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 8, 2009
To what depths have we sunk as a society when our paper of record, the esteemed Gray Lady, devotes — well, not ink and paper, but electrons anyway, to the vexed question of whether anyone has ever used a slice of bacon as a bookmark?
January 8, 2009
There’s a wonderful article in the new Atlantic by Mark Bowden called “The Hardest Job in Football.” That hardest job is being the director of a television broadcast of a game. Bowden focuses on a man named Bob Fishman, whom he believes to be the best at this job, as Fishman sits in a control room before a bank of TV screens. Each...
January 8, 2009
I’m still thinking — and will be for a long time — about the relationship between the act of reading a book or article or story and many other kinds of “reading” or visual “scanning.” (Earlier posts on this topic are here and here.) When you read a book your eyes scan a page, but do so with a certain regularity, with a...
January 7, 2009
Jonathan Zittrain has a new book called The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It. Zittrain’s belief is that we are headed towards a security nightmare, that without major changes in the architecture of the internet a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money through compromises of their online identities. And if that...
January 6, 2009
I was just reading Adam Sternbergh’s review of David Denby’s new book Snark. Denby claims that snark is “a nasty, knowing strain of abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation”; Sternbergh replies that, au contraire, snark “flourishes in an age of doublespeak and idiocy that’s too rarely called out...
January 5, 2009
Fred Wilson says that we have entered an “age of correspondence” because now we write so much more than we talk on the phone. This has been noted before: if the telephone brought to an end the great age of letter-writing, a different kind of writing has been created by the age of email and text-messaging. There are a lot of things...
January 2, 2009
My post a few days ago about natural signs received an interesting comment from Julana. She is wondering whether, if indeed we do largely lose our knowledge of the natural world — our very ability to name the things of Creation — we will also lose much of our ability to make metaphors. As it happens, there is a very wonderful poem by...
December 31, 2008
Some years ago I came across a document called “Seventy-Six Reasonable Questions to Ask about Any Technology.” If you follow that link you’ll see the questions attributed to the late Jacques Ellul, but I believe they were actually produced by members of the Jacques Ellul Society. In any event, they’re pretty interesting...
December 31, 2008
David Frum makes a familiar argument in several parts: 1) “Literature is a declining presence in our modern society.” 2) “What happens all too often in high school and college literary classes is this: Students are assigned work of very low literary quality. These works are chosen to provide sexual/racial/ethnic diversity.” 3)...
December 30, 2008
When the new semester begins at Wheaton College, where I teach, I’ll lead a seminar for senior English majors on the experience of reading. I’m interested in getting them to explore with me their own histories as readers: how their early reading experiences shaped them, what books were their favorites in childhood, how their reading...