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 10, 2010
Hugh McGuire: “A book properly hooked into the Internet is a far more valuable collection of information than a book not properly hooked into the Internet. ” Okay. But what about books whose purpose is not to be a “collection of information”?
September 10, 2010
So I recently got an interesting email from my friend and editor Rod Dreher — you do read Big Questions Online, don’t you? — who tells a thought-provoking story about the combined effects on a reader, namely him, of (a) an iPad and a (b) sabbatical from blogging. With his permission I share it with you: So, I burrowed in last...
September 9, 2010
Here’s a terrific post from Jonah Lehrer, with this sparkful idea: The act of reading observes a gradient of awareness. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica and rendered on lucid e-ink screens are read quickly and effortlessly. Meanwhile, unusual sentences with complex clauses and smudged ink tend to require more conscious effort,...
September 8, 2010
Dear readers, if you look to the right side of the screen you’ll see a change in the Twitter feed: instead of tweets coming from the @textpatterns account, you’ll see tweets tagged #textpatterns. I expect that most of these will be from me, but it would be a great way for my readers to contribute to the conversation of this...
September 8, 2010
Cathy Davidson: A “hack” is a reconfiguration or reprogramming of a system to function in a way different than that built into it but its owner, designer, or administrator. The term can run the gamut from a clever or quick fix to a messy (kludgy) temporary solution that no one’s happy with. It can refer to ingenuity and innovation...
September 7, 2010
September 7, 2010
Over the years I have developed a personal vocabulary of book annotation: I underline, I star, I write marginal comments, I use arrowing lines to link words that I have circled, I employ a range of punctuation marks that (for me) have distinctly different meanings. When I am reading on my Kindle — and the third generation Kindle is a...
September 6, 2010
I try to wear jeans or jeans-like trousers whenever possible — “five-pocket style,” it’s sometimes called, the fifth being the watch-pocket that’s tucked just above the right front one. Of course, such a pocket is in one sense as atavistic as an appendix, since no one carries pocket watches anymore, but in most of my jeans it...
September 2, 2010
So Infinite Summer, last year’s online book group for reading Infinite Jest, concluded with some questions for a round-table of readers. I thought I would wrap up my own thoughts about IJ by answering those questions. I would say that spoilers follow, but IJ really isn’t that kind of book. After all, the first chapter occurs...
August 31, 2010
Over at The American Scene, my blog-colleague Matt Feeney makes a case for Infinite Jest not unlike the one made in the comments on an earlier post here. Read and digest.