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 7, 2010
Jonah Lehrer: There is little doubt that the Internet is changing our brain. Everything changes our brain. What Carr neglects to mention, however, is that the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind. For instance, a comprehensive 2009 review of studies...
June 6, 2010
Are Google Maps and GPS bad for our brains?: Véronique Bohbot, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, has done extensive research demonstrating the connection between the size of the hippocampus and the degree to which we employ our navigational skills. She worries that, should our hippocampi begin to atrophy from a...
June 5, 2010
William Gibson: Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over. I wouldn’t blame anyone for assuming that this is akin to the declaration that history was...
June 4, 2010
June 4, 2010
Over at University Diaries, I am having a debate with Margaret Soltan about Flannery O’Connor. Come join the fun.
June 4, 2010
The Death and Life of the Book Review: In 1999 Steve Wasserman was three years into his tenure as the editor of The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and that July he published a review of Richard Howard’s new translation of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. The reason was simple: Howard is among the best translators of...
June 4, 2010
This week I’ve spent some time thinking and writing about John Self, the protagonist of Martin Amis’s 1984 novel Money. Self is not what you’d call a reader. He may be living in the pre-internet days, but he has access to telephones, and directs television commercials for a living. He’s used to thinking in thirty-second...
June 3, 2010
At the Technology Liberation Front, Adam Thierer has a long, detailed, and helpful review of Nick Carr’s The Shallows. Meanwhile, Mr. Carr himself is pursuing a strategy of delinkification, and following up with, um, links to responses.
June 3, 2010
June 3, 2010
My friend and colleague Tim Larsen on A History of Oxford Anthropology: The tone is set in a preface in which the argument is advanced that Oxford was able to lead the field because its collegiate system “provided a lived experience of ‘tribal’ life.” This analysis is developed apparently in all seriousness,...