I attended Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission in Cambridge, MA, April 24-26. (Follow that link for a summary of what the conference was about.) Here are my thoughts about the conference after returning home. Of primary interest to me, coming from Duluth, MN, where it was below freezing yesterday, was … Read more Media in Transition 6… Reactions…
“Exploring the Ethical Implications of Technological Change through the Thought of Walter Ong and Other Media Theorists” That’s the title of my paper for the conference coming up this weekend in Boston, Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission. The paper is not the greatest thing I’ve ever written, but it is … Read more Exploring the Ethical Implications of Media Technology Through the Thought of Walter Ong
Stephen L. Carter, a law professor who writes about democracy, has an article in The Daily Beast entitled, “Where’s the Bailout for the Publishing Industry?” It begins: Like a lot of writers, I am wondering when Congress and the administration will propose a bailout for the publishing industry. Carnage is everywhere. Advances slashed, editors fired, … Read more Stephen L. Carter – Where’s the Bailout for the Publishing Industry?
The details of the upcoming Media in Transition 6 conference have been posted to the web. On the site you can now find the full program and abstracts of all the papers being presented. Full papers are being added as they come in. This conference, which has no fee for registration, is going to be … Read more Media in Transition 6 conference details
Chapter two of John Miedema’s Slow Reading, “Slow Reading in an Information Ecology,” is now online at the Litwin Books site. The first two paragraphs here: Isaac Asimov (1969) tells a story of a future in which a character is asked to demonstrate his astonishing talent to the president. The talent is to perform basic … Read more Chapter Two of Slow Reading
Author: John Miedema Price: $12.00 Published: March 2009 ISBN: 978-0-9802004-4-7 Printed on acid-free paper https://staging.litwinbooks.com/slowreading.php In the face of ever-increasing demands for speed-reading of volumes of information fragments, some readers are choosing to slow down. While it often seems necessary to read quickly, many readers share a conviction that reading slowly is essential to enjoyment … Read more Slow Reading
Interesting post at Stay Free! commenting on a New York Times story about kids using YouTube as their primary search engine for information about topics assigned for homework. Carrie McLaren gets into some of the differences between text and video as information media…
Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission International Conference April 24-26, 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology CALL FOR PAPERS (MIT site) In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while … Read more Call for papers: Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission
CALL FOR PAPERS The Society for Textual Scholarship Fourteenth Biennial International Interdisciplinary Conference March 18-21, 2009, New York University Program Co-Chairs: Andrew Stauffer, Boston University [astauff@bu.edu]; John Young, Marshall University [youngj@marshall.edu] Deadline for Proposals: October 31, 2008 The Program Chairs invite the submission of full panels or individual papers devoted to interdisciplinary discussion of current … Read more Call for Papers: The Society for Textual Scholarship
Simson Garfinkel has an article in the new issue of MIT’s Technology Review about Wikipedia, arguing that it is creating troubling implications for the way we view reality: Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth: Why the online encyclopedia’s epistemology should worry those who care about traditional notions of accuracy. In a sense this article is … Read more Wikipedia and what we mean by truth
Kevin Arthur has posted a few paragraphs from recent article by Lewis Lapham on the education and intellectual life in the United States. Kevin picked out a few choice parts that concern the place of the humanities in the technological age (this being the focus of his blog), but Library Juice readers may be interested … Read more Lewis Lapham on education and intellectual life in the postmodern USA
A book of interest: Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation. What it says is that the under-30 generation is so removed from books and reading that it is shockingly ignorant, and we should all be worried. Bauerlein blames the internet. The Chicago Tribune published a decent review a few days ago. The students at the university … Read more Book: The Dumbest Generation
Thank you The Onion, for this: “Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book.”
Nicholas Carr writes in the Atlantic Monthly that “Google is Making Us Stupid,” focusing on the way a decade of web browsing has altered the way his mind works to the extent that he now struggles to read long texts. I pretty much know what he is talking about – I do find it harder … Read more Is Google Making Us Stupid?
I’m slow to catch this one, so I’ll just mention it (as an important scholarly paper that argues for the future of paper): William Powers’ “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal,” a discussion paper for the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.
I would like to propose that the current era in librarianship, which is normally characterized as a “period of rapid change,” is perhaps better described as a period of denial. It is a period in which librarians are scurrying to disassociate themselves from their own profession as it tends to be thought of, with a … Read more Librarian: Accept Yourself
I just caught some of this on the radio and want to share it. The new episode of Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge” is called Dumbing Down and Smartening Up, and features interviews with Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason (mentioned here March 16th); George Saunders, author of … Read more An Hour of Good Listening
Tim Brown has a post in Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, about the “death of zines,” claiming, as though no one had heard the idea before, that zine culture is dead and has been replaced by the internet. There’s something a little bit too obvious and common sense about the … Read more Zines: not dead, just retro
This is worth a mention: Mikita Brottman’s The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. I read about it in Kevin Arthur’s Question Technology blog. The book begins by questioning whether reading is necessarily good for you, and continues as a memoir of reading in different genres. Brottman’s own site links to a number of reviews. Reading is … Read more Against Reading?
Let’s start from the common premise that an important part of being a librarian in this time of rapid change is to keep a close eye on trends. How are things changing? We need to know so that we can keep up, so that we can modify our services to meet society’s changing needs, to … Read more Library trendspotting if you happen to like Susan Jacoby