The Stoa: a Review for Digital Classics

Gregory Crane, Reading in the Age of Google

As staggering as some changes have been over the past twenty-five years, it is difficult to predict what we will be reading in fifteen, ten, or even five years’ time. Subsequent developments may be even more dramatic as old ways of doing things dissolve and a new generation, immersed in electronic information from childhood, takes its place.

The goals we pursue-the hunger for ideas, the desire to understand more, the delight in reasoned, evidence-based debate-will continue to find new modes of expression. Reading has been in flux since writing began to emerge four thousand years ago. The increasing mechanization of print facilitated a shift from intensive reading, where readers repeatedly studied a few texts such as the Bible, Vergil’s Aeneid, or Shakespeare’s plays to extensive reading where readers moved through one novel after another. This shift had many effects, not least of which was laying the foundation for modern democratic society. The restless, question-driven, active reading in the age of Google may lead to a shift that is just as dramatic.

Henry Farrell in the CHE:

Both group blogs and the many hundreds of individual academic blogs that have been created in the last three years are pioneering something new and exciting. They’re the seeds of a collective conversation, which draws together different disciplines (sometimes through vigorous argument, sometimes through friendly interaction), which doesn’t reproduce traditional academic distinctions of privilege and rank, and which connects academic debates to a broader arena of public discussion. It’s not entirely surprising that academic blogs have provoked some fear and hostility; they represent a serious challenge to well-established patterns of behavior in the academy. Some academics view them as an unbecoming occupation for junior (and senior) scholars; in the words of Alex Halavais of the State University of New York at Buffalo, they seem “threatening to those who are established in academia, to financial interests, and to … well, decorum.” Not exactly dignified; a little undisciplined; carnivalesque. Sometimes signal, sometimes noise. But exactly because of this, they provide a kind of space for the exuberant debate of ideas, for connecting scholarship to the outside world, which we haven’t had for a long while. We should embrace them wholeheartedly.

from Slashdot:

Rewind your brain 15 years and imagine what you’d think if I told you:

Your computer will be roughly 1,000 faster than what you’re using today. You will probably have more than 4,000 times the memory, and a fast hard drive that stores over 100,000 times as much as that floppy you’re using. You can buy these supercomputers for less than $500 at Wal-Mart.

That computer will be hooked into a self-directed network that was designed by the Department of Defense and various universities – along with nearly 400,000,000 other machines. Your connection to this network will be 10,000 times faster than the 300 baud modem you’re using. In fact, it will be fast enough to download high-quality sound and video files in better than realtime.

There will be a good chance that your computer’s operating system will have been written by a global team of volunteers, some of them paid by their employers to implement specific parts. Free copies of this system will be available for download over the hyperfast network. You will have free access to the tools required to make your own changes, should you want to.

You will use this mind-bendingly powerful system to view corporate sponsored, community driven messages boards where people will bitch about having to drive cars that are almost unimaginably luxurious compared to what you have today.

Remember: in some fields, the singularity has already happened.