Anthropologists usefully define a tool as an artifact used to make other artifact

technical objects are always on the move toward new configurations, new milieu, and new kinds of techni­cal ensembles

ognitive deficit or a decline in cognitive ability among young peopl

are catalyzing a shift in the technological unconscious, that is, the actions, expectations, and anticipations that have become so habitual they are “automatized,” sinking below conscious awareness while still being in­tegrated into bodily routines carried on without conscious awareness.

he contemporary changes in mechanisms of attention are conveyed not through changes in the DNA but rather through epigenetic (i.e., environmental) changes. The relation between epigenetic and genetic changes has been a rich field of research in recent decades, resulting in a much more nuanced (and accurate) picture of biological adaptations than was previously understood, when the central dogma had all adaptations occurring through genetic processes

over a wide range of data-gathering instruments the results are consistent: people read less print, and they read print less well.

Young people, who vote with their feet in college, are marching in another direction—the digital direction.

With linear reading, by contrast, the cognitive load is at a minimum, precisely because eye movements are more routine and fewer decisions need to be made about how to read the material and in what order. Hence the transfer to long-term memory happens more efficiently, especially when readers reread passages and pause to reflect on them as they go along.

w odd a r^ e that the most valuable thing English ever had to offer was the very thing t o made us a discipline, t o transformed us from cultured gentlemen into a profession

makes no apology for linking the decline of reading skills directly to a decrease in print reading, issuing a stinging indictment to teachers, professors, and other mentors who think digital reading might encourage skills of its own

Worse, reading skills (as measured by the ability to identify themes, draw inferences, etc.) have been declining in junior high, high school, college, and even graduate schools for the same period.

research indicates that the small habitual actions associated with web interactions—clicking the mouse, moving a cursor, etc.—may be extraordinarily effective in retraining (or more accurately, repurposing) our neural circuitry, so that the changes are not only psychological but physical as well

Without abandoning print literacy. Comparative Media Studies enriches it through judicious comparison with other media, so that print is no longer the default mode into which one falls without much thought about alternatives but rather an informed choice made with full awareness of its possibilities and limitations.

as the limiting scarce resource

Surely there must be a better way. .Needed are approaches that can lo­cate digital work within print traditions, and print traditions within dig­ital media, without obscuring or failing to account for the differences between them. One such approach is advocated here: it goes by the name of Comparative Media Studies.^ As a concept, Comparative Media Studies has long inhabited the humanities, including comparisons of manuscript and print cultures, oral versus literate cultures, papyri versus vellum, immo­bile type versus moveable type, letterpress versus offset printing, etc. These fields have tended to exist at the margins of literary culture, of interest to specialists but (with significant exceptions) rarely sweeping the humanities as a whole. Moreover, they have occupied separate niches without overall theoretical and conceptual frameworks within which Comparative Media Studies might evolve.

To evaluate the impact of digital technologies, we may consider in over­view an escalating series of effects.

Another way is through the concept of technogenesis, the idea that hu­mans and technics have coevolved together.

humanities as traditionally print-based disciplines

Constructing a database also makes it possible for different scholars (or teams of scholars) to create different front-ends for the same data, thus encouraging collaboration in data collection, storing, and analysis.

presupposition

Such feelings, which are widespread,^ constitute nothing less than a change in worldview

Students read and write print texts in the classroom and consume and create digital texts^of their own on screens (with computers, iPhones, tablets, etc.), but there is little transfer from leisure activities to classroom instruction or vice versa

The abil­ity to access and retrieve information on a global scale has a significant im­pact on how one thinks about one’s place in the world.

As the number of links increased, comprehension declined, as measured by writing a summary and completing a multiple-choice test. Si

Hyper reading, which includes skimming, scanning, fragmenting, and juxtaposing texts, is a strategic response to an information-intensive envi­ronment, aiming to conserve attention by quickly identifying relevant infor­mation, so that only relatively few portions of a given text are actually read.

widespread,^ constitute nothing less than a change in worldview.Moreover, research indicates that the small habitual actions associated with web interactions—clicking the mouse, moving a cursor, etc.—may be extraordinarily effective in retraining (or more accurately, repurposing) our neural circuitry, so that the changes are not only psychological but physical as well

Concentration can be had, but for ·most of us it is only by setting oneself against the things that rourinely destroy it.

Our brains have become particularly adapted to creating coherent, gap-free sto-ries ....

eyes wide shut

Net seizes our attention only to scatter it

Neuroscience is now squarely at the center of any discussion of thinking or memory.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

that our inner exertions literally have the power to change us that thoroughly. It is not just that we, are what we think; we are how, with what tools, we think.

Maybe the screen was reconditioning him

Serious literary work has levels. The involved reader takes in not only the narrative premise and the craft of its realization, but also the resonanc

Is coming into human consciousness also a coming into narrative-is it part of the nature of human consciousness to seek and create narrative, which is to say meaning?

