This link has been bookmarked by 14 people . It was first bookmarked on 25 Jul 2008, by KO -.
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04 Nov 09
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Very few computers were connected. They stood alone. No handhelds, virtually no cell phones. To get on the internet was a chore, and it was a very small place.
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The idea that this world we are building is somehow diminishing communication is all wrong. In fact, it's enhancing communication. It is allowing all kinds of new language.
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You can't download it. That's the whole point. You want to download it so that you can read it like a book. But that's precisely what it can't be. You want it to be data, but it's experience.
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There will be lots of things that will be similar to the physical world, and there will be lots of things that will be different. But it's going to be a space that's going to have a lot of the attributes that we like in reality--a richness, a sense of place, a place to be silent, a place to go deep.
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Kaitlyn LehmanKevin Kelly article! Make 4 highlights and comment on each highlight!
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01 Oct 08
Michel Bauwenswhether books will be dethroned from their centrality in culture.
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03 Aug 08
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31 Jul 08
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Language is our evolutionary wonder. It is our marvel. If we're going to engage the universe, comprehend it and penetrate it, it will be through ever more refined language.
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it still impinges on me, because it means I live in a world that I find to be increasingly attenuated, distracted, fanned-out, disembodied.
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it seems to me, as an adult human being living in 1995, that the signal is getting weaker. I find that more and more I navigate my days within this kind of strange landscape.
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I don’t think a desirable bookless world is hard to imagine. It could be a very oral society, where the spoken word regains some the stature it lost when printing came along.
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Instead his koan contains an inherent conservativism in which any change is assumed to be negative.
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remolino75we should resist the idea that the book is the apex of human culture.
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29 Jul 08
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I have very nineteenth-century, romantic views of the self and what it can accomplish and be. I don't have a computer. I work on a typewriter. I don't do e-mail. It's enough for me to deal with mail. Mail itself almost feels like too much. I wish there were less of it and I could go about the business of living as an entity in my narrowed environment…
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Look, computers are over. All the effects that we can imagine coming from standalone computers have already happened. What we're talking about now is not a computer revolution, it's a communications revolution. And communication is, of course, the basis of culture itself. The idea that this world we are building is somehow diminishing communication is all wrong. In fact, it's enhancing communication.
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When you read a book, there's a kind of a silence. And in that silence, in the interstices between the words themselves, your imagination has room to move, to create. On-line communication is filling those spaces.
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But in order to feel the greatest sense of communication, to realize the most experience, as opposed to information, I want to be able to completely interact with the consciousness that's trying to communicate with mine. Rapidly. And in the sense that we are now creating a space in which the people of the planet can have that kind of communication relationship, I think we're moving away from information--through information, actually--and back toward experience.
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Writing a book is an act of self-limitation and, in a way, self-sublimation into language and expression and style. Style is very much a product of the print medium.
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And I think that the deep tendency of the circuited medium is to flatten language.
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At this point in history, most of the evolution of language, most of the richness in language, is happening in this space that we are creating. It's not happening in novels.
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Growing up in the Fifties, I felt I was living in a very real place. The terms of human interchange were ones I could navigate. I could get an aura buzz from living.
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I want an end to mediation.
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You can be like the Amish. Noble, but marginal.
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A lot of the things you seem to be looking for in the culture of the book, Sven, can actually be found in the culture of the screen.
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A decade later I stand by my point that we should resist the idea that the book is the apex of human culture. It seems likely we’ll soon invent other forms of media that take what the book has done and do it better. Maybe someday books may not be central to our culture or identity.
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I work on my computer in a two-story library surrounded by books. I am acutely aware of the shift our media is undergoing.
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I thought that Sven Birkerts summed up our collective concern about the internet in this perfect one line of poetry from the Harper’s conversation: “If you touch all parts of the globe, you can't do that and then turn around and look at your wife in the same way.”
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But we could just as easily imagine the experience of contacting the rest of the world as a process that enhances our view of our spouse. " I have touched all parts of the globe and now I see my wife differently." But this possibility is not suggested by Birkerts’ wonderfully crafted line of poetry. Instead his koan contains an inherent conservativism in which any change is assumed to be negative.
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25 Jul 08
Antonio TomboliniKELLY: Here you are wrong. If you hung out online, you'd find out that the language is not, in fact, flattening; it's flourishing. At this point in history, most of the evolution of language, most of the richness in language, is happening in this space that we are creating. It's not happening in novels.
BIRKERTS: I wish some of this marvelous prose could be downloaded and shown to me.
KELLY: You can't download it. That's the whole point. You want to download it so that you can read it like a book. But that's precisely what it can't be. You want it to be data, but it's experience. And it's an experience that you have to have there. When you go on-line, you're not going to have a book experience.
BIRKERTS: Well, I want a book experience.
KELLY: You think that somehow a book is the height of human achievement. It is not.
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