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
Here’s the great Elizabeth Eisenstein on the impact of the printing press on a lost world of information underload, and an interesting lens for viewing… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (10): Elizabeth Eisenstein on the Printing Press and the End of the Information Famine
Seven year-old Onfim slays his enemies; Onfim is a wild beast. Onfim (hat tip: Alex Tabarrok and Owen) reminds us that reading and writing (and… Read More »Writing and Reading (and visual art) as Technology (9): Virtual Realities
Overlay For those who came in late, here’s everyone’s favourite online encyclopedia on AR: Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (8): Augmenting Reality
Rover, Wanderer …And the road becomes my brideI have stripped of all but prideSo in her I do confideAnd she keeps me satisfiedGives me all… Read More »The Hero’s Journey (Wherever I May Roam)
I haven’t been able to find a literacy campaign earlier than King Sejong the Great of Korea‘s 1443-1444 Hunminjeongeum (“The Correct/Proper Sounds for the Instruction… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (7): History’s First Mass Literacy Campaign?
Revisionist History Thursday, 20:02 hrs I report an error on an OWID graph in their preliminary collection of information about books. Some of the numbers… Read More »Our World in Data is Great and Getting Better; or, How I Destroyed Several Billion Medieval Manuscripts
Not Gutenberg Gutenberg put several important pieces together in a new way in 1439(ish) when he built what most of us probably think of as… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (6): Stop Press. Who invented moveable type?
The development of spoken language was humankind’s first great networking technology.* Speech allows us to communicate thought and to think far better than we could… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (5): Literacy as Infrastructure for Thought