https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37423/37423-h/37423-h.htm

Our schools are troubled with a multiplication of studies, each in turn having its own multiplication of materials and principles. Our teachers find their tasks made heavier in that they have come to deal with pupils individually and not merely in mass. Unless these steps in advance are to end in distraction, some clew of unity, some principle that makes for simplification, must be found. This book represents the conviction that the needed steadying and centralizing factor is found in adopting as the end of endeavor that attitude of mind, that habit of thought, which we call scientific. This scientific attitude of mind might, conceivably, be quite irrelevant to teaching children and youth. But this book also represents the conviction that such is not the case; that the native and unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific mind. If these pages assist any to appreciate this kinship and to consider seriously how its recognition in educational practice would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste, the book will amply have served its purpose.

Vannevar Bush

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/?single_page=true

“Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century

Carolyn Marvin

https://books.google.com/books/about/When_Old_Technologies_Were_New.html?id=GgepDgAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description

In the history of electronic communication, the last quarter of the nineteenth century holds a special place, for it was during this period that the telephone, phonograph, electric light, wireless, and cinema were all invented. In When old Technologies Were New, Carolyn Marvin explores how two of these new inventions--the telephone and the electric light--were publicly envisioned at the end of the nineteenth century, as seen in specialized engineering journals and popular media. Marvin pays particular attention to the telephone, describing how it disrupted established social relations, unsettling customary ways of dividing the private person and family from the more public setting of the community. On the lighter side, she describes how people spoke louder when calling long distance, and how they worried about catching contagious diseases over the phone. A particularly powerful chapter deals with telephonic precursors of radio broadcasting--the "Telephone Herald" in New York and the "Telefon Hirmondo" of Hungary--and the conflict between the technological development of broadcasting and the attempt to impose a homogenous, ethnocentric variant of Anglo-Saxon culture on the public. While focusing on the way professionals in the electronics field tried to control the new media, Marvin also illuminates the broader social impact, presenting a wide-ranging, informative, and entertaining account of the early years of electronic media.

Francisco J. Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Embodied_Mind_revised_edition/gzLaDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PR11&printsec=frontcover

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience. The authors argue that only by having a sense of common ground between mind in Science and mind in experience can our understanding of cognition be more complete. Toward that end, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate it in relation to other traditions such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

Tom Snyder, National Center for Education Statistics

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

The historical data show large increases in enrollment rates over the past 125 years, with some significant rises even in more recent years. The higher levels of education attained by young adults in the most recent decades suggest that the overall education level of the population will continue to rise slowly into at least the early 21st century.

Scott Minneman, Dale MacDonald, Jon Winet, Margaret Crane

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6243740

The present invention provides a method and system of publicly co-creating a narrative document by parallel and on-going communication of a plurality of signals comprising public reactions to portions of the document, the signals being generated via one or more repurposed signaling devices. A display illustrates an introductory portion of the document intended to engender a public interest in the document and an emotive or intellectual reaction thereto. The document can comprise a dependent set of associated document elements which are sequentially variable for variation of document content to evolve different document narratives. The public viewing the display communicates, via the device or devices, a signal indicative of their reactions and for effecting a prospective scene selection in the document content that, in turn will vary the narrative.

Craig Harris editor

https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2566/Art-and-InnovationThe-Xerox-PARC-Artist-in

The idea behind Xerox's interdisciplinary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is simple: if you put creative people in a hothouse setting, innovation will naturally emerge. PARC's Artist-in-Residence Program (PAIR) brings artists who use new media to PARC and pairs them with researchers who often use the same media, though in different contexts. This is radically different from most corporate support of the arts, where there is little intersection between the disciplines. The result is both interesting art and new scientific innovations. Art and Innovation explores the unique process that grew from this pairing of new media artists and scientists working at the frontier of developing technologies. In addition to discussing specific works created during several long-term residencies, the artists and researchers reveal the similarities and differences in their approaches and perspectives as they engage each other in a search for new methods for communication and creativity.

