pavel sebastian's List: tech

• The medieval books we admire so much today are distinguished by the remarkable visual images, in the body of a text and in the margins, that scholars have frequently compared to hypertexted images on internet “pages.”
• The function of these images in illuminated manuscripts has no small bearing on the hypertext analogy. These “miniatures” (so named not because they were small—often they were not—but because they used red ink, or vermillion, the Latin word for which is minium) did not generally function as illustrations of something in the written text, but in reference to something beyond it.
• Of particular delight to us today, much of the marginalia in illuminated books expressed the opinions and feelings of the illuminator about all manner of things—his demanding wife, the debauched monks in his neighborhood, or his own bacchanalian exploits.
• Add to these distractions the fact that medieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. A binding might include a bit of Chaucer—something from the life of St. Bridget, perhaps—and part of an almanac, or a treatise on herbal remedies. They were mash-ups, that is. Or, to borrow terminology from George P. Landow, they were “dispersed texts,” unburdened by the modern fiction of sequential ordering of thought as “natural” or unitary authorship as normative that contributed to Enlightenment understandings of the “focused” mind of the individual thinker.
• dispersed texts,
• such bookish encounters were not centered on didactic performances for passive listeners, but were rather fully interactive engagements that enlarged any given book into a much wider social “text.”
• private reading and the linear thinking that Carr so values as essential for deep, contemplative thought did not feature much in the lives of the people who pretty much brought us the contemplative tradition. Rather, sorting though the mix of images and ideas, arguing with friends over meanings and interpretations, and mullying it up again with a new bit of this or that seem to have been very much at the center of the thought world of ancient philosophers and medieval mystics.

• Lev Manovich, for example, in The Language of New Media identifies five features which distinguish new media from old more precisely than the presence of hyperlinks.

   

  The features Manovich identifies all stem from the first, digitization, and include modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. Modularity, or what Manovich also calls the “fractal structure of new media,” allows for individual elements of a hypertext (text, image, video, chart, audio, etc.) to retain their integrity and be easily abstracted and recombined in another setting.

  • modularity is distinct from continuity. it allows a closer relation between user and artifact, and a greater freedom.

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• Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

     

  But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic.

  • so, is Zarathustra the Medium?
• sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies
• When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed.
• In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
• In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

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• There are two groups right now that are fighting for influence over the Internet. One groups is the guys who’ve run the Internet for a very long time. And I do mean guys. It’s mostly engineers – some with major tech companies, some with major telecom companies – who dominate meetings of things like the IETF, who are representatives of organizations like ICANN. These are people who’ve been putting in their civic service on the Internet in the course of their professional lives. It’s a very engineering-centered culture. It’s a rough, consensus-based culture. It may not be quite as democratic as people would like. It tends to be North American and European dominated.

• There’s a second camp in all this that is represented by governments, particularly governments of China, Russia, some governments from the global South, that are essentially saying ‘Look, this needs to be run through something closer to the UN system. It needs to be multi-national. It needs to be more representative.’

   

  And while on paper that sounds great, many of the countries that are pushing for this are pretty aggressive Internet censors. So there’s this big battle that’s been lined up between the engineers and the ITU crowd, which is where a lot of these state actors are trying to work through. This is a really well established battle between these two camps. There’s been a lot going on in that space.