MachineMachine / stream

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Within the pages of Digital Folklore Reader, Olia Lialina, one of the book's editors, refers to a claim by the social media researcher Danah Boyd, that some American teenagers identify…

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The English language contains certain meaning-rich words that command attention and stir controversy. “Paradigm,” for instance: When Thomas Kuhn used it in 1966 to describe accepted scientific theories, and gave…

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A few days ago a blogger who identifies himself as just "Philip" took to his site to recount his experience of reading War and Peace – specifically, a 99¢ version…

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Publication used to mean preservation but it no longer does. Let me explain. When a print book is published its metadata is literally attached to its content. The author and…

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The Ecstasy of Influence, now the title of his recent collection of writings, often addresses the process of integrating and "cobbling together" ideas and culture to make something new. Yet,…

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Can physicists produce insights about language that have eluded linguists and English professors? That possibility was put to the test this week when a team of physicists published a paper…

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When Philip K. Dick died in 1982 of a series of strokes brought on by years of overwork and amphetamine abuse, he was seen within the science fiction genre as…

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This is a zombie edition, one of many I found for early modern texts on Amazon. Produced as cheap print-on-demand editions from EEBO or GoogleBook scans, they're listed alongside reputable…

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There has always been a lot of discussion about the effect that reading books has on us. Far less attention has been paid to the effect that we (the readers)…

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For the past dozen years, several distinguished thinkers about law and technology have warned that a golden age of Internet freedom may be about to close. The most influential alarm-ringer…

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What is a book, really? For that matter, what is an article, a record, or a movie? For each of these, I have a very clear picture in my mind…

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French writer, who gained fame at the age of forty-three with his first novel, Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967, Friday; or, The Other Island), an ingenious reworking of…

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The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It's being chewed by the…

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I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front. I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead. I am being…

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“I had all these ideas,” he said, speaking slowly and searchingly, like someone looking back on life and trying to figure out where it all went wrong. “I don’t know…

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We will always debate: the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display; the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting; location by page, location by paragraph.…

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In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool…

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Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was by profession a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In his off hours, however, he was also a fringe Surrealist, vanguard intellectual, and writer of…

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Technology of/on/about writing: A huge list of resources

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Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England”…

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Gleick makes his case in a sweeping survey that covers the five millenniums of humanity’s engagement with information, from the invention of writing in Sumer to the elevation of information…

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Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology…

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Imagine it: a flower blossoming inside the brain, nanometer stalks splitting away from a micrometer stem. Expanding into every available capillary, touching every cubic millimeter of the brain, collecting terabytes…

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But what happens the rest of the time? Away from the world of freak glitches, what fate befalls the writer as his or her magnum opus enters the publishing production…

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One of the first things I did with my palm-sized glossy black pebble of the future was to download loads of free books using the app Stanza. I read The…

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How do we deal with a purposeless universe and the finality of death? From Victorian séances to the embalming of Lenin's corpse to schemes for uploading our minds into cyberspace,…

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It’s fitting that at the end of this essay about the proliferation of e-readers, Scott McLemee invokes critic Franco Moretti, who has devoted the past decade to deromanticizing literary criticism…