Sunday, June 20, 2010

Unboxed - Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social - NYTimes.com

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    • “THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with him.
    • other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in the book.

       

    • Thanks to e-mail, Twitter and the blogosphere, I regularly exchange information with hundreds of people in a single day: scheduling meetings, sharing political gossip, trading edits on a book chapter, planning a family vacation, reading tech punditry. How many of those exchanges could happen were I limited exclusively to the technologies of the phone, the post office and the face-to-face meeting? I suspect that the number would be a small fraction of my current rate.
    • high-level thinking when the culture migrates from the page to the screen.
    • Mr. Carr’s original essay, published in The Atlantic — along with Clay Shirky’s more optimistic account, which led to the book “Cognitive Surplus
    • The intellectual tools for assessing the media, once the province of academics and professional critics, are now far more accessible to the masses.
    • The question is not whether our brains are being changed. (Of course new experiences change your brain — that’s what experience is, on some basic level.) The question is whether the rewards of the change are worth the liabilities.
    • Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.