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
January 11, 2011
As I have explained elsewhere, the iPad has become a major teaching tool for me. But as a reading device . . . not so much. I have not had as much of a problem with the backlit screen as I thought I would: it doesn’t seem to tire my eyes, and it’s nice not to have to worry about surrounding lighting. But here are my chief...
January 10, 2011
The chief theme of the opening pages of The Whale and the Reactor is the absence of a substantial philosophy of technology: “At this late date in the development of our industrial/technological civilization the most accurate observation to be made about the philosophy of technology is that there really isn’t one.” In...
January 5, 2011
One of my plans for this blog in the coming year is to spend less time responding to the news of the moment — that’s really what Twitter is for — and to spend more time working my way through, well, books. And longer-form writing more generally. So over the next few days, or maybe weeks, I’m going to be blogging my reading of...
January 4, 2011
So, worried about the long-term survival of digitized documents? Here’s your answer: Schielke and Rauber’s solution is to switch everything over to a format called microfilm, a 200-year-old technology which stores information as tiny images and can be read with nothing more than a good magnifying glass. Microfilm can last for over...
January 4, 2011
“If Gutenberg were alive today” . . . or how about this: “If Shakespeare were alive today” . . . It’s funny how predictable these speculations are. They work on this model: Drama was the hot form of entertainment in Shakespeare’s time, whereas TV (or film, or advertising, or whatever) is the hot form of entertainment in our...
January 3, 2011
Bob Stein writes: People are very resistant to leaving comments in a public space. There was a much more extensive discussion of this draft on the private Read 2.0 listserve than what you see in the public CommentPress version. i begged people on the listserve to post their comments on the public version, but with few exceptions no one...
December 30, 2010
How interesting would it be to have a writer’s every keystroke recorded and played back? Pretty interesting, perhaps, but I don’t want it to happen to me. Though I think Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, I somehow never got around to reading his next, Against the Day — but...
December 29, 2010
Marshall Poe says that “the Internet changes nothing”: The media experts, however, tell us that there really is something new and transformative about the Internet. It goes under various names, but it amounts to “collaboration.” The Internet makes it much easier for people to do things together. Look, they say, at email...
December 28, 2010
Looking at my Pinboard and Instapaper pages — how I love those tools — I see so many stories I want to blog about but will probably not find time to. There’s no strict reason why there should be a statute of limitations on such things, and there remains a chance that I’ll come back to some of these stories later, but the end of...
December 28, 2010
Regular readers, if I have any regular readers, will know that this is the kind of thing I strongly disagree with: Overwhelmed by all the noise, some have simply chosen to block it out — to opt out, say, of social networks and microblog platforms like Twitter. Alternatively, others have hewn close to these social networks, counting on...