http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1476/technology-and-the-novel-from-blake-to-ballard Writers have long been fascinated by machinery – what it gives and what it takes away. Tom McCarthy, whose experimental work has been hailed as the future of fiction, charts literature's complicated relationship with technology, at once beautiful and menacing.

For centuries, literature has been haunted by technology. When Blake shudders in fearful awe before the tiger, don't be fooled into thinking that he's contemplating nature. What the animal, a product of "hammer", "chain", "furnace" and "anvil", really represents is the industrial revolution. Blake, like Quixote, grappled with dark satanic mills. His contemporary Mary Shelley also created… ]]> Sun, 25 Jul 2010 07:13:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1476/technology-and-the-novel-from-blake-to-ballard http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1455/goodbye-to-the-graphosphere For half a millennium, across continents and civilizations, the human readership did almost nothing but grow and consolidate itself. Constantly more people in more and more places could read, and could read more books more cheaply, with increasing ease. And not only were they able to do this, but they chose to. It would be astonishing to learn, if some retrospective survey could be carried out, that hours per head spent reading didn’t increase across all capitalist or otherwise modernizing countries (most Communist regimes having been energetic promoters of literacy) until at least the middle of the past century. ]]> Sat, 17 Jul 2010 12:36:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1455/goodbye-to-the-graphosphere http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1449/12-events-that-will-change-everything-made-interactive This Web-only article is a special rich-media presentation of the feature, "12 Events That Will Change Everything," which appears in the June 2010 issue of Scientific American. The presentation was created by Zemi Media. Find all our other interactive offerings here. ]]> Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:05:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1449/12-events-that-will-change-everything-made-interactive http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1440/reading-in-a-whole-new-way As digital screens proliferate and people move from print to pixel, how will the act of reading change?

America was founded on the written word. Its roots spring from documents—the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and, indirectly, the Bible. The country’s success depended on high levels of literacy, freedom of the press, allegiance to the rule of law (found in books) and a common language across a continent. American prosperity and liberty grew out of a culture of reading and writing.

But reading and writing, like all technologies, are dynamic. In ancient times, authors… ]]> Fri, 09 Jul 2010 03:24:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1440/reading-in-a-whole-new-way http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1428/losing-our-minds-to-the-web Enter Nicholas Carr, a technology writer and Silicon Valley’s favourite contrarian, whose book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton) has just come out in the US (and will be published in Britain by Atlantic in September). It is an expanded version of an essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” printed in the Atlantic magazine in 2008, which struck a chord with several groups. Those worrying about Google’s growing hold on our culture felt Carr was justified in going after it (though there was little about the search giant in the article). Those concerned with the… ]]> Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:50:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1428/losing-our-minds-to-the-web http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1426/borges-on-pleasure-island Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical proof with the emotionally profound wit of Dostoyevsky. Or: He courts paradox so primrosely, describing his Dupin-like detective character as having “reckless perspicacity” and the light in his infinite Library of Babel as being “insufficient, and unceasing.” But see, such worship is pale.

And problematic as well. More than any other 20th-century figure, Borges is the one designated — and often dismissed as — the Platonic… ]]> Thu, 01 Jul 2010 02:17:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1426/borges-on-pleasure-island http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1423/why-e-books-will-never-replace-real-books Because we perceive print and electronic media differently. Because Marshall McLuhan was right about some things.

In case you don't recall one of the more influential thinkers of the late 20th century: McLuhan was an academic media theorist who ended up being called a "high priest of popular culture." He was big enough to be a standing joke on Laugh-In ("Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?") to appear in a cameo in Annie Hall, to get interviewed in Playboy. One of the fundamental things McLuhan said was that new media change us and change the world. We… ]]> Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:21:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1423/why-e-books-will-never-replace-real-books http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1397/quotthe-ignorant-schoolmasterquot-by-jacques-ranciere We are all here to speak about the virtue of masters. I wrote a work called The Ignorant Master. Therefore it falls to me to defend on this subject the most apparently unreasonable of positions: the first virtue of the master is that of ignorance. My book tells the history of a professor, Joseph Jacoto, who created a scandal in the Holland and France of the 1830s by proclaiming that uneducated people could learn on their own without a master to explain things to them, and that masters, on their side, could teach the things they themselves did not know.… ]]> Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:48:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1397/quotthe-ignorant-schoolmasterquot-by-jacques-ranciere http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1385/the-chess-master-and-the-computer In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.

