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 18, 2010
I really think Infinite Jest ought to be discussed as a novel, rather than a prophecy, but there’s no way of avoiding some acknowledgement of the latter element. Jason Kottke posted recently about the novel’s anticipation of Apple’s FaceTime technology, but it also anticipates Peapod (online ordering and delivery of groceries,...
August 16, 2010
Yeah, I know everybody read Infinite Jest last summer, but I didn’t. I had a book to write. Also this summer. So I am finally getting around to it, but have been somewhat comically delayed by indecisiveness: paperback or Kindle?I’ve had the big paperback version for a while, and I was expecting to read that. I got myself a...
August 12, 2010
Here’s a really thoughtful post by Siobhan Phillips on the highly fraught relationship between e-readers and verse. Phillips wants to argue that poetry’s concern with lineation and space ought to cause us to rethink what books and texts are. Poetry is not just a problem for e-reading, but a challenge to us to reconsider what we think...
August 11, 2010
Via this post by Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket, or rather the comments thereupon, I found this story about life as a freelance writer. It made my blood run cold, not because I’ve been in that situation but because there but for the grace of God. . . . I’ve had some wonderful relationships with editors over the years, but also some of...
August 9, 2010
I can’t disguise how pleased I am with this. The whole project has been exciting and gratifying, but I wasn’t prepared for how moved I would be to see my name on the same page as Auden’s — his poetry and thought have meant so much to me over the years. The juxtaposition is rather shocking, to be truthful; I keep...
August 6, 2010
When the wonderful literary critic Tony Tanner died twelve years ago, Colin McCabe wrote an obituary containing these lines: The degree he undertook at Cambridge was largely the product of a union of I.A. Richards’s methods of practical criticism and F.R. Leavis’s historical moralism. Both for very different reasons situated English...
August 4, 2010
Thanks to travel and the like I’ll not be very active on this site for the next ten days or so. Don’t think that my affection has diminished.
August 3, 2010
Several times in recent posts and comments I’ve mentioned Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget. It’s wildly uneven, a product of too many overlapping and non-overlapping interests, but there’s a lot of wonderful stuff in it. I thought I might reproduce one little section. Says Lanier, “These are some of...
August 2, 2010
This is a reasonably good story about plagiarism, covering the usual theories about How Social Media Are Changing Our Kids, but offering some rebuttals as well. But there’s one point that always emerges in stories on this topic that bug me a little, i.e.: At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s...
July 31, 2010
A while back I commented on David Carr’s enthusiasm for Twitter: “Twitter helps define what is important,” etc. etc. Now Peggy Orenstein comes to the same magazine with fear and trepidation: “Each Twitter post seemed a tacit referendum on who I am, or at least who I believe myself to be.” My verdict?...