> Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies"
The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
The epistemological collapse we are experiencing wasn't caused by information being online and disseminated via browsers.
It was, and is, caused by a mass of uninformed people, with strong tribal behavior, shutting out any information that doesn't fit their preconceived world views, and industries and politics designed to benefit from that behavior.
And btw. misinformation can be, and has been, spread via print [even today][1].
[1]: https://english.nv.ua/nation/russia-delivers-nine-tons-of-pr...
Indeed its psychological torture but it doesn't just tear up the individual, it undermines all social institutions.
A minor nitpick, TFA author uses the term "Epistemological Collapse". That's the "science/philosophy and study of knowledge and meaning" and for that to collapse would be different from what people talk about more widely which is "epistemic crisis"... a deterioration in common knowledge and disappearance of meaning, trust, truth, veracity.
Historians call it an 'interregnum'. We're very definitely in one. With another author I co-wrote about it here [0]. You can see it everywhere. But I argue that no single technology is the cause of it - rather what people do and how tech alters their behaviour. Look at this adjacent thread on whether "Malware can turn off webcam LED and record video". This rather simple debate raises a more or less "unfalsifiable question", even if you have sophisticated electronic test equipment and nation-state level of dedicated expertise,, what do you really know about the relation between an LED and covert surveillance.
In an epistemic crisis we are forced to confront how we use knowledge and maybe to use it in a different way.
[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/radical-disbelief-and-its-ca...
[1] >>42259278
2-Bloomberg has this one recently 'The Print Magazine Revival of 2024: Several factors are driving this revival but the focus is a niche and on high quality which translated into resources,aka money, it also cites the following:
Nostalgia and Tangibility: Many readers still appreciate the tactile experience of reading a physical magazine. -Niche Markets: Smaller, independent publications are thriving by catering to specific interests and communities. -Strategic Repositioning: Established brands like Bloomberg Businessweek and Sports Illustrated are adapting by reducing frequency and focusing on high-quality content.
I have been in print media since CMP Media Win Magazine and it will end next month. I can assure you that resources for high quality print journalism is no longer there, I am talking about capable editorial talents and other production means, photographers, graphic designers etc. From 20 photographers pre-COVID to one with a dozen freelancers for example that applies to the rest departments.
This is a great representation of everything I've come to hate of the way reading is praised as a means to an ends, divorced from the writing itself. I assume this comes from people being praised for reading as children - when they're developing a novel skill - and carrying the same value into adulthood, uncritical and unchanged.
So we end up with bookshops full of erotica with cutesy covers, proudly read by people who think they're doing something intellectual. We end up with the 'Torment Nexus' argument, where a political view becomes an unassailable truth as soon as it's committed to sci-fi print. If you're doing anything in technology, pray that it doesn't bear superficial resemblance to Skynet. Pray that it doesn't sound like Soylent Green.
TFA starts with the Terry Pratchet anecdote about Holocaust denial. It's an impressive prediction - but it's a also a prediction made by every other Usenet nerd in 1995 that didn't have a financial interest in being ignorant of it. His and Sagan's arguments are elevated above expert contemporaries just because they wrote fiction and pop-science. Ironically, it's the loathed Silicon Valley nerds who might more fairly celebrate the prescience of people like rms.
Terry Pratchet didn't write to advocate for truth of the Holocaust. He wrote fun fiction, without much to take from it other than boot-themed economics. It doesn't stop being entertainment - or escapism - just because it's a book.
>Dean Blobaum of the University of Chicago Press castigated how The Gutenberg Elegies makes electronic media the “whipping boy for the ills of western society,” claiming that Birkerts’ argument is too all-encompassing, blaming computers for the “Decline in education, literacy, and literate culture.” Here’s the thing some thirty years later, however—Birkerts was right.
Except, here's the thing: he wasn't.[1] Ignore the demise of truth propagated by this online article, because literacy rates are rising rapidly globally. And I can think of no invention - not even the printing press - that can be thanked for this as much as the personal computer. Even in developed nations, literacy rates continue to rise.
But the most damning part is what the author shows this belief results in. Do unqualified 'reading', and you too can write guff like:
>The frenetic, interconnected, hypertext-permeated universe of digital reading is categorically a different experience. Even more importantly, a physical book on a shelf is a cosmos unto-itself, while that dimension of interiority and introspection—of privacy—is obscured in the virtual domain.
