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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog
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High Tech News weblog of writer Nicholas Carr
Nicolas is a writer
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| Address URL | http://www.roughtype.com/ Registered: 23-Feb-2008 |
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 Rough Ty | Words in stone and on the wind in General | | 03-Feb-2012 | After I wrote, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, about the malleability of text in electronic books, a reader asked me to flesh out my thoughts about the different ways that "typographical fixity" - to again borrow Elizabeth Eisenstein's term - can manifest itself in a book. I've been thinking about that and have come up with four categories of fixity or stability - not all of which are typ [..] Read complete article | | Rough Ty | Saint Zuck in General | | 02-Feb-2012 | "Facebook was not originally created to be a company," writes Mark Zuckerberg at the start of his letter to would-be shareholders in the company's IPO filing. "It was built to accomplish a social mission ? to make the world more open and connected." Hosanna! One of the great things about our newly transparent world is that we can peer into people's pasts - I mean, their timelines - and see what th [..] Read complete article | | Rough Ty | The camera in the stands in General | | 31-Jan-2012 | The wisdom of Pudge Fisk, channeled through Jon Udell: Somewhere in the 2000s, [Roger] Angell asked [Carlton] Fisk to reflect on what had most altered the game of baseball since his playing days. The salaries? The drugs? No. The game-changer, Fisk said, was instant replay. His game-winning 1975 home run is one of most-remembered moments in all of sports. The video of that event is one of the most- [..] Read complete article
Read 1 times | | Rough Ty | Why publishers should give away ebooks in General | | 30-Jan-2012 | I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don't anymore. That's not to say I don't listen to MP3s. I have about 10,000 of the little guys squeezed like vienna sausages into my iTunes music folder, and I listen to them a lot. But when I buy music today I buy it on vinyl. I'm no audiophile, no retro hepcat, but my ears tell me that music sounds better on vinyl - warmer, more nuanced, less shrill - and I make i [..] Read complete article
Read 1 times | | Rough Ty | Power to the data! in General | | 27-Jan-2012 | Seth Finkelstein, a long-time crusader against online censorship, made what seemed like a jaundiced comment on my recent post Piracy and Privacy. I had raised the possibility that online activists, fresh from their SOPA fight, might now come to the support of efforts to give people more control over the personal information that companies collect and trade online. Will the activists rise up again? [..] Read complete article
Read 2 times | | Rough Ty | Pieces of mind in General | | 24-Jan-2012 | In an intriguing article at The Millions, Guy Patrick Cunningham wonders whether fragmentary writing may prove a cure for fragmentary reading: [David Shields's] Reality Hunger and [Masha Tupitsyn?s] Laconia are very different books, but they share this desire to use fragmentary writing to dramatize the act of thinking through culture (in Shields? case mostly books, in Tupitsyn?s mostly films). Eve [..] Read complete article
Read 2 times | | Rough Ty | Words are numbers too in General | | 24-Jan-2012 | One reason to get excited about the rise of the enticingly named "digital humanities" is that pretty soon students will be able to do their math homework and their English homework at the same time. The two subjects will converge (as things tend to do these days), and that should greatly enhance the efficiency of education. Stanley Fish discusses the coming of the digital humanities, and what it p [..] Read complete article
Read 2 times | | Rough Ty | Piracy and privacy in General | | 24-Jan-2012 | Internet activists flexed some impressive muscle over the last couple of weeks in working to block Congress from enacting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), which would have put legal restraints and restrictions on search engines, advertising networks, internet service providers, and other online sites and services as a means of stemming the unauthorized trade of copyrighted works and other forms [..] Read complete article
Read 1 times | | Rough Ty | The Summers' Tale in General | | 22-Jan-2012 | "Before the printing press," writes Lawrence Summers in the Times's Education Life section today, "scholars had to memorize 'The Canterbury Tales' to have continuing access to them." That has to be one of the most dunderheaded sentences ever written by a former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary. The bound book was invented more than a thousand years before the printing press came alo [..] Read complete article | | Rough Ty | Thinking about reading in General | | 03-Jan-2012 | To mark its 21st birthday, Vintage Books has released a collection of essays on reading called Stop What You're Doing and Read This! Contributors include Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Tim Parks, and Blake Morrison. I also have a piece in the book, "The Dreams of Readers," in which I mull over my own experience as a reader and try to connect it with some of the interesting new research, by scholars lik [..] Read complete article
Read 2 times |
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| Words in stone and on the wind | | After I wrote, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, about the malleability of text in electronic books, a reader asked me to flesh out my thoughts about the different ways that "typographical fixity" - to again borrow Elizabeth Eisenstein's term - can manifest itself in a book. I've been thinking about that and have come up with four categories of fixity or stability - not all of which are typ [..] Read complete article |  | Published 03-Feb-2012 by Rough Ty in General
Read 0 times. More hits in   |