Our brains have become particularly adapted to creating coherent, gap-free sto-ries .... 1his propensity for narrative creation is part of what pre-disposes humans to religious thought.

Think of all that we can explore, think of the amazing lateral speeds of which we are now capable, the wealth of other kinds of information (visual, spoken, musical

As it follows an electronic-as opposed to mechanical-paradigm, this transformation is dramatically more accelerated and more psychologically formative than any previous technological transformation we have gone through as a species. The overwhelming difference is that where formerly we could be said to interact with various systems------be those of commerce, law, politics, scholarship-now those systems are, in effect, merging into one, an unwieldy gargantuan unity that runs all its parts on a code of ls and Os.

Our us.e of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it."

Is Google Making Us Stupid?," an essay that begins with an image of unsettling implication

"information wants to be free."

No one can really predict

We might think in terms of a circuit-board model, picturing ourselves as the contact points.

Language will grow increasingly iropoverished through a series of vicious cycles.

If electronic media are the one thing that the young are at ease with, why not exploit the fact?

"morbid symptoms"

eading is fundamentally an act of translation

The electronic media, while conspicuous in gadgetry, are very nearly invisible in their functioning. They have slipped deeply and irrevocably into our midst, creating sluices and circulating through them.

Who can blame the students? Everything they meet with in the world around them gives the signal: That was then, and electronic communications are now.

Gutenberg

But certainly the idea of what it means to be a person liv-ing a life will be much changed.

Language will grow increasingly iropoverished through a series of vicious cycles

hey are less and less will-ing to publish work, however worthy, that will not make a tidy profi

Engagement is intrinsically public, taking place within a circuit oflarger connectedness.

Print also posits a time axis; the turning of pages, not to mention the vertical descent down the page, is a forward-moving succession, with earlier contents at every point serving as a ground for what follows. Moreover, the printed material is static-it is the reader, not the book, that moves forward.

The so-called natural world, the place we used to live, which served us so long as the yardstick for all measurements, can now only be perceived through a scrim

Many educators say that our students are less and less able to read, or analyze, or write with clarity and purpose.

The printed word is part of a vestigial order that we are moving away from-by choice and by societal compulsion.

And what will happen when educators find that not very many of the old materials will "play"-that is, capture student enthusiasm?

that our educational systems are in decline; that our students are less and less able to read and comprehend their required texts, and that their aptitude scores have leveled off well below those of previous gener-ations. T

reading is fundamentally an act of translation. Symbols are turned into their ver-bal referents and these are in turn interpreted

printed sheet is heading for obsolescence

'hd if you still think God made us," writes Greenberg, "there's a neurochemical reason for that too." He quotes writer David Linden, author of The Acddental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Jls Love, Memory, Dreams, and God· "Our brains have be-come particularly adapted to creating coherent, gap-free stories .... This propensity for narrative creation is part of what predisposes humans to religious thought."

You Are What You Click More than twenty years ago I published a book called The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. It was my speculative-but also, I admit, somewhat alarmed-response to what felt like the rash ascendancy of all things digital.

Daily news-papers, with their long columns of print, struggle against declining sales. Fewer and fewer people under the age of fifty read them; comput-ers will soon make packaged information a custom product. But if the printed sheet is heading for obsolescence, people are tuning in to the signals. The screen is where the information and entertainment wars will be fought.

are now. Do I exaggerate? If all this is the case, why haven't we heard more about it? Why hasn't somebody stepped forward with a bow tie and a pointer stick to explain what is going on?

The printed word is part of a vestigial order that we are moving away from-by choice and by societal compulsion.

Historically, this sort of shift in authority accompanied the emergence and development of the informational genres. The progression is nicely marked in the shift from Webster (Noah) to Webster's (the publishing house in Springfield, Mass.) and finally to Webster's as a synonym for "the dictionary," a generic name that has in fact been in the public domain for a number of years.

Information, in short, is a strikingly bland substance."

The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage

but also notions like "reputation

now-obsolete use of information to mean "formation or moulding of the mind or character, instruction,"

And while it is certain that many forms and genres will migrate in part or in whole to an electronic mode of existence over the coming years,

forty-five years from now gender roles will be differen

Paper is just an object that [some] information has been sprayed onto in the past... —Ted Nelson

information is able to perform the work it does precisely because it fuzzes the boundaries between several genetically distinct categories of experience. Ultimately, then, the question we want to ask is phenomenological rather than lexicographical; not, What does information mean?, but rather, How is the impression of "information" constituted out of certain practices of reading and the particular representations that support them?

complement to the informational forms of print — a domain that privileges the personal, the private, and the subjective against the impersonal, the public, and the objective.

ntertextuality"

When theorists talk about the power of the new media to make everyone an author, for example, or to provide everyone with universal access to potential audiences of millions of readers,

Take the picture that appeared in Popular Mechanics magazine in 1950 in an article on "The Home of the Future."

and first of all the limit between the private, the secret (whether private or public) and the public or phenomenal.

