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
January 25, 2009
Regarding the post just below: Carr refers to Wikipedia as “a single source of information” — but is it? It’s a single conduit of information, but a conduit is not a source. What are the sources of information that emerge through the Wikipedia conduit, having undergone the Wikipedia filters? Well, there’s a...
January 25, 2009
Much of the Robert Darnton article I linked to in an earlier post is concerned with the power that Google now has over access to books, through its massive digitization project and, especially, the recent agreement it has reached with publishers to continue and expand on that that project. Darnton: The settlement creates a fundamental...
January 25, 2009
There appears to be no end in sight of essays deploring what Modern Technology is depriving us of. Some of these are right, but not many of them, and the vast majority that are wrong — or greatly overstated, anyway — go awry because of their lack of historical context. Take this essay by William Deresiewicz in the Chronicle of Higher...
January 23, 2009
By which I mean not the reviewing of books but the kind of newspaper section called a book review, as in the New York Times Book Review or the Washington Post Book World, which may be closing down. I am not sure how much to be worried about this. For much of their history newspapers have not reviewed books at all — going back to the...
January 23, 2009
Here’s an excellent article by Robert Darnton, about which I will have more to say later. But for now here’s a taste: The eighteenth century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police, no boundaries, and no inequalities other than those determined by talent. Anyone could join it by exercising the two main attributes...
January 23, 2009
David Parry at academhack, in a post called “Teaching in the Age of Distraction,” writes, “Let’s be clear: I think wireless access in a classroom is at this point a necessity, any space which purports to be about the sharing and construction of knowledge that does not have access to the internet seems to me to be a severely...
January 23, 2009
For people interested in the relations between orality and literacy, there’s a fascinating passage in the Biblical book that Christians call 2 Kings. You may read the whole passage here. When Josiah was the young king of Judah — the Northern Kingdom of Israel having been overrun by the Assyrians some decades earlier — he decided to...
January 22, 2009
Hey everybody, I have been away — from this blog, and from everything else — for the past few days because of the death of my father. It was not altogether a surprise (he had lung cancer) but he declined faster than anyone had expected, so I had to leave town suddenly. Posting will resume in the next couple of days.
January 16, 2009
Over at boingboing, a very interesting post by Steven Johnson in which he discusses, among other things, the research he did for his new book on the great clergyman/chemist/inventor/revolutionary Joseph Priestley: This is the first book that I have written where Google Books played an absolutely indispensable role. An amazing number of...
January 16, 2009
I was a reasonably early adopter of Facebook — after it was opened to people as old as I am — though I can’t remember precisely when I got on board. But I do remember that I lasted about six months before I shut down my account. The only thing I liked about Facebook was the status updates; everything else seemed to be way too...