This link has been bookmarked by 12 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 Jul 2008, by Martin Carel.
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15 Oct 11
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spoken language is an evolutionary adaptation, but written language, in every form from cuneiform to unicode, is a technology, so there’s no written mode that isn’t under some sway or other.
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Kittler says the typewriter made Nietzsche’s work more aphoristic, but Nietzsche was always an aphoristic writer, so was this a perversion or a purification of his style?
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15 May 10
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02 Sep 08
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01 Sep 08
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08 Aug 08
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Consider, every time new prosthetics allowed people to see and know much more, conservatives and nostalgists claimed that normal people could not adapt. That such godlike powers should be reserved to an elite, perhaps even renounced. (And we have our own renunciation-promoters, don’t we? Indeed, renunciation is the theme of my next novel.)
Meanwhile, enthusiasts zealously have greeted every memory and vision prosthetic with hosannas, forecasting an apotheosis of reason and light.
(In 1894, philanthropist John Jacob Astor wrote a best-selling novel about the year 2001 — a future transformed by science, technology, enterprise and human good will. Life can be ironic. Astor died with a famed flourish of noblesse oblige aboard the sinking Titanic — the first of many garish calamities that began quenching this naive zeal for progress. For a while.)
In reality, the vision and memory prosthetics brought on consequences that were always far more complicated than either set of idealists expected. Out of all this ruction, just one thing made it possible for us to advance, ensuring that the net effects would be positive. That one thing was the pragmatic mind set of the Enlightenment.
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01 Aug 08
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Carr calls me an optimist, which is true. Here’s why: Every past technology I know of that has increased the number of producers and consumers of written material, from the alphabet and papyrus to the telegraph and the paperback, has been good for humanity.
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Nietzsche’s writing style changed with the typewriter, but was this change for the better or the worse? There is a melodramatic reference to Nietzsche being “under the sway of the machine,” but surely he was just as much under the sway of pen and ink before?
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29 Jul 08
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Whenever the abundance of written material spikes, the average quality of written material falls, as a side-effect of volume. New forms start out tentative and incomplete, and can only compete for attention with older literature among people who prize experimentation. The abundance itself creates a distraction as people grapple with information overload. Institutions built around previous scarcities warn, often correctly, of the end of society as we know it. And the act of institutionalizing the new abundance necessitates complex, and occasionally revolutionary, change.
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My argument instead is that technologies that make writing abundant always require new social structures to accompany them.
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We have a challenge before us in figuring out how to keep the distractions of the net at bay, now that new material is no longer hard to discover or access. Perhaps Carr is right that this time we will fail. Perhaps a medium that radically expands our ability to create and share written material will end up being bad for humanity. But that would be a first, in the three thousand years between the Phoenician alphabet and now.
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22 Jul 08
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