No need for evidence, or argument, or even decent prose. Maybe this self-satisfaction is why so many book protagonists are quiet, misunderstood children who long to be librarians. You're just reading. You're grown adults. Get over yourselves.
[1] https://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/fs45-li...
When I opened the page initially it just looked the same like it did with an adblocker on, but eventually: https://imgur.com/a/L7F7uNm
Unfortunately research doesn't agree with you on this part: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-faile...
On top of that research, my personal experience mirrors these findings. Not having hands-on labs, not reading/writing but just listening prevents things from being committed to longer term memory. How many podcasts they remember? How many interesting things they have watched made a change in their lives?
There's also mounting research that writing is different than typing, and using a real pen and paper changes how brain fundamentally works.
I also experience this daily. I take notes and make lists on notebooks all day, and it allows me to concentrate and build a better picture of my day ahead. My longer term plans are stored in "personal project planning" software, but it failed to replace paper for the last 4-5 years consistently. So, now they work in tandem. Not against each other.
From my personal experience, designing code on paper results in compacter, more performant and less buggy code in my endeavors. Writing/designing on the spot doesn't scale much longer term, and always increases the "tidying rounds" in my software.
We still romanticize SciFi movies and technological acceleration via external devices. Nature has different priorities and doesn't work as we assume. We're going to learn this the hard way.
If you can't internalize some basic and advanced knowledge, your daily and work life will be much harder, period. Humans increase their cognitive and intellectual depth by building on top of this persistent building blocks by experience. When you externalize these essential building blocks, building on top of them becomes almost impossible.
The only thing I found which works brilliantly is eBook readers. Being able to carry a library in a distraction-free device with a screen tailored for long reading sessions is a superpower. Yes, it kills the sense of "progress" due to being constant thickness and lacking pages, but it works, and beats carrying a 2000+ page tome in every aspect.
> The spread of mechanical movable type printing in Europe in the Renaissance introduced the era of mass communication, which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation, and threatened the power of political and religious authorities. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
in my opinion, the author of the blog post wastes the readers time by not delving into historical comparisons; no effort is spent analyzing the solutions that society implemented in the past when faced with this problem.
This has been attempted in the outdoors world for 20+ years. E.g., Alpinist[0] and The Surfers Journal[1]. It works, kinda. Alpinist now has more ads and is a smaller physical size and lower-quality paper than it was at the start. I think it's also had a couple close calls with bankruptcy. I wasn't reading TSJ over a long enough time span to tell if they had similar issues.
[0] http://www.alpinist.com/ [1] https://www.surfersjournal.com/
Important distinction here, book burnings are an example of knowledge destruction, but not all information is knowledge, and not all knowledge is truth.
That is why this isn't applicable to the internet age, or in fact even the reverse is true. In an environment of digital mass communication there's much more information than knowledge, and the way to destabilize knowledge and truth is not to destroy knowledge but to flood you with information. This is why the most important skill today has shifted from finding knowledge to filtering out noise. The Nazi of today isn't going to hunt a library for a book, he's instead going to create an environment so entropic that truth and fiction become indistinguishable.
And that's also of course why you find people in that camp today as defenders of free flow of information. Because you need to realize that the signal to noise ratio has been turned on its head. When Google deletes 90% of my emails this isn't because they pursue evil plans like someone who burns 90% of a library down, quite the opposite, it's the only way I don't end up being scammed.
https://philosophicalsociety.com/html/BaudrillardsThoughtsOn...
It’s not true for the extreme top end: [0]
Here’s a Yahoo Finance article citing several efforts to investigate inheritance vs self-made wealth in the upper middle class: [1]
We keep electing new politicians and buying the latest and greatest thing. Technology keeps revolutionizing everything.
This leads to a ton of churn at the top as incumbents are replaced.
What may fool you though is that all successful people are similar in important ways (Anna Karenina principle). But they are not the same people.
[0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-les...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/all-billion...
The article you linked was a bit fuzzy, seems they counted people like Thiel and Musk as 'entrepreneurs' rather than inheritance because they didn't keep running a family company. But them being wealthy is absolutely connected to their families being privileged and the nasty, nasty crimes they profited from.
Were you trying to say that maybe all that destruction in the pursuit of insatiable greed could be 'good' somehow? Like Zorg's little speech [0] about the benefits of destruction (the broken window fallacy)?