Steve Harrison, Scott Minneman, Maribeth Back, Anne Balsamo, Mark Chow, Rich Gold, Matt Gorbet, Dale Mac Donald

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/369825.369829

XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading is a museum installation that explores how reading might change in the near future. Featuring 11 interactive exhibits, XFR was designed by researchers in the RED (Research on Experimental Documents) group at Xerox PARC to give museum visitors an opportunity to explore a range of new reading devices. Reading is intrinsic to how we share knowledge; entertain ourselves; and manage social, political, economic, and educational systems. Reading is also greatly influenced by technologies of various sorts: writing, authoring, presentation, publication, and distribution. XFR presents several speculations on how reading might change with the development of new media and digital technologies. The physical form of the reading device affects our interpretation of what we read, as does the mode of interactivity. Digital technologies enable design of complex and novel reading technologies, as well as creation of new textual forms and genres. While many people envision a future dominated by hand-held reading devices, RED speculates that the future will include a wide variety of reading technologies.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2481/pg2481-images.html

Preoccupation with language is, in fact, preoccupation with ourselves as individuals and as a species. While many concerns, such as terrorism, AIDS, poverty, racism, and massive migration of populations, haunt us as we hurry to achieve our portion of well-being, one at least seems easier to allay: illiteracy. This book proclaims the end of literacy, as it also accounts for the incredible forces at work in our restlessly shifting world. The end of literacy-a chasm between a not-so-distant yesterday and the exciting, though confusing, tomorrow-is probably more difficult to understand than to live with. Reluctance to acknowledge change only makes things worse. We notice that literate language use does not work as we assume or were told it should, and wonder what can be done to make things fit our expectations. Parents hope that better schools with better teachers will remedy the situation. Teachers expect more from the family and suggest that society should invest more in order to maintain literacy skills. Professors groan under the prospect of ill-prepared students entering college. Publishers redefine their strategies as new forms of expression and communication vie for public attention and dollars. Lawyers, journalists, the military, and politicians worry about the role and functions of language in society. Probably most concerned with their own roles in the social structure and with the legitimacy of their institutions, they would preserve those structures of human activity that justify literacy and thus their own positions of power and influence. The few who believe that literacy comprises not only skills, but also ideals and values, say that the destiny of our civilization is at stake, and that the decline in literacy has dreadful implications. Opportunity is not part of the discourse or argument.

James P. Zappen

https://homepages.rpi.edu/~zappenj/Vita/DigitalRhetoric2005.pdf

This article surveys the literature on digital rhetoric, which encompasses a wide range of issues, including novel strategies of self-expression and collaboration, the characteristics, affordances, and constraints of the new digital media, and the formation of identities and communities in digital spaces. It notes the current disparate nature of the field and calls for an integrated theory of digital rhetoric that charts new directions for rhetorical studies in general and the rhetoric of science and technology in particular.

Klaus Krippendorff

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=asc_papers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to connect two discourses, the discourse of cybernetics and that of design. Design/methodology/approach – The paper takes a comparative analysis of relevant definitions, concepts, and entailments in both discourse, and an integration of these into a cybernetically informed concept of human-centered design, on the one hand, and a design-informed concept of second-order cybernetics, on the other hand. In the course of this conceptual exploration, the distinction between science and design is explored with cybernetics located in the dialectic between the two. Technology centered design is distinguished from human-centered design, and several axioms of the latter are stated and discussed. Findings – This paper consists of recommendations to think and do things differently. In particular, a generalization of interface is suggested as a replacement for the notion of products; a concept of meaning is developed to substitute for the meaninglessness of physical properties; a theory of stakeholder networks is discussed to replace the deceptive notion of THE user; and, above all, is suggested that designers, in order to design something that affords use to others, engage in second-order understanding. Originality/value – The paper makes several radical suggestions that face likely rejection by traditionalists but acceptance by cyberneticians and designers attempting to make a contribution to contemporary information society.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Evocative_Objects.html?id=-5wQAQAAIAAJ&source=kp_book_description

For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with." In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.These days, scholars show new interest in the importance of the concrete. This volume's special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects--an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer--are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, "No ideas but in things." The notion of evocative objects goes further: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable.Whether it's a student's beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes--the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner's keyboards and Lev Vygotsky's hobbyhorses; William Mitchell's Melbourne train and Roland Barthes' pleasures of text; Joseph Cevetello's glucometer and Donna Haraway's cyborgs. Each essay is framed by images that are themselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look more closely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold our affections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.

