duh
The text to voice features associated with hand-held readers could have unintended consequences. Devices such as Kindle could end up facilitating, not new waves of book reading, but illiteracy from those uninterested in learning sight reading.
duh2
Humanists are wary of technological determinism. This is a perspective founded on the premise that tool making is the defining human activity. Such determinism correlates progressions of technology with progressions of human activity. Technological determinism would conclude that the Egyptians built pyramids because of their engineering skill or that the cell phone makes modern Cairo livable.
Technological determinism can position the interpreter. The changing and persistent roles of the book can be monitored from progressions in hand-held readers. This keeps the scroll moving just fine and there is a lively momentum of postings, but there is also a strange feeling of quarantine. In the example of book sustainability, the technological determinist can overlook or neglect older devices still in use that the interpreter can deem obsolescent.
But the divide, rather than the assimilation, between old and new is a small bias of technological determinist perspective. Other distortion happens with a mechanistic view of any human system; finance, science, politics, theology, or culture transmission via books. Too many cascades beyond technology of social behaviors, transient understandings, educational efficiencies, ecological dependencies and accidental events surround the destiny of the book. And, in the strange case of the book, there is the influence of the book itself on all these vectors.
cbaa notes
“One of the exciting things about CBAA was seeing the number of students in Masters and PhD programs who are working on theses and dissertations about artistsí books.”
Sign of the Owl
This was such a dense and rich conference with a wonderful peer equivalence between presenters and participants. It was necessary to remember that this was the first full meeting of a completely new organization. The UICB hosted the first biennial College Book Art Association Conference ì
Art, Fact, and Artifact: The Book in Time and Placeî
January, 8 ñ 10, 2009.
So evident in this conference is the enthusiasm for the physical book and the enthusiasm for its screen based renditions and accesses. Here is a thematic for the continued validity of humanist study and liberal arts during hard times and strategic college positioning.
e-babel
Teleread is now posting over a dozen news items each day so that the screen is scrolling much faster than readers can build threaded comments. It is a symptom of technology determinists, that such speed is itself news. Twittering isn’t necessarily causality. As for the premise of tracking every reading application, device feature and content distributor, the FotB view is that
Teleread only misses the irrelevance, inefficiency and uneconomic of print book simulation.