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
May 17, 2017
Greetings, readers. I’m back from a visit to my old friends in Wheaton, and aside from seeing those old friends, possibly the best aspect of the trip — which I took by automobile, covering around 2500 miles all told — was the escape it offered from the relentless stimulus/response operant conditioning of social media, so much of...
May 12, 2017
As I argued in two earlier posts, here and here, the smartphone is an idolorum fabricam, a perpetual idol-making factory. I want now to juxtapose that argument with something that might seem unrelated, the thesis articulated by the sociologist Christian Smith and his colleagues that the de facto religion of Americans, especially young...
May 11, 2017
Consider this the mirror-image of my previous post. In Lost in the Cosmos — about which I wrote an enthusiastic length here — Walker Percy offers a “semiotic primer of the self” which takes as one of its chief concerns the problem of alienation and re-entry: experiences that throw us out of our familiar patterns, in ways both...
May 10, 2017
I’m going to be traveling for the next few days, by automobile, and will therefore be mostly away from the internet. I have queued up a few posts that will show up during that period, but I will probably be slow in approving comments. Greg Egan’s novel Diaspora came out twenty years ago, and it anticipates in really interesting ways...
May 9, 2017
In a recent post, I wrote, “I think we desperately need now a recovery of interest in metaphor and myth – not a simple return to the days of Northrop Frye and Mircea Eliade and Suzanne Langer, but a redirecting of attention to those fields of inquiry in light of what we have learned since that half-century ago heyday of mythology and...
May 8, 2017
I’ve mentioned that Adam Roberts is blogging his way through the voluminous works of H. G. Wells, and I’ve found myself thinking often about this post, on Wells’s early book The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll (1896). At one point in the post Adam engages in helpful ways with Paul Smethurst’s recent book The Bicycle: Towards...
May 5, 2017
Maybe the coolest thing about my current project is that I get to read — I am obliged to read — theology, the history of technology, and science fiction, in a sort of rotation. These very different genres rub against one another in fascinating ways. But I am finding that the theology I’m reading isn’t helping me much, at least...
May 3, 2017
LiquidText, an iPad app for annotating PDFs and webpages, is a genuinely remarkable achievement — a delightful and useful piece of software engineering. Here’s what an annotated LiquidText file looks like: You’ll see that you can highlight, but also comment in the margin on what you have highlighted, connect other comments to that,...
May 2, 2017
This post of mine from earlier today, which was based on this column by Damon Linker, has a lot in common with this post by Scott Alexander: I write a lot about how we shouldn’t get our enemies fired lest they try to fire us, how we shouldn’t get our enemies’ campus speakers disinvited lest they try to disinvite ours, how we...
May 2, 2017
Following up on yesterday’s request for help with the notorious Bret Stephens op-ed on climate change — no help has been forthcoming, by the way — I’d like to call your attention to this superb column by Damon Linker: Stephens didn’t deny the reality of climate change. He merely dared to advocate a slight rhetorical...