Tag: literature

Medieval Multitasking and Focus

A few weeks ago Religion Dispatches published an article about medieval manuscripts and multitasking. The point is that for centuries our minds have referenced texts on multiple levels; the internet did not inherently create this distraction. There is also this gem from a David Brooks column:

The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities.

The New Literacy

From a fascinating article at Wired:

Its almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasnt a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text like in law, advertising, or media, theyd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

I’m with Daniel in that this is a fact that’s quite obvious to users.

Oracle Bones

I’m in the process of reading Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler. Hessler was a Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Boston Globe, and National Geographic and also spent time in China with the Peace Corps.

If you haven’t read it I highly recommend it; even though I’m not finished with it the book presents a captivating look at aspects of Chinese society and history on a more personal level.

Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler: a great read.

The anecdotes and experiences related by Hessler show a side of China that I think sometimes gets lost in the talk of international trade and human rights. By telling stories that focus upon Chinese individuals Hessler does a brilliant job of portraying life in Beijing and throughout China.

Below is the description from Amazon:

A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler explores the human side of China’s transformation, viewing modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

Aristotle on Democrats

I’m reading Aristotle’s “The Politics” right now for a class on Democratic Theory. In Book 3, Chapter 4 he writes something that I found to be quite applicable to current American politics and specifically to the Democratic reaction to Barack Obama’s victory in the elections. In this chapter Aristotle writes that:

Hence this too has been rightly said–that it is not possible to rule well without having been ruled. Virtue in [each of these] cases is different, but the good citizen should know and have the capacity both to be ruled and to rule, and this very thing is the virtue of a citizen–knowledge of rule over free persons from both [points of view].

This spoke to me in realtion to the estatic reaction among Democrats to Obama’s election. Suddenly a mass of people has decided that they need to be involved in politics, community service, and day to day political news. Certainly part of this is due to the ever-worsening economic situation, but it seems undeniable that part of it is also a result of Democrats now being the “rulers” to use Aristotle’s language. What I wonder is where was all of this political activism during the past 8 years? There were certainly just as important of decisions being made during this time, but instead of being involved in the process the mass of Democrats seemed to be largely apathetic to the daily actions of George Bush.

To me a disturbing number of Democrats, perhaps epitomized by some of those currently serving in Congress, are happy to extol the virtues of the American political system when they control the presidency and both houses of Congress, but once the other party gains control they revert right back to decrying how disastrous that party is for America and how broken the system is. This kind of hypocrisy just doesn’t sit well with me and is one of the main reasons why I largely abstained from voting for candidates in this past election: they’re all equally hypocritical and despicable.

Newspaper Propaganda

I read this article today about a new group of newspaper executives that have banded together to combat what they see as the misrepresentation of the economic viability of newspapers. That article sums up the main message of this group (whose website can be found here) as:

— Newspapers are very much alive and growing when you consider the print and online audience together. And they talk to far more people than their radio, television and Internet competitors.

— Newspapers have earned the public’s trust because they employ professional journalists to verify news for truth, accuracy and context, and they are usually the first source of local news.

– Advertisers continue to invest in newspapers because they deliver results. They still move goods and services more reliably than other forms of promotion.

— Newspapers remain essential to our democratic system of government, serving as a watchdog against crime and corruption, and a guide dog for information that allows the public to make informed decisions on the issues of the day.

While the thoughts behind some of these points are probably on the right track I cannot help but read this website as a simple propaganda message by newspaper execs. A quick perusal of the groups website reveals headlines like “Let’s Invent an iTunes for News“, “Network television is fading fast“, and “Newspaper Web Site Audience Rises Twelve Percent In 2008“. While some of these articles focus on reinventing the newspaper industry a far greater portion of them focus on dispelling the notion that newspapers are in any sort of drastic decline.

I see many problems arising through this viewpoint of news and what needs to be done to revolutionize it. Instead of trying to summarize all of them I’d rather present what I see as necessary for a “news revolution.”

