“The most important reason to stop multitasking so much isn’t to make me feel respected, but to make you exist. If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”
— Jaron Lanier (amen!)
11:00 am • 3 September 2010
“More important, we may pay closer attention to reading as an element in what used to be called the history of mentalities - that is, world views and ways of thinking. All the keepers of commonplace books, from Drake to Madan, read their way through life, picking up fragments of experience and fitting them into patterns. The underlying affinities that held those patterns together represented an attempt to get a grip on life, to make sense of it, not by elaborating theories but by imposing form on matter. Commonplacing was like quilting: it produced pictures, some more beautiful than others, but each of them interesting in its own way. They reveal patterns of culture: the segments that went into it, the stitching that connected them, the tears that pulled them apart, and the common cloth of which they were composed.”
— Robert Darnton, The Mysteries of Reading, from The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, page 173
9:00 am • 28 August 2010 • 3 notes
“Libraries absolutely cannot keel over and let Google replace them. They are our collective bookshelves, the memory theater for a community. As Robert Darnton suggested in the December 17, 2009 New York Review of Books, the U.S. government might do well to acquire Google Books outright. France, after legally blocking Google’s plans to scan its books, is undertaking a digitization initiative of its own. This is, after all, a basically political matter; the bookshelf is a political arrangement. It carries our words, ideas, convictions, memories, identity, and language—the imaginative substance of any political order. Just as a personal bookshelf becomes the extension of one’s body, a democratic society must ensure that its books are held democratically.”
— Nathan Schneider
2:38 pm • 19 August 2010 • 2 notes
“Lines that once separated, say, public from indiscreet, consumers from connoisseurs, sharing from stealing, enthusiasm from compulsion, have been progressively blurred. We can’t trust the horizon to stay fixed, which distorts our own sense of limits. Just when it seems possible to keep up with the information flow, new torrents flood into focus. Just when we think we have mastered the breadth of our desires, other temptations emerge and we spread ourselves thinner. We think we are presenting a coherent picture of who we are online, only to recognize suddenly that we are not so sure of that identity ourselves. We become afraid of missing out on things at the same time we dread the ramifications of becoming clued in. Prodded by the awareness of plenitude within reach, we end up with insatiable appetite for disappointment. Pleasure becomes coextensive with unbounded connectivity, but moral intuition would seem to suggest that unbounded pleasures cannot be sustainable. We end up both wanting and not wanting what technology can provide simultaneously, another reason why the metaphor of addiction seems applicable.
But by expediting our access to ever more data, technology isn’t merely overwhelming our moral or neurological capabilities to resist. Instead, its chief ideological accomplishment is to complement preexisting assumptions about our shared values that are already built into consumerism — that quantity is synonymous with quality, that more is automatically better, that contentment is a mirage, that it’s normal to be ostentatious and to conceive the scope of our ambitions and our identity as limitless (which, incidentally, promises to make us limitlessly productive as we pursue these dreams). It may be that the extent to which we are indoctrinated into those values determines the degree to which we find technology addictive, and nothing inherent in technology makes us compulsive about it.”
— Rob Horning, New Inquiry, Children are Our Future: Resistance, Addition, and the Digital Natives
10:16 am • 17 August 2010 • 1 note
My Empty iPad
I think the iPad is a great idea. But, in it’s present state, it’s not a truly great device.
Compared to the computers I’ve used over the past two decades, it’s a stunning achievement. I can browse the web, send and receive email, listen to music, watch video, play games, create documents, record audio, and many other things on this tiny, beautiful tablet that recognizes the touch of my hand and has to be recharged so infrequently that it seems to simply run on its own lifeforce. It makes real the utilitarian props of science fiction books and film; it’s the time machine that reminds us we live in the future. Oh, and given all that it does, it’s really not that expensive.
I did, of course, overlook two particularly important things in my features list. The iPad is a part of two new web ecosystems - that of focused, “miniature” applications (apps) and of e-books. The ability to create and run apps for Apple’s mobile devices has resulted in so much fanfare, the only thing that threatens to overshadow it has been the joy of moving our libraries from shelves to the cloud. But frankly, apps and e-books, with all their glorious potential, are the most disappointing things about the iPad.
To me, apps remind me of coupons. Most coupons offer discounts for things I would ordinarily not buy, yet I am tempted by the deal to buy them. In like manner, few apps present truly useful functionality, yet offered up for free or a nominal fee, it’s hard to resist filling my iPad with them, or my time trying to integrate them into my life. Ironically, the only “app” I find at all useful is the one that seems it should be an integrated piece of the iPad operating system: iBooks. Sadly, iBooks is the other big disappointment.
