Alvin Toffler, 40 years after the publication of his book, Future Shock
Forty years ago, America was gripped by Future Shock. It was a book, published in July of 1970 — but it was also an idea.
But what about their book’s main prediction — the idea that change is speeding up, and that it threatens to overwhelm us? Alvin Toffler says he sees it happening, and that others do now, too.
“In the past, you made a decision and that was it. Now, you make a decision and you say, ‘What happens next?’ There’s always a next,” he says.
Still, the accelerating change doesn’t seem to be driving people crazy, as was predicted by Future Shock. Alvin Toffler says it may be that younger generations have simply become more adapted to change, that it is their culture.
Crazy people usually don’t acknowledge their insanity… Just sayin’
3:17 pm • 28 July 2010
I read this book when I was ten. It was probably one of the last Bellairs books I read…that is, until I re-read a few of them as an adult.
The Secret of the Underground Room by John Bellairs was published in 1990 by Dial Books for Young Readers. Edward Gorey created the dust jacket artwork for this title.
10:03 am • 28 July 2010 • 1 note
"We are sold books the same way we are sold cell phones, as if the latest models deserve the most attention. Each year, publishing houses churn out hundreds of thousands of new titles, including 35,000 works of fiction. The publicity machine goes to work, eager to fashion the rare success. Magazines and newspapers — the ones that still have book sections — chime in with opinions on which new books are worthwhile and why. Newspapers print their “summer reading” lists. The big-box bookstores pile their display tables with glossy stacks of fresh arrivals — for a fee, naturally. A relentless progression of the latest, freshest, greatest. Read this book! But all the middlemen along the way — the publishers, publicists, critics and book sellers — know the truth: The book they are hyping probably is not the book you ought to read, not even the book you would most enjoy reading. That book lies hidden in the back of the bookstore, or perhaps not even there. It is 10-, 20-, 35-years-old. However good it is, no one talks about it anymore. You might not have heard its title or its author’s name."
— Nathan Ihara
1:06 pm • 17 July 2010 • 19 notes
I love this picture (and others like it from Marco Mucig). There’s something in the zeitgeist about how books are interacting with our modern world, and vice versa, how we’re interacting with books. The web, in that it is a network of stories, is almost a web of books, and this image is kind of like what that might look like if those “books” that float in the ether were visual.
Incidentally, I created an image very much like this for my last article on how Storytelling is the Future of the Web…
2:38 pm • 16 July 2010 • 1 note
Storytelling Strategies for Digital Marketing
We’ve heard quite a bit over the past few years about how the web has changed the way we read, even the way we think. In particular, the often publicized worry is that the change has been a negative one—that we no longer read deeply, and that we can no longer focus our thinking as we did before. There are plenty of voices in dissent on this opinion, though they don’t tend to dispute the fact that the web has changed us rather than the judgement that said change is for the worse. As a result, those of us in the digital marketing space are caught up in a quite tumultuous time, seeking out any trick we can find to get people to pay attention to our messages online.
But I don’t think there is any “trick” to be discovered. While I may personally worry about the effects of the web on our brains, the reality seems to be that we do not actually have an attention problem. The problem lies in our failure to imbue marketing with information worth paying attention to.
What We Pay Attention To
No matter what happens with the web, people still fervently seek out entertainment. Every year, more books, television shows, movies, music and the like are created and voraciously consumed. But if that is the case, why do we believe this idea that the web has killed our attention? Perhaps the volume of content is increasing but the demands it makes on our attention spans are less? (In other words, is it possible that the web is helping us to create and sell more books, for example, that people aren’t actually reading?) I decided to take a closer look at the books, movies, and television we’ve consumed over the past twenty years to see if a clearer picture of what’s happening might emerge.
I began by looking at the the top-selling books from the last twenty years, wondering if I might see any trends in length or subject matter. If our attention spans were truly waning, I guessed that shorter self-help books might be the most popular books in recent years. After gathering the top three books from each year, both in the fiction and non-fiction categories (which you can see plotted out in the graph above), I saw that my suspicions were completely wrong. In reality, the bestselling fiction books were longer and outsold the bestselling non-fiction…
Read More >
9:00 am • 13 July 2010 • 1 note
German book vending machines!
2:22 pm • 4 June 2010
"Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics…Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books."
— M.D.R. Evans
4:19 pm • 21 April 2010 • 1 note
"You already know the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, born from a lower barrier-to-entry to publish. New modes of storytelling. Less environmental impact. A rise in importance of editors. And, yes — paradoxically — a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed."
— Craig Mod on Books in the Age of the iPad
1:04 pm • 7 March 2010 • 3 notes
"As the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, ‘The world is all that is the case.’ We have been flung into the world whether we like it or not. But the internet creates a vast illusion that the physical, social world of interacting minds and hearts does not exist. In this new situation, the screen is all that is the case, along with the illusion that the screen projects of a world tamed, digested, abbreviated, rationalized, and ordered into a trillion connected units, called sites. This new world turns the most consequential fact of human life—other people—into seemingly manipulable half presences wholly available to our fantasies. It’s a world controlled by our wrist and finger."
— Lee Siegel, Against the Machine
11:49 am • 16 December 2009
These turned out wonderfully— via Pentagram:
Faced with the task of designing 21 new covers for the works of Vladimir Nabokov, art director John Gall decided to ask 20 other designers for help. To create a series look—and to pay homage to Nabokov’s passion for butterfly collecting—he sent each of the participating designers a collector’s specimen box to serve as the centerpiece of the cover.
The one above is my favorite. See all 18 here >
5:29 pm • 10 November 2009
From Britannica blogger Robert McHenry:
Over my desk hangs a large print of a photograph (seen below) taken in London during World War II. It is of the library of Holland House, one of the great houses of London from the time of its construction early in the 17th century until its ruin in the Blitz of World War II…
One night in September 1940 the house was largely destroyed by German bombs. But the library – perhaps fortified by the weight of those books, perhaps (let us imagine) defiant of the book-burning Nazi regime – stood. The roof fell in, great beams hung precariously, but the shelves were mostly intact and the books remained quietly and neatly arranged in their proper order.
In the photograph, three men stand quietly at those shelves, seemingly oblivious of the rubble all about them. They are hatted, of course – two homburgs and a fedora – which brings home to the viewer the ambiguity of their situation: Are they indoors or out? One of the men is looking into a book; a second is just about to pull one from its shelf; and the third is simply scanning the spines arrayed before him.
What strikes us most forcefully is the men’s sangfroid. Surrounded by the wrack of war, they stand in silent contemplation of the books.
Merely British stiff-upper-lip? Perhaps. But it seems more than that to me.
2:10 pm • 3 November 2009 • 51 notes
