The Great Geek Manual

[W]e tend to think of the information age as something entirely new. In fact, people have been wrestling with information for many centuries. If I was going to say when the information age started, I would probably say the 15th century with the invention of the mechanical clock, which turned time into a measurable flow, and the printing press, which expanded our ability to tap into other kinds of thinking. The information age has been building ever since then.

- Nicholas Carr, as interviewed in “Nicholas Carr on Impact of the Information Age“

Originally posted on The Browser.

Poetry and science have more in common than revealing secrets. Both depend on metaphor, which is as crucial to scientific discovery as it is to lyric. A new metaphor is a new mapping of the world. Even maths uses metaphor; and this is where more condensed forms of poetry join in. John Donne, living through exciting new scientific discoveries, relished the door-opening powers of science. “A mathematical point is the most indivisible and unique thing which art can present,” he said. His lyric uses science as image rather than exposition. (…)

Scientia means “knowledge:” science, it seems to me, is not about facts; it is about thinking about facts. Equally, poetry might or might not be driven by feeling but what it is “about” is relationships – between word and sound, word and thing, word and thought, sound and meaning, words and other words. So is science. Darwin wondered constantly about the relationships of organic forms – in earth, in stone, in what happens between red clover and bumble bees, orchid and moth.

The deepest thing science and poetry share, perhaps, is the way they can tolerate uncertainty. They have a modesty in common: they do not have to say they’re right. True, perhaps. Or just truer. “A scientist should be the first to say he doesn’t know,” a tiger biologist told me when I asked some detail of tiger behaviour. “A scientist goes forward towards truth but never gets there.”

Which is roughly what Donne said too. “On a huge hill, / Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will. / Reach her, about must, and about must go.”

- “The science of poetry, the poetry of science” by Ruth Padel, December 9, 2011.
Originally published by The Guardian.

Like speech, coding structures make use of what might be called the syntagmatic and paradigmatic, but in inverse relation to how they operate in speech systems. As Lev Manovich observes in The Language of New Media, in speech or writing the syntagmatic is what appears on the page (or as patterned sound), whereas the paradigmatic (the alternative choices that could have been made) is virtually rather than actually present (229-33). In digital media using dynamic databases, this relationship is reversed. The paradigmatic alternatives are encoded into the database and in this sense actually exist, whereas the syntagmatic is dynamically generated on the fly as choices are made that determine which items in the database will be used. In this sense, the syntagmatic is virtual rather than actual. This insight opens onto further explorations of how databases and narratives interface together, especially in electronic literature and the more general question of literariness.

- “My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts.” by Hayles, N. Katherine, 2005.

Amidst the attention given to the sciences as how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered ‘useless,’ will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously.

- John Maeda

The Internet is the most fantastic tool ever brought into being to make things right and to fix our democracy. We can use it. It is going to happen. But how long? It depends on whether [you] feel passionate about it and get involved.

- Al Gore, in an interview with Sean Parker at SXSW 2012.
Quoted in “Al Gore with Sean Parker at SXSW: ‘Occupy democracy!’” by Daniel Terdiman, March 12, 2012.

Our democracy has been hacked. It no longer works to serve the best interests of the people of this country.

- Al Gore, in an interview with Sean Parker at SXSW 2012.
Quoted in “Al Gore with Sean Parker at SXSW: ‘Occupy democracy!’” by Daniel Terdiman, March 12, 2012.

Every time society advances, it faces challenges from those people economically and emotionally invested in the past. Undoubtedly stone age flint knappers were less than happy about bronze-age technology disturbing their business model. The medieval church was none too pleased about printing technology breaking their hegemony over knowledge, but we’d never have had the Enlightenment without it. Today the media-conglomerates, governments and educational institutions that profit from gatekeeping knowledge of all kinds are pushing the Stop Online Piracy Act, and even more draconian legislation to try and hold back the flood of free knowledge that threatens their power. Unless we want to stay in the knowledge equivalent of the stone age, and miss the next enlightenment the knowledge revolution promises to bring with it, we should all redouble our efforts to make sure they lose. For centuries the book has been the highest symbol of knowledge. The object that has enshrined and preserved knowledge through history. The book is so inextricably linked with our concept of knowledge that for many people it is hard to separate one from the other. But for human knowledge to reach its full potential, we may have to let go of the book-as-object first, or open our thinking to a radically different definition of what a book is.

- “Are books and the internet about to merge?” by Damien Walter, February 15, 2012.
First published by the Guardian.

Probably the biggest change is going to come from the changed definition of what we’re reading. More and more, texts will evolve the way Wikipedia entries evolve; the idea of a finished text, where all the words have been locked down, will start to seem a little less orthodox—something you’d expect from a novel, but not from a magazine article, say. And that open-endedness will likely mean that the reader is capable of participating, adding links, commenting, suggesting new avenues for exploration, fact-checking. So we’ll have to read in an even more focused way, I suspect, knowing that we can have a say in where the text eventually goes. So there you go: ebooks and digital text are keeping us from skimming *and* forcing us to engage with the text more directly. Who would have thought it?

- Steve Johnson, as quoted in the interview “The Future of Reading,” February 15, 2012.
Originally posted to Findings.com.