Before I explain my disappointment, let me first list the things about iBooks that are not disappointing (I won’t, by the way, mention all the UI metaphorical disappointments in iBooks, as those complaints are plentiful on the web already). Finding, sampling, purchasing, downloading, and reading books is very easy. As Apple fans like to say, “it just works.” In addition to the two books I’ve purchased from the iBooks store, I’ve downloaded over fifteen books from among Project Gutenberg, a collection of works now among the public domain. In my opinion, the very existence of the Project Gutenberg collection is a significant “pro” for the iPad. But aside from the selection of public domain classics, “selection” within the iBooks ecosystem is surprisingly limited. Yes, I found a couple of science fiction novels of interest, but the majority of the books that I’ve put on my “to read” list are not available from iBooks. Specifically, 20 books that I hope to read at some point are, at this time, not listed in the iBooks store. Nor are 67 of the books that I’ve read over the past year and a half. These titles are not obscure, nor are they all so new as to be expected to be absent. They’re just not there yet. Maybe someday I’ll be able to purchase them…
Oh, right. I forgot. I actually would rather not purchase these books. I’d much rather borrow them from the library. The library - where I have found and accessed the vast majority of books that I’ve read over the past four years - need not be threatened by the iPad. Maybe it is or will be, but it really shouldn’t have to be that way. My dream for this device is to be able to borrow books from the library collection in electronic format, either by gaining access to them through the library’s website, or by “picking them up” while physically browsing its collection. The serendipity of discovering books in proximity to those you’ve sought out is a powerful thing. It’s how I’ve come to read a substantial number of books. Proximity is a recommendation engine of its own - an algorithm composed of the gaps between books, the curatorial decisions of librarians, and the element of chance determining whether a book is there or in the hands of a fellow citizen. It’s a human engine that is more likely to deliver you a book you didn’t know about than those recommendation engines you find on sites like Amazon.com. Those are so heavily influenced by popularity and inventory, that you are likely to see a smaller and more predictable array of material “also bought by” or “also viewed by” those who bought or looked at the book you’re considering.
I’m disappointed by the pressure I feel to integrate apps in my life and thereby validate my purchase of the iPad. Boy, it would be so much easier if I could honestly say, “I’ve come to truly depend upon ___, I could never give up my iPad now.” But I can’t say that. I sincerely want to read on my iPad, but I’m disappointed that the only way to participate in this e-books revolution is to buy books that I really don’t want to read and to buy books when I really just want to borrow them. One day (in the future), when I can join my love for the community library (whatever that means then) with my personal device, I will be happy.
Can I get an amen?
9:09 pm • 12 August 2010 • 1 note
“Engaged by brilliant illuminations; challenged by reading in Latin, without spacing between words, capitalization, or punctuation; and invited into the commentary of past readers of the text, medieval readers of Augustine, Dante, Virgil, or the Bible would surely be able to give today’s digitally-distracted multitaskers a run for our money. The physical form of the bound book brought together all of these various “links” into one “platform” so that the diverse perspectives of a blended contemporary and historical community of thinkers could be more easily accessed.”
— Elizabeth Drescher, on illuminated manuscripts
10:01 am • 29 July 2010 • 2 notes
“The function of these images in illuminated manuscripts has no small bearing on the hypertext analogy. These “miniatures” (so named not because they were small—often they were not—but because they used red ink, or vermillion, the Latin word for which is minium) did not generally function as illustrations of something in the written text, but in reference to something beyond it. The patron of the volume might be shown receiving the completed book or supervising its writing. Or, a scene related to a saint might accompany a biblical text read on that saint’s day in the liturgical calendar without otherwise having anything to do with the scripture passage. Of particular delight to us today, much of the marginalia in illuminated books expressed the opinions and feelings of the illuminator about all manner of things—his demanding wife, the debauched monks in his neighborhood, or his own bacchanalian exploits.”
— Elizabeth Drescher, comparing illuminated manuscripts to hypertext
4:18 pm • 28 July 2010 • 1 note
“
Of course there’s a new Luddism! There’s always a new Luddism whenever there’s change. I mean, Luddism is specifically a demand that the people who benefited from the old system be consulted before any technology is allowed to disrupt it…
And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore…
The baby boomers, when we were young, we had zero, zero patience for the idea that people who are in their fifties in the ’70s and ’80s should somehow be shielded from cultural changes because somehow the stuff that we were doing was upsetting them. So, now it’s our turn and we ought to just suck it up…
What is quite obviously happening is that the number of things that are available for short attention are increasing. But, so is the ability to consume complicated, long-form information.
”
— Clay Shirky
12:10 pm • 20 July 2010 • 10 notes
“It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides—after all, it’s not a revolution if nobody loses.”
— Clay Shirky
1:35 pm • 19 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 • 20 notes
“In short, the fast-slow polarity – or antithesis, if you prefer – strikes me as false. We all have several guises as readers. If I am reading – to pick an obvious example – James Joyce, slow reading feels appropriate. If I’m reading the instruction manual for a new washing machine, it doesn’t.”
— Henry Hitchings
11:03 am • 17 July 2010 • 1 note
“I don’t think using a search engine to find certain key words in a text is a substitute for reading it properly. You don’t get a proper sense of the work, or understand its context. And there’s no serendipity – half the things I’ve found in my research have come when I’ve luckily stumbled across something I wasn’t expecting.”
— Keith Thomas, Oxford History Professor
9:00 am • 17 July 2010
