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
June 22, 2010
Text people — my tribe — tend not to get graphic stories. Or we struggle to get them. We zip through a whole book in less than an hour and feel cheated. “This could have been a short story!” “I bet the whole book doesn’t have more than a couple of thousand words.”To respond in this way is of course to miss the point. If...
June 21, 2010
It would seem that Steven Johnson isn’t the only advocate of the quantity-trumps-quality defense of online life. The other day I mentioned Cory Doctorow’s praise for Clay Shirky’s new book, but Jonah Lehrer has a different and considerably more skeptical take: After Shirky introduces his argument, much of the remaining 170...
June 19, 2010
Unfortunately, Steven Johnson, once one of the sharpest cultural commentators around, seems to be turning into a caricature. His recent response to the concerns about digital life articulated by Nicholas Carr and others is woefully bad. He simply refuses to take seriously the increasingly large body of evidence about the negative...
June 19, 2010
Tom Bisell, from his book Extra Lives, an extended defense of the art of the video game and the value of spending large chunks of your life playing them: Once upon a time, I wrote in the morning, jogged in the late afternoon, and spent most of my evenings reading. Once upon a time, I wrote off as unproductive those days in which I had...
June 18, 2010
A. O. Scott on Toy Story 3: Perhaps no series of movies has so brilliantly grasped the emotional logic that binds the innate creativity of children at play to the machinery of mass entertainment. Each one feeds, and colonizes, the other. And perhaps only Pixar, a company Utopian in its faith in technological progress, artisanal in its...
June 18, 2010
Cory Doctorow on Clay Shirky’s new book: Shirky is very good on the connection between trivial entertainments and serious business, from writing web-servers to changing government. Lolcats aren’t particularly virtuous examples of generosity and sharing, but they are a kind of gateway drug between zero participation and some...
June 18, 2010
The second major impression that strikes me, on this re-reading, is Trollope’s almost metafictional refusal to play some of the typical games of the novelist. A great example comes in Barchester Towers when we see our heroine, Eleanor Harding, pursued simultaneously by the feckless and improvident Bertie Stanhope and the scheming, oily...
June 17, 2010
It’s been ten years or more since I read Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, and I am returning to them now with great delight. I have now re-read the first four, and will probably move along to The Last Chronicle of Barset because of my particular dislike for Lily Dale, the masochistic heroine of The Small House at Allington....
June 16, 2010
I seem to be in an academic-pedagogical vein these days, and while I’ll shift from that tomorrow, let me go at it one more time. . . .Some people have an inexhaustible appetite for the what’s-the-matter-with-these-darn-kids subgenre of the jeremiad; others can’t stand it and find it intrinsically offensive. But whatever side...
June 15, 2010
Here, in a nutshell, is the insoluble probleem with “the humanities” in the academy, by which I mean most people in English departments and a good many people in history, Continental philosophy, art history, political theory, etc.: 1) The scholarly performance of academic humanists is evaluated — by colleagues, tenure committees,...