MachineMachine /stream - tagged with literacy http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com Life after Papyrus: The Swerve http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/17762040844/life-after-papyrus/los-angeles-review-of-books-life-after-papyrus Life after Papyrus: A review of Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" : http://t.co/Ck96u2WN #books #clinamen ]]> Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:05:50 -0700 http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/17762040844/life-after-papyrus/los-angeles-review-of-books-life-after-papyrus Reading revolutions: Online digital text and implications for reading in academe http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3340 While the Internet is a text-saturated world, reading online screens tends to be significantly different from reading printed text. This review essay examines literature from a variety of disciplines on the technological, social, behavioural, and neuroscientific impacts that the Internet is having on the practice of reading. A particular focus is given to the reading behaviour of emerging university students, especially within Canada and the United States. A brief overview is provided of the recent transformation of academic libraries into providers of online digital text in addition to printed books and other materials, before looking at research on college students’… ]]> Mon, 06 Jun 2011 13:36:26 -0700 http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3340 Goodbye to the Graphosphere http://nplusonemag.com/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://nplusonemag.com/goodbye-to-the-graphosphere Reading in a Whole New Way http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/Reading-in-a-Whole-New-Way.html 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://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/Reading-in-a-Whole-New-Way.html As technology advances, deep reading suffers http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/19/INL91DU44K.DTL 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://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/19/INL91DU44K.DTL On Reading and This Progress, Connecting Lévi-Strauss and Tino Sehgal http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/03/against_writingthis_progress.html Buried in the middle of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, a book digressive in exactly the right way, is an astonishing argument about writing. Lévi-Strauss considers what the invention of writing might mean in the history of civilizations worldwide, arriving at a conclusion that still surprises:

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. Such, as any rate, is the typical pattern of development to be observed from Egypt… ]]> Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:11:00 -0700 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/03/against_writingthis_progress.html The Future of Reading http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6703852.html?industryid=47109 The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for learning, for work, and for pleasure may be slowly dying out as a widespread social practice. Only at living history farms will we see people reading. For decades the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been studying the reading habits of adult Americans, issuing a series of reports with rousingly alliterative titles such as “Reading at Risk” (July 2004) and “Reading on the Rise” (January 2009). Sometime in… ]]> Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:30:00 -0700 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6703852.html?industryid=47109 Postliterate Society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postliterate_society A postliterate society is a hypothetical society wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary. Many advanced science-fiction societies are postliterate, for example in Dan Simmons' 2003 novel Ilium. Postliterate is markedly different from preliterate. A preliterate society has not yet discovered how to read and write; a postliterate society has replaced the written word with an electronic oral culture, or some other means of communication. All information is either transmitted via sound or some other, more complex means. Postliteracy is sometimes considered a sign that a society… ]]> Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:34:00 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postliterate_society The Next Great Discontinuity: The Data Deluge http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/04/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-two.html

Speed is the elegance of thought, which mocks stupidity, heavy and slow. Intelligence thinks and says the unexpected; it moves with the fly, with its flight. A fool is defined by predictability…

But if life is brief, luckily, thought travels as fast as the speed of light. In earlier times philosophers used the metaphor of light to express the clarity of thought; I would like to use it to express not only brilliance and purity but also speed. In this sense we are inventing right now a new Age of Enlightenment…

A lot of… incomprehension… comes simply from this speed.… ]]> Tue, 05 May 2009 07:35:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/04/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-two.html Luis Camnitzer: Art and Literacy | Journal / e-flux http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/42 [T]his theory—that if one wants to be able to write something, one should know how it is written—has some logic to it. It forces one first to read, then to copy what one reads—to understand somebody else’s presentation in order to then re-present it. In art terms, however, this is similar to saying that one has to first look at the model in order to then copy it. Now the logical construction becomes much less persuasive. This is not necessarily wrong, insofar as one really wants to copy the model, or the need to copy the model is well grounded.… ]]> Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:00:00 -0700 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/42 Is Google Making Us Stupid? | The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s… ]]> Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:58:00 -0700 http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google Further Reading on Reading | NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/books/reading-extra.html?ref=books What does it mean to read in a digital age? Researchers are just beginning to explore the question, and educators are engaged in passionate debate about how reading may be changing on the Internet. It is impossible to write about any one piece of research at great length, so for those interested in more in-depth information, here are links to some studies, speeches, reading tests — old and new — and other resources. ]]> Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:55:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/books/reading-extra.html?ref=books