Books: December 2007 Archive Page

Doris Lessing doesn't like those silly bloggers one bit, as interpreted here via commentary from Ars Technica:

Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn't believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. "And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc." It is now common, she says, for "young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers."

Because, of course, to know about computers is to know nothing of value.

I just read a paper from a college senior who, when writing a paper on a canonically validated text, initially cited more sources from a DVD documentary than from scholarly books and articles, so I, too, lament the decline of literacy. Yet I'm not exactly comfortable with Lessing's take on the value of a liberal-arts education, or her assessment of the causes of the decay of literacy. Like the printing press, blogging puts the power of literacy in the hands of the populace. If the unwashed masses have the tools in their hands, they're going to use them to produce texts about what matters to them, not what matters to the ones who were already in power before the tools escaped into the wild.

It is rather amazing that educated people who don't have time to read a book have the time to make Lego stop-motion animated versions of viral dance videos, but I'd much rather that people create and share their own works -- which means the processing of a few diamonds along with a lot of roughage -- than limit themselves to silently swallowing what big-business wants them to consume.

ZDNet explores the public reaction to Amazon's new e-book reader.

I don't usually judge things by how they look but this thing, in my opinion, is ugly in a way that I thought was exclusive to the Zune. Weighing up the pros and cons, I'd come to the conclusion that the Kindle has already hit the peak of popularity and the only way for it to go was down.

But then I realized that the Kindle had a cult.

From a speculative essay by Richard M. Stallman:

In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment--for not taking pains to prevent the crime.