Socrates' Criticism of the Written Word Echoes Those Agai...

En la época de Sócrates, los textos escritos aún no eran una herramienta habitual y todavía despertaban recelos. Los consideraban un sucedáneo de la palabra oral — liviana, alada, sagrada—. Aunque la Atenas del siglo V a. C. ya contaba con un incipiente comercio de libros, no sería hasta un siglo después, en tiempos de Aristóteles, cuando se llegase a contemplar sin extrañeza el hábito de leer. Para Sócrates, los libros eran ayudas de la memoria y el conocimiento, pero pensaba ...

 Riddles Present New Ways of Looking at Things

The riddle can accomplish certain things by inviting the riddlee to awaken to a new vision of the world. It is not a form well suited to all sorts of discourse, however. According to Cohen (1996), It is clear that the riddle is not the best way of communicating about unknown things. If we want to learn from another person about something that he knows and we do not, a genuine question would serve us better than any riddle. On the other hand, if we want to communicate our experiences and our...

 Interactive Fiction has "Potential Narrative"

A work of IF is not itself a narrative; it is an interactive computer program. A narrative is “the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence” (Prince 1980, 180); this can result from an interactive session but does not describe any IF work itself. Similarly, interactive fiction is not a story in the sense of the things that happen in a narrative, or more precisely, “the content plane of narrative as opposed to its expression or discourse; the ‘what’ ...

 The Screen Revolution is Breaking the Thread of Literacy

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history. Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI). Because ubiquitous m...

 Medieval Book Curse

Steal not this book my honest friend For fear the gallows should be your end, And when you die the Lord will say And where's the book you stole away?

 Moritake Haiku

A fallen flower Returning to the branch? It was a butterfly.

 Caching in Public Libraries

...libraries are a natural example of a memory hierarchy when used in concert with our own desk space. In fact, libraries in themselves, with their various sections and storage facilities, are a great example of a memory hierarchy with multiple levels. As a consequence, they face all sorts of caching problems. They have to decide which books to put in the limited display space at the front of the library, which to keep in their stacks, and which to consign to offsite storage. The policy for w...

 Popular Books are Quickly Forgotten

Love your beloved classics now—because even now, few people read them, for the most part, and fewer still love them. In a century, they’ll probably be forgotten by all but a few eccentrics.   If it makes you feel any better, all fiction, even the books people love and rush to buy in droves, is subject to entropy. Consider, for example, the bestselling fiction novels of the week I was born, which was not so long ago. I’ve bolded the ones my local library currently has in stock. Hawaii,...

 Insights on Being Well-Read

What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally i...

 Universality of Games

Just as the ancient and primitive religions of the world show profound similarities in their fertility rites and their sun and moon worship, many games appear to be common property to human beings everywhere. Indeed, the comparison is not at all farfetched: many games now thought to be mere children's pastimes are, in fact, relics of religious rituals, often dating back to the dawn of mankind. Tug of war, for example, is a dramatized struggle between natural forces; knucklebones were once par...