First, for the notion of "publishing." To a certain extent, the particularities of the Web in this regard are purely quantitative. A signal virtue of electronic technologies is to remove the capital and institutional impediments to the production and circulation of documents.

"form of communication"

nd this way of talking rests on two assumptions. First, they assume a correlation between the size of a text (as measured in characters, bytes, column inches, or whatever) and the amount of content it conveys — a step that implies the commoditization of content that is central to the cultural role we ask information to play.

But none of this should be taken as depreciating the cultural effects of electronic media.

Separated from, or without the implication of, reference to a person informed: that which inheres in one of two or more alternative sequences, arrangements, etc., that produce different responses in something, and which is capable of being stored in, transferred by, and communicated to inanimate things.

Knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event; that of which one is apprised or told; intelligence, news. spec. contrasted with data.

information "...both covers and covers up much of what was referenced by the anthropological sense of 'culture.'" But even granting all this, it doesn't follow that we can simply drop the word information from our vocabularies in favor of literatures, culture, knowledge, or whatever other items it seems to be standing in for.

the first sort of error is in seeing the future as being insufficiently like the present, and that is relatively easy to correct for; you just imagine the future furnished like the room you are in. Whereas the second sort of error involves seeing the future as insufficiently different from the present,

This is one of the important ways in which information differs from knowledge, which always requires a knowing subject — an individual, a collectivity, or at the limit a text, which serves as a proxy for its author.

"Objectivity" is a complex notion here. It refers, first, to a kind of perspectival objectivity, the impression that information gives us its content in the "view from nowhere," without reference to private states or privileged points of view. This perspective-neutrality is the feature of information that gives it a more-or-less uniform exchange value, so that a piece of information that I give you can in principle be as comprehensible or as useful to you as it is to me.

hese claims to inclusiveness in turn permit us to attach a significance to exclusion — to an event that doesn't appearing in the newspaper, a word that doesn't appear in the dictionary, a historic site or restaurant that doesn't appearing in a travel guide, and so on. But of course this kind of claim is only possible when the boundaries of a document or building impose a manifest physical limit on the amount of material it can contain.

he trope is crucial to the claims of enthusiasts of the technology that it will usher in a new and epochal discursive order. We have to believe, that is, that the substance that computers traffic in, "information" in the technical sense of the term, is the same sort of stuff that led to the Reformation and the French Revolution, whether or not contemporaries talked about it in those terms. But the fact is that the use of information that people have in mind when they talk about "the information age" or say that information brought about the Reformation is not

Agre is certainly right, for example, to say that part of the work that information does for librarians is to flatten and obscure the subjective social topographies of content that are implicit when we speak of the holdings of a library in terms of "literatures."

In this essay, I want to show that these metaphors play false to the truth; we are rather in the situation, as Paul Duguid puts it, of breaking the banks and hoping still to have the river.

But there is a difficulty even in speaking of "intertextuality" when the individuation of texts themselves becomes so problematic: what could débordementsignify when there are no bords in the first place?

Electronic publication implies a new calculus of reputation, which I think no one has yet come to grips with.

But the assumption implicit in that phrase — that the magnitude or breadth of someone's reputation is proportional to its farthest geographical extension — has no relevance in the electronic world, where it takes no greater investment of resources to make a text available to distant readers than to local ones.

When theorists talk about the power of the new media to make everyone an author, for example, or to provide everyone with universal access to potential audiences of millions of readers, they invoke a notion of authorship and a model of access that is more appropriate to traditional print media than to electronic communication. What is an author, after all, if the new media no longer support the legal status or institutional privileges that have traditionally defined that role? And what real increase is there in the ability of the average citizen to affect public opinion if anyone who wants to gain the attention of a mass audience has to compete for attention with

There will be a digital revolution, but the printed book will be an important participant in it.

For the present it's enough to observe that there is nothing in the economics of publishing as a whole or the body of practice surrounding the use of the printed book that militates for its disappearance, even over the long term.

Nothing betrays the spirit of an age so precisely as the way it represents the future.

The second misapprehension is the opposite of the first. It comes from a failure to appreciate, not how durable some features of the material setting will turn out to be, but rather how contingent and mutable are some of the categories of social life.

The first and most obvious comes of taking some recent innovation at the steepest point of its curve and projecting it linearly to a point where it has swept all its predecessors aside.

And here, for all the revolutionary talk of the enthusiasts, there is a persistent tendency to yield to the second kind of misapprehension that representations of the future are liable to, where we naturalize contingent features of the current order of things. Indeed, the revolutionary rhetoric of the enthusiasts makes them especially susceptible to this presupposition, because the goal of making the material advantages of the new media sound inviting and exciting requires us to assume a continuity of communicative needs and interests.

