Posts tagged alan jacobs

You do realize by now that all of Culture Making is merely a preparatio evangelica for the work of Alan Jacobs? I must decrease, he must increase. All half-joking aside, do read his brief review of Richard John Neuhaus's final book, American Babylon, in the excellent journal The New Atlantis.

re: alan jacobs, babylon, exile, pentecost and beyond

Andy:

[T]he Babylonian captivity of the Israelites produced social and, yes, technological developments that permanently altered Judaism—that, one might say, made Judaism as a way of life separate from the cult of the Temple in Jerusalem. For it was in that captivity that the synagogue developed—the place for reading and interpreting Torah—and along with it the scribal system by which the debates of the rabbis were recorded, organized, displayed, and passed down to future generations in what we now call the Talmud. And when the Israelites were given the opportunity to return from exile and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and the Temple, many—among them some leading rabbis and their devoutest students—chose to stay in Babylon. They had come to prefer the new social structures they had made, and the new technologies formed to sustain those structures.

For those of us residing in the American Babylon, this sounds suspiciously like a parable; but it’s important to see that those who chose to stay behind were often neither frivolous nor culpably assimilated into Babylonian life. Moreover, wise historians doubt whether Judaism could have survived its ultimate diaspora were it not for the cultural forms originally built in that captivity.

The incomparable Alan Jacobs has begun blogging at Culture11 about the perfectly Culture Making–worthy topic of "technologies of reading and research and, well, knowledge." Alan is worth reading on any subject, anywhere, so let there be much rejoicing.

re: alan jacobs, language, reading, technology and change

Andy

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I’m interested in how reading on the page differs from reading on screens; in how different kinds of screens enable different kinds of knowledge; in the strategies and tools we employ for information gathering, for information ordering, and for information evaluating. I think a lot about linear and non-linear forms of organizing mental experience, and the technologies that make such organization easier or harder. I wonder about whether we’re really losing serendipity, as so many people say. I’m fascinated by the various speeds at which technologies move and by our ability (or, sometimes, inability) to match those speeds. I wonder what libraries are for and what they will be for.