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conflux

The New York Review of Books The Coming Revolution
"The widespread literacy resulting from the European invention of movable type half a millennium ago humbled priests and tyrants, revived classical learning, spawned the Enlightenment, and inspired the modern world with all its wonders and woes. Yet the abrupt death of Gutenberg's epochal technology midway through the final decade of the twentieth century was ignored as the world welcomed with great expectations its exponentially more powerful electronic successor.

New technologies change everything in their path, topple kings and empires, create new gods, new goods, and new ways of living in the world. They do not erase the past or change human nature, but they do replace previous forms of production. Like the technology of movable type from which the modern publishing business arose, many traditional publishing functions related to this abandoned technology are irrelevant to an electronic future. "

Salon The e-book wars
"The controversy over the IeBAF awards and the birth of its grass-roots alternative (which Rose hopes will become the "Sundance of e-books") highlight some pressing issues for e-publishing -- issues that have so far gotten lost in either idealism about the freedom it may give authors and independent publishers or eagerness on the part of the established book industry to stake its claim in a new medium. Will e-books offer a way for writers who've been snubbed by the big houses to find success marketing their books directly to readers? Or will e-publishing simply present the same books and authors currently found in bookstores, only in a different, less tangible form? Will mainstream publishers' newfound interest in the e-publishing scene bring a higher standard of literary quality and professionalism to a community that until now was amateur in the best and worst senses of the word? Is a small bastion of independence being stamped out, or are e-book readers finally going to get content they find truly enticing?"

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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