It illustrates the state of computer chess at the time that it didn’t come as much of a surprise when I achieved a perfect 32–0 score, winning every game, although there was an uncomfortable… ]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:11:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1385/the-chess-master-and-the-computer http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1384/the-book-is-dead-long-live-the-book In the beginning was the Word. Then came Gutenberg, and it was good. But then came a giddy army of Japanese school girls, writing and “publishing" novels on cell phones. And lo, the end was nigh. And loudly did the literati bewail the Death of the Word. But then those clever girls revealed their true intent. Mere moments after the emergence of the so-called keitai novel, heralded worldwide as a revolutionary blow against the hoary tradition of the literary elites, this exciting new creature morphed like a perverse genie into plain old paperback form, where it now fights for shelf… ]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2010 11:13:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1384/the-book-is-dead-long-live-the-book http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1382/yes-people-still-read-but-now-its-social “THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with him.

If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace’s observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in… ]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:56:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1382/yes-people-still-read-but-now-its-social http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1383/as-technology-advances-deep-reading-suffers Look closely at what you're reading right now. See those little spaces between the words? They may look unimportant, but the invention of word spaces, back in the Middle Ages, changed the course of culture.

For the first couple of thousand years after people began writing, they didn't bother separating one word from the next. Long lines of letters ran together across the length of the scroll or the page. Reading in those days was a trial. Your brain cranked away as you tried to decipher where one word ended and the next began. No one read… ]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:55:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1383/as-technology-advances-deep-reading-suffers http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1364/my-bright-idea-guy-deutscher Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society. Deutscher argues, in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world.

An honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, the 40-year-old… ]]> Sun, 13 Jun 2010 05:33:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1364/my-bright-idea-guy-deutscher http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1360/the-three-christs-of-ypsilanti-what-happens-when-three-men-who-identify-as-jesus-are-forced-to-live-together In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. "You oughta worship me, I'll tell you that!" one of the Christs yelled. "I will not worship you! You're a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!" another snapped back. "No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord!" the third interjected,… ]]> Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:18:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1360/the-three-christs-of-ypsilanti-what-happens-when-three-men-who-identify-as-jesus-are-forced-to-live-together http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1314/evolution-and-creativity-why-humans-triumphed Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success—tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language—seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands… ]]> Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:53:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1314/evolution-and-creativity-why-humans-triumphed http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1305/radio-open-source-the-ecstasy-of-influence We can’t stop talking about Jonathan Lethem’s essay in this month’s Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as interesting. Go ahead. And this post will still be here when you return. You know you want to.
plagiarism

Caught [Digirebelle / Flickr]

Nearly every word of this essay about cultural borrowing and reworking was stolen — er, appropriated — from some other source and then cobbled together with a big dose of Lethem magic to form a cohesive whole. Even the “I”s… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:01:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1305/radio-open-source-the-ecstasy-of-influence http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1306/the-ecstasy-of-influence-a-plagiarism-by-jonathan-lethem-harpers-magazine Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:00:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1306/the-ecstasy-of-influence-a-plagiarism-by-jonathan-lethem-harpers-magazine http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1278/cooking-with-dexter-free-bird There’s never been anything like the Internet for helping us find what we want. But when it comes to finding what we didn’t know we wanted, print is magic.

Back in the ’90s, I used to read a handmade magazine called 8-Track Mind. In every issue it ran something called “The Eight Noble Truths of the 8-Track Mind.” Truth No. 1 was, “State of the art is in the eye of the beholder.” No. 5 was, “ ‘New’ and ‘improved’ don’t necessarily mean the same thing.” And No. 8 was, “Innovation alone will not replace beauty.”
… ]]> Fri, 28 May 2010 04:23:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1278/cooking-with-dexter-free-bird http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1262/what-did-jesus-do-reading-an-unreading-the-gospels When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because… ]]> Wed, 19 May 2010 03:52:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1262/what-did-jesus-do-reading-an-unreading-the-gospels http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1254/astral-weeks-an-unexpected-and-welcome-delillo-discovery In Don DeLillo's latest novel, the weirdly exciting "Point Omega," a character is "trying to read science fiction but nothing she'd read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet ... for sheer unimaginableness." With another writer, you might coax an unsurprising aesthetic from this point of view: Ignore the attractions of extraterrestrials and dystopia — the way we live now is more than ample fodder for the fiction writer's art.

The catch, of course, is that DeLillo has written science fiction and written it memorably. Indeed, it's hard to think of an SF… ]]> Sun, 16 May 2010 16:33:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/stream/items/view/1254/astral-weeks-an-unexpected-and-welcome-delillo-discovery