Recommended by OpenCulture.org, via HN. See also: Writing and Reading as Technology (1): Transforming Fire; Slow BurnWriting and Reading as Technology (2): Half-baked BeginningsWriting and… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (15): videos on the evolution of the alphabet and the spread of writing
Tremendous.
Hat tip: HNWith apologies to subscribers who received post 14 of this series out of order due to my enthusiasm for the subject matter… …… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (13): Erik Engheim on Gutenberg vs earlier Asian printing technologies
We often have convenience now because someone did the maths before. Ben Sparks With apologies to subscribers who received this out of order due to… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (14): Magical Paper Sizes; or, The Golden Non-Ratio
The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients… Read More »Steven Pinker on writing in the classic style
… it was the two extremes of human population range that fascinated him most of all. They very young and the very old – both… Read More »Arthur C. Clarke on Immortality and Decadence, Death and Life
Here’s Eisenstein again. There’s a lot at work: The combinatorial innovation that was the printing press created further opportunities for cross-pollination by breaking down old… Read More »Technology (23): Elizabeth Eisenstein on how the printing press created new networks and sparked further innovation
I’m working my way through Elizabeth Eisenstein’s excellent The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, an abridged version of her two-volume The Printing Press as… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (12): Elizabeth Eisenstein on How the Printing Press Changed Books
From the so-far excellent A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: Years ago, on the phone with Bill Buford, then fiction editor of The… Read More »“I read a line and I like it enough to read the next”: George Saunders on Stories as Linear Temporal Phenomena
The technology of writing isn’t simply the infrastructure of thought: it’s the enabling infrastructure of most of the complex activities we think of as government.… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (11): Writing Rules