Project Xanadu

The computer world is not just technicality and razzle-dazzle. It is a continual war over software politics and paradigms. With ideas which are still radical, WE FIGHT ON. We hope for vindication, the last laugh, and recognition as an additional standard-- electronic documents with visible connections. We propose a new kind of writing-- PARALLEL PAGES, VISIBLY CONNECTED.

How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

N. Katherine Hayles

https://www.google.com/books/edition/How_We_Became_Posthuman/JqB6Qy9z3TcC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA1&printsec=frontcover

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman." Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems. Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2010/09/17/technology-trends-among-people-of-color/

On September 16, 2010 Pew Internet Project Senior Research Specialist Aaron Smith spoke to the Center for American Progress Internet Advocacy Roundtable about three trends in minority technology use. The outline of his discussion (along with links to the relevant research) is posted below. One of the themes of the Q&A involved the challenges in studying the Asian-American population. For an overview of some of these challenges (along with other sources of useful data) see our blog post on the topic.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/1394/Designing-CultureThe-Technological-Imagination-at

The renowned cultural theorist and media designer Anne Balsamo maintains that technology and culture are inseparable; those who engage in technological innovation are designing the cultures of the future. Designing Culture is a call for taking culture seriously in the design and development of innovative technologies. Balsamo contends that the wellspring of technological innovation is the technological imagination, a quality of mind that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible. She describes the technological imagination at work in several multimedia collaborations in which she was involved as a designer or developer. One of these entailed the creation of an interactive documentary for the NGO Forum held in conjunction with the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. (That documentary is included as a DVD in Designing Culture.) Balsamo also recounts the development of the interactive museum exhibit XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading, created by the group RED (Research in Experimental Documents) at Xerox PARC. She speculates on what it would mean to cultivate imaginations as ingenious in creating new democratic cultural possibilities as they are in creating new kinds of technologies and digital media. Designing Culture is a manifesto for transforming educational programs and developing learning strategies adequate to the task of inspiring culturally attuned technological imaginations.

Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice

Janet H. Murray

https://books.google.com/books/about/Inventing_the_Medium.html?id=cNnxCwAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description

An introductory textbook on interaction design, distinguished by its foundational perspective on digital technology as a medium. Murray identifies four defining characteristics of the digital medium -- it is computational, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic -- and for each of them, introduces a wide range of design examples and tactics. She then concludes with a number of chapters on other design perspectives, such as computer as tool and computer as medium. The pedagogical approach is consistently based on a large number of quickly sketched examples, which offers great coverage at the expense of reflective depth. Another notable feature of the book is Murray's ambition to introduce the technical foundations of the digital medium, including binary arithmetic as well as programming principles. Personally, I would recommend more specialized sources for the aspiring interaction designer aiming to learn about digital sketching and the basics of the materials.

Samuel McNerney

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/a-brief-guide-to-embodied-cognition-why-you-are-not-your-brain/

Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible... the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal.

N. Katherine Hayles

https://books.google.com/books?id=hdHJMV3u09oC

“How do we think?” N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition has become far more complicated, particularly for the traditionally print-based disciplines in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesis—the belief that humans and technics are coevolving—and advocates for what she calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital work within print traditions and vice versa. Hayles examines the evolution of the field from the traditional humanities and how the digital humanities are changing academic scholarship, research, teaching, and publication. She goes on to depict the neurological consequences of working in digital media, where skimming and scanning, or “hyper reading,” and analysis through machine algorithms are forms of reading as valid as close reading once was. Hayles contends that we must recognize all three types of reading and understand the limitations and possibilities of each. In addition to illustrating what a comparative media perspective entails, Hayles explores the technogenesis spiral in its full complexity. She considers the effects of early databases such as telegraph code books and confronts our changing perceptions of time and space in the digital age, illustrating this through three innovative digital productions—Steve Tomasula’s electronic novel, TOC; Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts; and Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions. Deepening our understanding of the extraordinary transformative powers digital technologies have placed in the hands of humanists, How We Think presents a cogent rationale for tackling the challenges facing the humanities today.

