Walking in the rain today I was amazed by some of our major biases towards the book as a vehicle of thought transmission. We give much credence to the book: an author’s thoughts are represented by his books, so much to the point that when we say “Augustine’s thought on this subject” what we […]
I’ll tell you one thing about not having a computer:I kinda don’t miss reading my feeds. Sure, I am interested in what everyone has to say–the small blogs for their individual life stories, and the large blogs for the cool things I am shown which I might have not discovered otherwise. But today, as I […]
Long live the book:Dialogue, handwriting, print, photography, cinema, radio, television, digital: all these things still exist, yet each of them in turn has become the defining media of an era, longer or shorter, only to have their dominance overtaken by the next big thing. None of them have wholly been superseded, because each has its particular communication that it is not only well suited for, but such communication is almost impossible in any other form.Debate might still be best done in person–at least the nature of debate changes through blogs and comments…. Philosophy and other extended treatise work well in the printed book but as Neil Postman writes, extended discourse just doesn’t work on television.The average time a reader spends on a blog post is 96 seconds.
Much of it mirrors my own experience, the discovery of used bookstores, the addictive desire to own too much, his poverty in favour of his books.I read, made futile notes toward ambitious writing projects, waited for the spark that would carry me from planning into actual production…I woke up one day and found that my way of living had become intolerable…. I have been wanting to make a study of the literary essay for a while–I seem to remember a time of reading Seneca, Montaigne and Borges with relish.Back to the book, the conclusion struck me.I saw what it could be like, our toil and misery replaced by a vivid, pleasant dream…. What interests me is this dissemination, the movement and effects of books, not simply their existence.Books will always exist, just like movies have not killed theater, and people still go to concerts, and they still debate in person.
I found a javascript bookmarklet to allow Categories in posts, mostly because I can’t get the Greasemonkey scripts to work, and I’ve edited it just for technorati, because I don’t, as of yet, use del.icio.us.What I want to do it edit the script for Wikipeida links. I love to annotate me posts with references to Wikipedia for those things which people might want more info on. It shouldn’t be too hard, just changing the input to go to “en.wikipeida.org/wiki/” instead of “www.technorati.com/tag/“I’ve also got around to reading, finally, Febvre and Martin’s The Coming of the Book…. It is like reading a more accurate version of McLuhan.There was one section noting that, before the introduction of print, printing from woodblock and then copper engravings was quite common, easing the eventual introduction of printed type to the general public.
