Recent quotes:
Harvard Professor Harry Lewis on Early Calculating and Computing Devices - YouTube
Harvard Professor Harry Lewis on Early Calculating and Computing DevicesThe Imperial Origins of Big Data - Yale University Press
Over the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, paper emerged as the fundamental substrate which politicians, merchants, and scholars relied on to record and circulate information in governance, commerce, and learning. At the same time, governing institutions sought to preserve and control the spread of written information through the creation of archives: repositories where they collected, organized, and stored documents. The expansion of European polities overseas from the late fifteenth century onward saw governments massively scale up their use of paper—and confront the challenge of controlling its dissemination across thousands of miles of ocean and land. These pressures were felt particularly acutely in what eventually became the largest empire in world history, the British empire. As people from the British isles from the early seventeenth century fought, traded, and settled their way to power in the Atlantic world and South Asia, administrators faced the problem of how to govern both their emigrating subjects and the non-British peoples with whom they interacted. This meant collecting information about their behavior through the technology of paper. Just as we struggle to organize, search, and control our email boxes, text messages, and app notifications, so too did these early moderns confront the attendant challenges of developing practices of collection and storage to manage the resulting information overload. And despite the best efforts of states and companies to control information, it constantly escaped their grasp, falling into the hands of their opponents and rivals who deployed it to challenge and contest ruling powers.How Google made the world go viral - The Verge
And here is where you get into the circular nature of his argument against Google’s influence. Thousands of food bloggers are searching for advice on how to optimize their blogs for Google. The advice that sits at the top of Google is bad, but they’re using it anyway, and now, their blogs all look the same. Isn’t that, in a sense, Google shaping how content is made?Would we have film noire without corridors?
oger Luckhurst’s ambitious and consistently informative cultural history of the corridor makes brief mention of The Maltese Falcon in accounting for film noir’s preoccupation with bleakly anonymous lobbies, passages and hallways. But it’s not the skills and attitudes required to negotiate these spaces that interest Luckhurst. In his view, corridors have a meaning rather than a function. Film noir, he says, set out to ‘interpret’ lobbies, passages and hallways as an index to modern alienation. This is emphatically a cultural rather than an architectural history. Literature, film, TV and other media are called on to elucidate meaning.
Because inherent in the artist’s creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change. It’s always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it. But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the massage — that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists.
I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.