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
March 11, 2009
From here: Twitter of the Shrew – adapted for Twitter by @BrianFeldman from the classic comedy attributed to William Shakespeare, with additional material by @irenelpynn, is a Twitter adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew (1590-1594). Spanning 19 Twitter accounts and presented over 12 days (one scene per day), “Twitter of the...
March 10, 2009
So, a further thought about Paul Graham’s Hacker News and its comments policy. (See yesterday’s post for details.) If reddit allows you to approve or disapprove of things you haven't even read, Hacker News appears not to allow you to disapprove of things at all: you can click the “up” arrow or . . . well, do...
March 10, 2009
A tweet from Suggested Donation, via librarian.net: “Can anyone tell this ignorant museum and library blogger where this is? Our guess was heaven.” Not a bad guess, for book lovers anyway.
March 9, 2009
I keep chewing on the problem of blog architecture: If the basic structure is going to be based on posts-plus-comments, how could thoughtful, sane, reasonable posts and comments be encouraged? Can that structure be re-engineered so that the “choice architecture” nudges people towards something other than snarkery and...
March 6, 2009
When we talk about reading, and whether The Screen is an enemy of The Book, we need to pause to make distinctions. We need to be aware that we read for several diffferent reasons: for pleasure, for benefits intellectual and academic (these are not always the same) and spiritual. We need to be aware that we read in different modes: the...
March 6, 2009
I was walking to work this morning (in more pleasant weather than I’ve been afforded in quite some time) and decided to listen to some music. I don't usually do this: I like to reserve that fifteen minutes for prayer or just silence. But I hadn't had a chance to give a thorough listen to the new U2 record, No Line on the...
March 5, 2009
Some from me, some from James Poulos.Literal Digitacy Literate Digits Texts R UsRead It and Weep Unicode Festival DigeradoTypomaniaLexicogHermes' HermeneutsPresse de DigitatorWord UpMediatrixThe Rosetta Zone(Honesty requires me to admit that James came up with the brilliant "Presse de Digitator.")
March 5, 2009
This story is surprising to me. I am not at all surprised that people claim to have read books that they haven't read, but I certainly didn't expect that Nineteen Eighty-Four would be at the top of the list. I mean, it’s not an especially challenging or especially long read, and there are plenty of folks out there — I...
March 4, 2009
ENTHUSIAST: My Kindle is awesome. I can carry around hundreds of books in one small package; I can order more books from almost anywhere and have them downloaded to the device in a few seconds. And the books cost a good deal less than their dead-tree equivalents. It’s revolutionary, I tell you. SKEPTIC: I guess. But what if you...
March 3, 2009
Well, Sven Birkerts suspects the Kindle — no surprise there. Interestingly, in the seminar I’m currently teaching we just finished reading Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies, and at the end of that discussion I brought my Kindle to class and passed it around. So this brief essay by Birkerts is for me and my students a...