Saved by Riley Crane
Reading Ourselves to Death — The New Atlantis
What will be the fate of reading? I don’t mean the left-to-right movement of the eyes as we take in information, but the age-old practice of addressing the world by way of this inward faculty of imagination. I mean reading as a filtering of the complexities of the real through artistic narrative, reflection, and orchestration of verbal imagery.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Lael Johnson and added
“There will be only answers,” the writer Marguerite Duras said in 1985 when a TV show asked her to make a prediction about the year 2000. “The demand will be such that there will only be answers. All texts will be answers… about [man’s] body, his corporeal future, his health, his family life, his salary, his leisure. It’s not far from a nightmare.
... See morereallifemag.com • Easy Answers — Real Life
New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
It is one thing to think with a pamphlet, another to think with a newspaper, yet another to think with a televisual image, and still another to think with a meme.
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
The triumph of the digital seems to have also brought the triumph of the factual. As literature, as the idea of literature, suffers depreciation, it gets ever harder to make the case for imagination. And what is imagination if not the animating power of inwardness? The subjective self takes in the world and fashions meaning; art and religion are it
... See moreSven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
the man in a literate and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms. He acquires the illusion of the third dimension and the “private point of view” as part of his Narcissus fixation, and is quite shut off from Blake’s awareness or that of the Psalmist, that we become what we behold.
Marshall McLuhan • Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon - Understanding Media_ the Extensions of Man_ Critical Edition-Gingko Press
Laura Huang added
One thing I’ve also noticed is the gradual loss of the understanding of “imagination” as a category; it can sound a little Reading Rainbow to talk about, but wouldn’t you know imagination is actually an essential part of the human condition. In so far as the words “spirit” or “spirituality” mean anything beyond woo-woo or cliché they must include t... See more
John Ganz • Why Culture Sucks
Faith Hahn added
It seems distant now, but once upon a time the Internet was going to save us from the menace of TV. Since the late fifties, TV has had a special role, both as the country’s dominant medium, in audience and influence, and as a bête noire for a certain strain of American intellectuals, who view it as the root of all evil. In “Amusing Ourselves to Dea... See more
Chris Hayes • On the Internet, We’re Always Famous
Alex Wittenberg added