What is most telling to us now about the Popular Mechanics picture is its presupposition is that in the year 2000 the household cleaning will still be woman's work

the Machine,

When Vashti served away form the sunbeams with a cry, she behaved barbarically - she put out her hand to steady her. "How dare you!" exclaimed the passenger. "You forget yourself!" The woman was confused, and apologized for not having let her fall. People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.

"Those mountains to the right - let me show you them." She pushed back a metal blind. The main chain of the Himalayas was revealed. "They were once called the Roof of the World, those mountains."

It was to the ear what artificial air was to the lungs, and agonizing pains shot across her head.

Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven

scraps of the untainted sky.

Wessex

Ælfrid

hills of Wessex

It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.

Man"s feet are the measure for distance,

unmechanical names

idea

By these days it was a demerit to be muscular.

not through the Machine."

honeycomb

superstitious phrase

Homelessness

"We have indeed advance, thanks to the Machine,

Doubtless the Committee was right.

ideas to be got

"It is contrary to the spirit of the age," she asserted. "Do you mean by that, contrary to the Machine?"

had an idea

but you were always busy or isolated

scraps of the untainted sky

"Never," said Kuno, "never. Humanity has learnt its lesson."

"Quicker," he gasped, "I am dying - but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine."

"The Machine stops."

But for the most part panic reigned, and men spent their strength praying to their Books, tangible proofs of the Machine"s omnipotence.

She whirled around, praying to be saved from this, at any rate, kissing the Book, pressing button after button.

Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven.

"I have been threatened with Homelessness," said Kuno.

A tube oozed towards her serpent fashion

"Quicker," he gasped, "I am dying - but we touch, we talk, not through the Machine."

As for Vashti, her life went peacefully forward until the final disaster. She made her room dark and slept; she awoke and made the room light. She lectured and attended lectures.

Here his story ended. Discussion of it was impossible, and Vashti turned to go.

It is not the proper thing, it is not mechanical

uneasy slumber, she was disturbed by an unfamiliar glow, which was the dawn.

The man in front dropped his Book - no great matter, but it disquieted them all. In the rooms, if the Book was dropped, the floor raised it mechanically

"Because, any moment, something tremendous many happen."

Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.

for it was rumoured that Euthanasia, too, was out of order, and that pain had reappeared among men.

while there was the Book there was security.

"I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the midst and the ferns until our civilization stops. Today they are the Homeless - tomorrow ------ "

Wessex, when Ælfrid overthrew the Danes.

kissing the Book

The Mending Apparatus has treated us so well in the past that we all sympathize with it, and will wait patiently for its recovery. In its own good time it will resume its duties

"Some one of meddling with the Machine---" they began. "Some one is trying to make himself king, to reintroduce the personal element." "Punish that man with Homelessness."

re-establishment of religion

"Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. "First-hand ideas do not really exist.

"Of course," said a famous lecturer - he of the French Revolution, who gilded each new decay with splendour - "of course we shall not press our complaints now

Wessex

We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now.

trying to summon trains which could not be summoned

Ever since her birth she had been surrounded by the steady hum

He kissed her.

air- ship

so did recapture the meaning of “Near” and “Far”. “Near” is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. “Far” is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet;

"I found out a way of my own." The phrase conveyed no meaning to her, and he had to repeat it.

tubular railway

The phrase still conveyed nothing. If Eternity was stopping it would of course be set going shortly.

edification

The Machine has been most merciful.

How can I possibly explain this? It was naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here.

"You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say “space is annihilated”, but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof.

pneumatic stopper

atavism

Machine can have no mercy

They commune with humanity in dreams.

But this is not for me, nor perhaps for my generation. I climbed with my respirator and my hygienic clothes and my dietetic tabloids! Better thus than not at all.

You are throwing civilization away."

in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally.

he would never have been happy in that state of life to which the Machine had called him;

vomitories

At this she grew angry. "I worship nothing!" she cried.

irreligious

"You are beginning to worship the Machine," he said coldly.

The victim is exposed to the air, which kills him.

She was too well-bred to shake him by the hand.

"Can you imagine anything more absurd?" she cried to a friend. "A man who was my son believes that the Machine is stopping. It would be impious if it was not mad."

"The Machine," they exclaimed, "feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine."

French Revolution

People were crawling about

vomitories

cinematophote

Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time" - his voice rose - "there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation

"Because I have seen her in the twilight - because she came to my help when I called - because she, too, was entangled by the worms, and, luckier than I, was killed by one of them piercing her throat."

The Machine hums! Did you know that? Its hum penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts.

The Machine hums! Did you know that? Its hum penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts.

His was not a type that the Machine desired to hand on.

I could not tell you such a thing through the Machine."

which exactly resembled her own.