Various Gutenberg elegists, from Clifford Stoll and Sven Birkerts to Neil Postman and Neal Stephenson, now loudly lament the death of reading and yearn for an age when texts were books (or in Stephenson's more fascinating thesis, when computers may pretend to be books).
These worthies refuse to swallow the "silicon snake oil" of global telecommunications, the Internet, and hypertext among other things. Along with Landauer they imagine a world without computers; and though Landauer considers this scenario a thought experiment, some of the bookmen mean it quite practically. Differences aside, both Landauer and the elegists compel us to consider a very important question:
In our headlong dive into what Pat Cadigan calls "the age of fast information," just where do we think we're going?
see Judy Malloy...Cathy Marshall
Download ebooks on www.frenchtheory.com
See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts
Enter Hypertextual as a member