Also, I'm learning Latin, and it's been an incredible experience to read graded readers with optional interlinear translation[2] as well as the ability to hear the text expressively narrated in Latin at a touch of a button. None of this is possible with paper.
[0]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-eliot/middlemarch
The article reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes 'Academia here I come' (Reddit reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1300k80/ac...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair - for the curious.
The Sokal affair is a funny thing yes, which I'd seen before (and I presume many people here are familiar with). I don't see how it's relevant here?
I mean - it was one journal, in 1996, that had no peer review process, that published a fake article someone sent in to prove a point that the journal publishes at least some crap...
What should we reject based on that in your opinion - all cultural and media studies presumably, at the very least, you seem to be clearly suggesting. And every philosopher too? The logicians? The linguists? All of social science? Economics too? Is it just STEM-type stuff that's acceptable then?
Seems preposterous to me. The soft sciences are looser, and definitely have a higher proportion of hand-wavy nonsense, but rejecting it all to avoid stuff you don't like is just silly. Learning to avoid the crap and find the good stuff is pretty similar to other fields.
And often, anecdotally, it seems to me that the more interesting figures in the experimental sciences tend to be very intrigued by the softer, arguably sometimes "trickier" questions that the non-STEM sciences can explore.
The way of life of our billionaires is threatening all life on the planet, particularly the poorest [0]. There might not be a living standard if we don't fix this issue.
0 - https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaires-emit-mo...
First, fascism is a totalitarian ideology. You could have googled it yourself instead of parroting what The View tells you. It demands 100% subordination of individual interests in service of the state. Here's a quote from Mussolini: "The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist" [0] From his support of Trump and DOGE, we can conclude that he's the opposite of a fascist and wants to reduce the state. He's much more Millei than Mussolini. This is so elementary I'm a little confused as to why I have to spell it out.
Here's some more homework for you: [1]. Words like Nazi and Fascist and Communist have meanings. If we want to have a civilized society, we must first respect the meanings of words so that we can have a conversation.
Second: name a Nazi that Musk likes. Before you say Trump, here's Trump's Fine People speech. Watch the whole thing, then tell me he's a Nazi. Then also keep in mind the massive "Trump calls Nazis Fine People" hoax the media has been banging on about ever since: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKbFA7HW-U
Here's one of him disavowing the KKK many times over a long period: https://x.com/TimRunsHisMouth/status/897112536574828544
Third, Musk is known for making wild promises, many of which are as yet undone. Nobody would care who he is if that was all there is to him. But some of his wild promises are real and part of everyday life.
Fourth, if you think he wins due to extreme funding, go read the stories of Zip2, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX. All of the above teetered on the brink of nonexistence due to being bootstrapped by Musk who was then strapped for cash.
It's hard to swallow--TV and social media are the backbones of our culture now--but it's pretty convincing that Postman's predictions came true.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
https://www.solent.ac.uk/blogs/media-technology-blogs/digita...
The article you linked starts with a large graph, LOOK TEST SCORES ARE GOING DOWN. And Ironically just segues from that into their narrative, no deep thinking about the graph is done
Is this a standard test? What are the variables here? Do you think adding countries could lower the average (8 countries have been added since the start of the graph)? Why did they choose to show the average in the first place and then completely drop the subject? Why does this graph start at 480? What kind of swing does 20 points represent on a test like this? Does the complete societal collapse of deep thinking result in a few extra wrong answers on a standardized test? Is deep thinking even rewarded in this test or is it outweighed by mechanical ability (singapore far and away at the top with reading being the largest gap at 27 points for the 2022 test)? Hey do singaporean children use smartphones [1]?
From the generation taught without phones there seems to be a huge lapse in both critical and deep thinking skills.
[1] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/parenting-education/m...
PISA is a standardized test conducted by OECD for International Student Assessment. It's homepage is located at [0], alongside with datasets for all previous tests, and plethora of material.
So, you can download the data, look at the questions in any language you prefer, do your own analysis.
I'll just reiterate that, my personal experience mirrors the article. Extreme reliance of smart devices and technologies like conversational LLMs reduce the cognitive ability and deep thinking capacity tremendously. Children and people become interfaces to these devices they use. They just delegate all their thinking to these devices and live a much hollower life.