First, in my mind newspaper execs shouldn’t be putting their time into spreading the message that newspapers are doing well and that there shouldn’t be such worry. Instead, they ought to be focusing their attention and resources on creating and delivering content that actually spreads readership. If newspapers gain readership (either in print or digitally) then advertisers will listen. Don’t tell us that newspapers are doing fine, show us. Prove to the country and to advertisers that people are still interested in reading the New York Times.

Second, what I see as lacking is a mode of digital news consumption that can create significant revenue for large news institutions. I don’t see people as starting to pay for digital news content until they have a device that makes the consumption of this content indispensable or at least far easier than it currently is. Perhaps the Kindle, iPhone, and G1 are a start, and maybe there is a better device in the future, but ultimately newspapers will have to find a way to distribute content digitally through devices that already exist. With these devices that can seemingly do everything around people are not going to want to carry around yet another device to read their news on. Thus, the focus ought to be on newspapers banding together and creating apps for these pervasive devices that can distribute news from a broad base of sources as well as generate revenue. What I’m thinking here is an app with an interface similar to Classics for the iPhone, but one that places subtle and relevant ads among the content. This provides yet another form of advertising revenue for newspapers as well as an extendable and fluid form through which newspapers will be able to adapt to changing digital and economic conditions in the future.

Third, it’s time for newspapers to realize that a daily print distribution is just getting to be too costly. With this in mind their websites and portable modes of consumption need to create more revenue. On this note, the websites of newspapers should become more adaptable to the individual reader. This is partly being done through RSS feeds on many sites, but it’s not there yet. If I read headlines in my RSS reader or on my phone then I don’t really want to visit the sites homepage and see all of those same articles again. I realize that to individualize news to every user would be an immense effort both financially and technologically, but I think that we’ve reached a point with technology and content management systems that this is now possible and through creativity can be made feasible too.

Ultimately it may be that large newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are just simply too big to adapt to this new age. Perhaps as some have suggested it will be small start-ups and maybe even college newspapers that provide a successful model for digital news distribution. There’s some exciting stuff happening out there and it’s time that print newspapers stopped trying to convince people that their medium is secure and instead started working on spreading and capitalizing on their digital distribution.

Phew, you made it all the way to the end. Those are just my two cents (or almost 900 words…yikes). I’ll probably look back on this in a few months and reword it and wish I had made it a little more solid and clear, but for now those are my thoughts.

Google and Digitizing Books (again)

There’s another article on the New York Times concerning Google’s effort to digitize books and the recent class-action settlement that fell in their favour. From the article:

Like the oil barons in the late 19th century, Google is thirsty for a vital raw material — digital content. As Daniel J. Clancy, the engineering director for Google Book Search, put it, “our core business is about search and discovery, and search and discovery improves with more content.”

He can even sound like a prospector when he says Google began its effort to scan millions of books “because there is a ridiculous amount of information out there,” he said, later adding, “and we didn’t see anyone else doing it.”

The idea that all of these books will be searchable is certainly appealing to me, but personally a digitized book will never replace a physical copy for me. With the medium of technology as it is now I can enjoy reading newspapers and short to medium articles digitally, but reading through something like Foucault or Aristotle on a screen would simply be intolerable for me. With that said I have yet to try some of the newer forms of digital books (e.g. the Kindle and Classics for the iPhone). Maybe it’s just a computer screen that I can’t handle reading a book on, but until something proves to me otherwise I will not be convinced of a digital presentation for books.

Link via Link By Link – In a Google Library, Millions of Books, but No Card Catalog – NYTimes.com.

Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish

I’m currently reading and enjoying Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Taken from Wikipedia is the summary/main information:

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a book written by the philosopher Michel Foucault. Originally published in 1975 in France under the title Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison, it was translated into English in 1977. It is an examination of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the massive changes that occurred in western penal systems during the modern age. It focuses on historical documents from France, but the issues it examines are relevant to every modern western society. It is considered a seminal work, and has influenced many theorists and artists.