KATHRYN ZICKUHR

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2013/11/04/reading-writing-and-research-in-the-digital-age/

Reading, writing, and research in the digital age from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. The internet revolutionized how people find information, and now the rising popularity of both e-books and mobile devices is transforming Americans’ reading habits. The impact of this constantly evolving digital landscape on educational institutions is mixed, as libraries try to keep pace while still serving the needs of traditional patrons, and educators offer conflicting reports on technology’s effects on students’ research habits.

Short- and Long-Term Effects of a Novel on Connectivity in the Brain

Gregory S. Berns, Kristina Blaine, Michael J. Prietula, Brandon E. Pye

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3868356/

We sought to determine whether reading a novel causes measurable changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain and how long these changes persist. Incorporating a within-subjects design, participants received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on 19 consecutive days. First, baseline resting state data for a “washin” period were taken for each participant for 5 days. For the next 9 days, participants read 1/9th of a novel during the evening and resting-state data were taken the next morning. Finally, resting-state data for a “wash-out” period were taken for 5 days after the conclusion of the novel. On the days after the reading, significant increases in connectivity were centered on hubs in the left angular/supramarginal gyri and right posterior temporal gyri. These hubs corresponded to regions previously associated with perspective taking and story comprehension, and the changes exhibited a timecourse that decayed rapidly after the completion of the novel. Long-term changes in connectivity, which persisted for several days after the reading, were observed in bilateral somatosensory cortex, suggesting a potential mechanism for “embodied semantics.”

Andrew D. Wilson* and Sabrina Golonka

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00058/full

The most exciting hypothesis in cognitive science right now is the theory that cognition is embodied. Like all good ideas in cognitive science, however, embodiment immediately came to mean six different things. The most common definitions involve the straight-forward claim that “states of the body modify states of the mind.” However, the implications of embodiment are actually much more radical than this. If cognition can span the brain, body, and the environment, then the “states of mind” of disembodied cognitive science won’t exist to be modified. Cognition will instead be an extended system assembled from a broad array of resources.

Douglas Eyman

https://books.google.com/books/about/Digital_Rhetoric.html?id=TXY-CQAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description

What is “digital rhetoric”? This book aims to answer that question by looking at a number of interrelated histories, as well as evaluating a wide range of methods and practices from fields in the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences to determine what might constitute the work and the world of digital rhetoric. The advent of digital and networked communication technologies prompts renewed interest in basic questions such as What counts as a text? and Can traditional rhetoric operate in digital spheres or will it need to be revised? Or will we need to invent new rhetorical practices altogether? Through examples and consideration of digital rhetoric theories, methods for both researching and making in digital rhetoric fields, and examples of digital rhetoric pedagogy, scholarship, and public performance, this book delivers a broad overview of digital rhetoric. In addition, Douglas Eyman provides historical context by investigating the histories and boundaries that arise from mapping this emerging field and by focusing on the theories that have been taken up and revised by digital rhetoric scholars and practitioners. Both traditional and new methods are examined for the tools they provide that can be used to both study digital rhetoric and to potentially make new forms that draw on digital rhetoric for their persuasive power.

https://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/jun/26/hashtag-language-evolution-digital-age

The hashtag, or #, has recently been named UK children’s word of the year. Children’s dictionary writers at Oxford University Press analysed 120,421 entries to BBC Radio 2’s annual short story competition. They found that under 13s were using the hashtag symbol in a new way: to add emphasis or to signal a comment in their story-writing. According to Vineeta Gupta, head of children’s dictionaries at OUP, examples of this phenomenon might include: “This is a wonderful day, #sunny” or “I have the best family, #fantasticfamily”

https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/blogs/2016/the-rapid-evolution-of-literacy

Surprising as it may be, Maryann Wolf writes in her book, "Proust and the Squid," it took humans over 2,000 years to learn to read with an alphabet. Today, we expect children to accomplish this skill in about 2,000 days. Not too long ago, we visualized young children using a pencil and paper as they learn to read and write. The image of a young child misspelling a word on a chalkboard or piece of paper, as he or she acquires this knowledge, is vivid. While this impression may have been accurate 10 years ago, most young children today come to literacy through the use of smart technology. From computers to handheld devices, new technologies have allowed literacy to transcend the borders of pencil and paper to incorporate digital, visual, and social interconnectedness.