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| Saint Zuck | | "Facebook was not originally created to be a company," writes Mark Zuckerberg at the start of his letter to would-be shareholders in the company's IPO filing. "It was built to accomplish a social mission ? to make the world more open and connected." Hosanna! One of the great things about our newly transparent world is that we can peer into people's pasts - I mean, their timelines - and see what th [..] Read complete article | | Published 02-Feb-2012 by Rough Ty in General
Read 0 times. More hits in |
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| The camera in the stands | | The wisdom of Pudge Fisk, channeled through Jon Udell: Somewhere in the 2000s, [Roger] Angell asked [Carlton] Fisk to reflect on what had most altered the game of baseball since his playing days. The salaries? The drugs? No. The game-changer, Fisk said, was instant replay. His game-winning 1975 home run is one of most-remembered moments in all of sports. The video of that event is one of the most- [..] Read complete article | | Published 31-Jan-2012 by Rough Ty in General
Read 1 times. More hits in |
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| Why publishers should give away ebooks | | I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don't anymore. That's not to say I don't listen to MP3s. I have about 10,000 of the little guys squeezed like vienna sausages into my iTunes music folder, and I listen to them a lot. But when I buy music today I buy it on vinyl. I'm no audiophile, no retro hepcat, but my ears tell me that music sounds better on vinyl - warmer, more nuanced, less shrill - and I make i [..] Read complete article | | Published 30-Jan-2012 by Rough Ty in General
Read 1 times. More hits in |
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| Power to the data! | | Seth Finkelstein, a long-time crusader against online censorship, made what seemed like a jaundiced comment on my recent post Piracy and Privacy. I had raised the possibility that online activists, fresh from their SOPA fight, might now come to the support of efforts to give people more control over the personal information that companies collect and trade online. Will the activists rise up again? [..] Read complete article | | Published 27-Jan-2012 by Rough Ty in General
Read 2 times. More hits in |
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| Pieces of mind | | In an intriguing article at The Millions, Guy Patrick Cunningham wonders whether fragmentary writing may prove a cure for fragmentary reading: [David Shields's] Reality Hunger and [Masha Tupitsyn?s] Laconia are very different books, but they share this desire to use fragmentary writing to dramatize the act of thinking through culture (in Shields? case mostly books, in Tupitsyn?s mostly films). Eve [..] Read complete article | | Published 24-Jan-2012 by Rough Ty in General
Read 2 times. More hits in |
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| Words are numbers too | | One reason to get excited about the rise of the enticingly named "digital humanities" is that pretty soon students will be able to do their math homework and their English homework at the same time. The two subjects will converge (as things tend to do these days), and that should greatly enhance the efficiency of education. Stanley Fish discusses the coming of the digital humanities, and what it p [..] Read complete article | | Published 24-Jan-2012 by Rough Ty in General
Read 2 times. More hits in |
|
| Piracy and privacy | | Internet activists flexed some impressive muscle over the last couple of weeks in working to block Congress from enacting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), which would have put legal restraints and restrictions on search engines, advertising networks, internet service providers, and other online sites and services as a means of stemming the unauthorized trade of copyrighted works and other forms [..] Read complete article | | Published 24-Jan-2012 by Rough Ty in General
Read 1 times. More hits in |
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| The Summers' Tale | | "Before the printing press," writes Lawrence Summers in the Times's Education Life section today, "scholars had to memorize 'The Canterbury Tales' to have continuing access to them." That has to be one of the most dunderheaded sentences ever written by a former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary. The bound book was invented more than a thousand years before the printing press came alo [..] Read complete article | | Published 22-Jan-2012 by Rough Ty in General
Read 0 times. More hits in |
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| Thinking about reading | | To mark its 21st birthday, Vintage Books has released a collection of essays on reading called Stop What You're Doing and Read This! Contributors include Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Tim Parks, and Blake Morrison. I also have a piece in the book, "The Dreams of Readers," in which I mull over my own experience as a reader and try to connect it with some of the interesting new research, by scholars lik [..] Read complete article | | Published 03-Jan-2012 by Rough Ty in General
Read 2 times. More hits in |
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| The industrialization of the ineffable | | It dawns on me that there may be a correspondence between Steven Johnson's vision of serendipity as the output of a properly manipulated digital mechanism and Nick Bilton's belief in the scheduling of units of daydreaming as a means for the optimization of problem-solving. The Like button seems to be part of the same trend. Let's call it the Industrialization of the Ineffable.... [..] Read complete article | | Published 02-Jan-2012 by Rough Ty in General
Read 2 times. More hits in |
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| To tweet, perchance to dream | | The future, it seems, is too much for Nick Bilton. The New York Times's in-house webstud, and author of the book I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works, had something of a Joycean epiphany last week. Perched atop a rocky cliff, watching the sun dissolve majestically into the Pacific, he immediately did, he writes, "what any normal person would do in 2011": he whipped out his iPhone and started [..] Read complete article | | Published 02-Jan-2012 by Rough Ty in General
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