Foucault challenges the commonly accepted idea that the prison became the consistent form of punishment due to humanitarian concerns of reformists, although he does not deny those. He does so by meticulously tracing out the shifts in culture that led to the prison’s dominance, focusing on the body and questions of power. Prison is a form used by the “disciplines”, a new technological power, which can also be found, according to Foucault, in schoolshospitals, military barracks, etc. The main ideas of Discipline and Punishcan be grouped according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline and prison.

Read the full Wikipedia article.

Another take on journalism

This time from Matthew Yglesias who writes that:

People should also recall that a catastrophic collapse of the newspaper industry would hardly be without precedent. The real heyday of American newspapering came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the United States features a literate population and no broadcast media. The rise of radio and television had a devastating impact on the industry and caused massive shrinkage in the volume of papers. This shrinkage then led to what journalists consider the heyday of Americanjournalism when the industry had fallen so far that most papers faced little-to-no competition and could serve as authoritative “objective” sources of information. We’re now once again amidst and era in which technological change is going to kill off a lot of existing business models. But all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

While the simple fact that a decline has precedent doesn’t mean that we should disregard the current decline in print journalism it is nonetheless important when we read doom and gloom articles about the current state of the newspaper industry. The idea that Yglesias brings up in his post (i.e. that money ought to be invested in non-profit media institutions) is a good one, and hopefully one that philanthropists like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates will listen to.

Ultimately I see the eventual decline of print journalism as inevitable. Over the past decades society as a whole has simply moved toward more image-based and more fragmented modes of consuming information. This can be seen with the rapid growth of the television and then the internet. Both of these mediums encourage people to digest news in short blurbs and bursts and do not require the time that reading newspaper articles does. Overall, I think that a vast percentage of society has been conditioned to not have the attention span needed for reading through the New York Times or the Atlantic Monthly. It’s too bad, but I fear it’s true.

Read the original article.

A critique of Morrison

Finally, another human on this planet that does not think that Toni Morrison is the greatest writer alive. B.R. Myers writes of Morrison’s new novel A Mercy that:

How shallow and vague that is; how glibly it breezes through the life of the mind. A Mercy is eked out with a few set pieces, but even they rush us through; the book never seems to settle into narrative “real time.”

For all its cheerlessness, the novel is anything but grittily realistic. Some scenes, such as one in which a character gets out of her bath “aslide with wintergreen,” evince an effort to make even these miserable lives picturesque. But Morrison’s failure to evoke the period is more the fault of her all-too-contemporary prose style: “1682 and Virginia was still a mess.” No one likes an archaizer, apart from a million Cormac McCarthy fans, but a novelist writing of the 17th century should at least avoid language that is jarringly inconsistent or out of place. Reminiscing, the slaves vacillate between would-be-poetic English and an equally improbable sort of Hollywood Injun: “Shadows of men sat on barrels, then stood. They said they were told to break we in.” Anachronisms abound, from New Age lingo like “She gives off a bad feeling” to the dialect of the postbellum South: “her borning young.” We are even told that our Anglo-Dutch trader had “gone head to head with rich gentry.” What, and not drunk their milk shake?

For the one required class on campus Freshman year we were required to read Beloved which I found to be a self-indulgent and arrogant piece of literary crap. I have never been able to understand why Toni Morrison gets the praise that she does for her novels while other American writers simply get overshadowed.

Link to the original article.

More from A Thousand Plateaus

Another interesting quote I found while reading the first chapter of Deleuz and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus”:

Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit an to make no presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. (page 7)

I simply found this interesting because I found it to be quite relevant to my feelings toward the teaching and learning of languages like Ancient Greek or Latin. I’ve always been troubled by the way that we do not fully comprehend the structure or construction of these languages, but yet we still make assumptions about language usage and meaning. I believe that we do this by breaking the languages down into a single realm of meaning that may or may not have been applicable or relevant for the general populous of the time.