The End of Print: Digitization and Its Consequence—Revolutionary Changes in Scholarly and Social Communication and in Scientific Research

Lloyd A. Davidson

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/10915810590921351

The transformation from print to digital media for scientific communication, driven in part by the growth of the Internet and the tremendous explosion in the amount of information now available to everybody, is creating fundamental changes in institutions such as publishers, libraries, and universities that primarily exist for the creation, management, and distribution of information and knowledge. Scientific, technological, and medical journals are the first publications to be completely transformed from print to digital format but monographs are beginning to appear in digital format as well and soon all communication and publishing of scientific information will be entirely electronic. In fact, this change is affecting all components of the scientific enterprise, from personal correspondence and laboratory methods to peer reviewing and the quality assessment of scientific research. Along with these radical and rapid changes in information presentation and distribution are coincident changes in the expectations of both the public and other scientists, with both groups demanding ever more rapid, open, and global access to scientific information than has been available in the past. The consequence of this revolution in the mechanics of communications technology is threatening the very existence of a number of highly regarded institutions such as intellectual property, commercial publishers, scientific societies, and academic libraries and might soon begin to threaten even the traditional university.

AARON M. BORNSTEIN

https://nautil.us/is-artificial-intelligence-permanently-inscrutable-236088/

Dmitry Malioutov can’t say much about what he built. As a research scientist at IBM, Malioutov spends part of his time building machine learning systems that solve difficult problems faced by IBM’s corporate clients. One such program was meant for a large insurance corporation. It was a challenging assignment, requiring a sophisticated algorithm. When it came time to describe the results to his client, though, there was a wrinkle. “We couldn’t explain the model to them because they didn’t have the training in machine learning.” In fact, it may not have helped even if they were machine learning experts. That’s because the model was an artificial neural network, a program that takes in a given type of data—in this case, the insurance company’s customer records—and finds patterns in them. These networks have been in practical use for over half a century, but lately they’ve seen a resurgence, powering breakthroughs in everything from speech recognition and language translation to Go-playing robots and self-driving cars.

Book / Website

John Palfrey Urs Gasser

https://www.harvard.com/book/born_digital_how_children_grow_up_in_a_digital_age/

The first generation of children who were born into and raised in the digital world are coming of age and reshaping the world in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture, and even the shape of our family life are being transformed. But who are these wired young people? And what is the world they’re creating going to look like? In this revised and updated edition, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a cutting-edge sociological portrait of these young people, who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow. Exploring a broad range of issues?privacy concerns, the psychological effects of information overload, and larger ethical issues raised by the fact that young people’s social interactions, friendships, and civic activities are now mediated by digital technologies?Born Digital is essential reading for parents, teachers, and the myriad of confused adults who want to understand the digital present and shape the digital future. Companion website http://www.borndigitalbook.com/index.php

Martin L Kutscher M.D.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-childs-brain-and-behavior/201701/the-effects-of-digital-technology-on-reading

Does reading on a screen interfere with in-depth learning? Yes. Let’s examine four reasons: Screens lack tactile experience. Hypertexts are distracting and are hard to navigate. Shallow reading becomes the norm. Digital distractions are right there on the machine.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/08/25/finding-brand-success-in-the-digital-world/?sh=4b848559626e

Digital marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day. At some point, we start a screening process for what we engage with and start ignoring brands and advertising messages, unless it’s something that we have a personal interest in. Of the brands that you have interacted with today, which ones did the best job of marketing to your needs or interests? Do they have a clear message? How did they connect with you?

Naomi S. Baron

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0031721717734184

The many advantages of reading digitally also bring with them implications for how we learn differently when we read differently. The author suggests that new contemporary technologies are changing the very notion of what it means to read. Even millennials acknowledge that their attention is more focused when they read print rather than online. But they also perceive print as boring. If print is increasingly seen as more boring than digital text, will our ability to read print generally diminish? Since online technology is tailor-made for searching for information rather than analyzing complex ideas, might the meaning of “reading” become finding information rather than contemplating and understanding?

