Tag Archives: internet

Of Ethical Consequence

On National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Scott Simon interviews Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption.

SS: You actually recommended an information diet that is kind of the equivalent to Michael Pollan’s famous food diet, which is: eat food not too much, mostly plants.

CJ: That’s right. It’s, you know, seek not too much, mostly facts. Right? Eat low on these sorts of information food chain and stick close to sources. If it’s an article on a bill in Congress or even, you know, a statehouse somewhere, going deep and actually trying to read the bill itself is really, I think, advantageous.

And it takes a little bit of time to pick up. Bills are not, you know, House resolutions are not the most entertaining things to read for most people. But getting to know what our legislative language is helps us, I think, become better citizens.

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Pitch Perfect

Vanity Fair on the conundrum at the Times.

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Without Inverted Commas

In the Guardian Hari Kunzru ponders the death of postmodernism.

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Due to the New Terms

MG Siegler at TechCrunch comments on Amazon’s new Kindle Cloud Reader.

One thing to note is that the cloud versions (and obviously the downloaded versions) of the Kindle books are still limited to a set number of devices. So if you have your books downloaded to your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, etc, you may be over the limit and will not be able to read them in the cloud.

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Provocative Strings

At Slate Michael Agger reviews Are You Serious? by Lee Siegel.

What Siegel sees in Updike’s story is an anxiety about the state of the novel: Updikean seriousness stood in contrast to the decline of the novel’s seriousness—its loss of cultural importance. We are still serious about movies and music, in the sense that people are moved to discuss and debate them, but less so about literature. Siegel’s challenge: Name a novel that has moved you in the last year as a novel did in high school or college. The new generation’s disdain for Updike was given more fuel by his dimissal of the Internet, which he called an “electronic anthill.” The pounding that Updike took belied a deeper concern: It’s easier to criticize a fogey-ish stance than it is to reinvigorate the novel—to make it serious again.

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The Digerati

Larry Sanger examines a new geek anti-intellectualism.

You don’t really care about knowledge; it’s not a priority. For you, the books containing knowledge, the classics and old-fashioned scholarship summing up the best of our knowledge, the people and institutions whose purpose is to pass on knowledge–all are hopelessly antiquated. Even your own knowledge, the contents of your mind, can be outsourced to databases built by collaborative digital communities, and the more the better. After all, academics are boring. A new world is coming, and you are in the vanguard. In this world, the people who have and who value individual knowledge, especially theoretical and factual knowledge, are objects of your derision. You have contempt for the sort of people who read books and talk about them–especially classics, the long and difficult works that were created alone by people who, once upon a time, were hailed as brilliant.

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Not All Readers Care

Stephanie Rosenbloom has a piece in the New York Times about book signing in the age of electronic reading.

Here’s how an Autography eBook “signing” will work: a reader poses with the author for a photograph, which can be taken with an iPad camera or an external camera. The image immediately appears on the author’s iPad (if it’s shot with an external camera, it’s sent to the iPad via Bluetooth). Then the author uses a stylus to scrawl a digital message below the photo. When finished, the author taps a button on the iPad that sends the fan an e-mail with a link to the image, which can then be downloaded into the eBook.

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Pay Labyrinth

Michael DeGusta compares the New York Times’s new pricing structure to those of other digital subscription services.

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