful, thought-provoking, and sometimes hysterically funny. He’s good on everything: college admissions standards, evaluation of candidates, financial aid, you name it. And he links the themes together in sometimes unexpected...
March 4, 2011
I’ve been chatting recently with some Twitter friends about possibly doing a conference panel together, and we’ve been considering an exploration of skeuomorphs. This got linked to a discussion of three-dimensionality — a Tim Carmody favorite — and it occurred to me that many skeuomorphs are in fact attempts to mimic...
March 4, 2011
The other day a homeschooling parent, whose child is in the ninth grade, wrote to me to ask what books I thought are essential for a young person to have read before coming to college. My reply: For what it’s worth, I don’t think what a young person reads is nearly as important as how he or she reads. Young people who learn...
March 3, 2011
I tend to be annoyed by evolutionary just-so stories (“Let’s see, how can whatever I’m doing at the moment be explained by my hunter-gatherer ancestors?”) but this one I like, perhaps because it addresses an ongoing problem for me: Something’s been bothering me ever since I started reading books, especially non-fiction, on...
March 2, 2011
Andrew Keen: Today’s digital social network is a trap. Today’s cult of the social, peddled by an unholy alliance of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and communitarian idealists, is rooted in a misunderstanding of the human condition. The truth is that we aren’t naturally social beings. Instead, as Vermeer reminds us in The...
March 1, 2011
Just a note: So far this year I have re-read several books, and I am giving serious consideration to making this The Year of Re-Reading. I will have to read some things I haven’t read before because of reviewing commitments — David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming The Pale King, for instance — but I think I may commit to...
February 28, 2011
Devin Friedman writes about social media; I need to quote at length: [Silicon Valley] isn’t just the place where they invent this shit; it’s the single place where the life that’s advertised is lived. Where the adoption rate, if the product is right, approaches 100 percent. Where the world has been mapped out by the...
February 25, 2011
So I was having this conversation on Twitter the other day. I asked the question because I was thinking about Marshall McLuhan, about whom I am writing an essay that will (God willing) appear in a future issue of The New Atlantis: I was wondering whether it would make sense to call McLuhan a digital humanist. If Tim is right in his...
February 23, 2011
Returning to the subject of today’s earlier post: The authors of that study write this in summation: Statistical findings, said Heuser, made us realize that genres are icebergs: with a visible portion floating above the water, and a much larger part hidden below, and extending to unknown depths. Realizing that these depths exist; that...