[So maybe "very light" doesn't really mean "non-existent."] This paragraph is from yet another Thomas Friedman op-ed gushing over the revolutionary, disruptive, transformational possibilities MOOCs present: “Therefore, we have to get beyond the current system of information and delivery — the professorial “sage on the stage” and students taking notes, followed by a superficial assessment, … Continue reading »
Tagged with Reading …
“Many books are read but some books are lived”
Just a quick post to pass along a link to a wonderful essay that appeared recently in The New Republic. Leon Wieseltier’s “Voluminous” is a smart, evocative reflection on the meaning of books and a personal library that is Benjamin-esque in its effect. Here are a couple of excerpts. Do click through to read the rest. … Continue reading »
Making Sense Out of Life: Early Modern and Digital Reading Practices
When I wrote the About page for this blog I cited an article by Alan Jacobs from several years ago in which he likened blogs to commonplace books. Commonplace books, especially popular during the sixteenth century when printing first began to yield an avalanche of relatively affordable books, served as a means of ordering and … Continue reading »
Kindles, Books, and Half-hearted Endorsements of the New
Megan McArdle on the Kindle and the Book: The Kindle was only released in November of 2007, just three-and-a-half years ago. By 2009, Kindle book sales briefly surpassed print sales on the day after Christmas. In July of 2010, the eBook format overtook hardcovers, and six months later, it surpassed paperbacks. Today, according to Amazon, … Continue reading »
This is Not a Book
Budget cuts have put over 450 libraries across the UK in jeopardy and consequently launched protests and a vigorous campaign to save the libraries. Writing in Prospect Magazine, Leo Beneditus suggests that while this is unfortunate, the whole situation is not quite so desperate as the rhetoric of the library enthusiasts make it out to … Continue reading »
‘We mustn’t take people for fools’: de Certeau on Reading as Resistance
In The Practice of Everyday Life, French theorist and sometime Jesuit, Michel de Certeau presents an account of individual agency which seeks to nuance Foucault’s exposition of the disciplinary society. Where certain historical and sociological narratives are inclined to see only passive consumers at the mercy of structural forces, de Certeau wants us to see … Continue reading »
The (Un)Naturalness of Privacy
Andrew Keen is not an Internet enthusiast, at least not since the emergence of Web 2.0. That much has been clear since his 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and his 2006 essay equating Web 2.0 with Marxism in The Weekly Standard, a publication in which such … Continue reading »
“Darkness Gathers Around the Book”
“I read and I daydream …. My reading is thus a sort of impertinent absence. Is reading an exercise in ubiquity?” An initial, indeed initiatory, experience: to read is to be elsewhere, where they are not, in another world; it is to constitute a secret scene, a place one can enter and leave when one … Continue reading »
“We like lists because we don’t want to die”
It may not look like much, but that grocery list sitting on the kitchen counter is a faint visual echo of the beginnings of civilization. At least from a certain angle of vision explicated and illustrated in Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay (2009). In a Der Spiegel interview from November 2009, … Continue reading »
The Book is Dead, Long Live Book Art
Reports of the book’s death are, like those of Mark Twain’s, greatly exaggerated. While it’s obvious we are undergoing a significant shift, some might even say revolution, in how we read, I doubt it will eradicate the book. The book, however, has most certainly lost its monopoly as a reading platform. It is also interesting … Continue reading »