Randy Boyagoda, Christine McWebb

https://uwaterloo.ca/arts/news/how-reading-habits-are-changing-digital-age

During CBC radio's recent Cross Country Checkup discussion on how reading is changing, guest commentator on the program, Christine McWebb, programs director at Stratford Campus and French Studies professor, discussed the different ways in which digital technology affects us. She told Checkup guest host Randy Boyagoda why digital tools are making linear reading a lost skill and changing the way we think.

David M. Durant

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cb/mpub9944117/1:7/--reading-in-a-digital-age?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

Print Reading. To a certain extent, the debate over the future of reading is simply a continuation of previous arguments concerning the impact of new technologies on society. As far back as 1934, scholar Lewis Mumford expressed worries about the spread of technology in his Technics and Civilization. In the 1960s, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously observed that “the medium is the message.” More specifically, he predicted in his 1962 work The Gutenberg Galaxy that the growth of visual media such as films and television would greatly affect our ability to absorb and communicate via the written word. In the 1970s and 1980s, New York University (NYU) communication professor Neil Postman wrote widely on the negative impact of screen-­based technologies, primarily television, which he believed were reducing people’s attention spans and ability to think.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/digitaliberties/meaning-of-language-why-do-arts-and-sciences-need-language/

According to a number of neuroscientists and philosophers, language might not be the ultimate medium for the transmission of ideas. In the digital age, it is essential to understand its role and explore the new possibilities technology creates.

Maryanne Wolf

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf

When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age

https://ny.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/teens-reading-kqed/how-is-tech-changing-the-way-we-read-above-the-noise/

Reading has been an important part of the human experience for thousands of years, but believe it or not, that’s not a long time on the evolutionary time scale. Before the internet, it made sense to read long texts in a linear fashion, but that’s now changing as people are adapting to skimming shorter texts on their computers or phones. With the rise of social media and smartphone use, we are all reading fewer books than we once did. Some people are worried about what this means for the future of literature and, well, our brains. But is it true that we are really reading less?

ELLEN LUPTON AND ANDREA LIPPS editors

www.cooperhewitt.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/The_Senses_eBook_Revised.epub

A powerful reminder to anyone who thinks design is primarily a visual pursuit, The Senses accompanies a major exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum that explores how space, materials, sound, and light affect the mind and body. Learn how contemporary designers, including Petra Blaisse, Bruce Mau, Malin+Goetz, and many others, engage sensory experience. Multisensory design can solve problems and enhance life for everyone, including those with sensory disabilities. Featuring thematic essays on topics ranging from design for the table to tactile graphics, tactile sound, and visualizing the senses, this book is a call to action for multisensory design practice. The Senses: Design Beyond Vision is mandatory reading for students and professionals working in diverse fields, including products, interiors, graphics, interaction, sound, animation, and data visualization, or anyone seeking the widest possible understanding of design.

Language equality in the digital age Towards a human language project

Publications Office of the European Union

https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/fa0a50e7-cda4-11e7-a5d5-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF

The EU is a unique endeavour involving more than 500 million citizens sharing about 80 different languages, and while multilingualism is a key feature, it is also one of the most substantial challenges for the creation of a truly integrated EU. Language barriers have a profound effect on cross-border public services, on fostering a common European identity, on workers’ mobility, and on cross-border e-commerce and trade, in the context of a Digital Single Market. The emergence of new technological approaches, based on increased computational power and access to sizeable amounts of data, are making Human Language Technologies (HLT) a real solution to overcoming language barriers. However, several challenges, such as market fragmentation and unsubstantial and uncoordinated funding strategies, are hindering the European HLT community, including research and industry.

https://archaeologyofreading.org/

The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.

https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2020/04/17/ebooks-how-the-digital-age-transformed-the-way-we-read/

I’m not old enough to pull the whole ‘back-in-my-day-I-read-by-candlelight’, and I certainly can’t relate to the youngest generation of readers who grew up reading in the dark. That last bit I don’t mean figuratively: Kindle’s, iPad’s and other self-lit electronic devices have made it so we can continue reading after mains lights are switched off. Taking it one step further, audiobooks mean we can quite literally ‘read’ with our eyes closed.

Literacy in the Digital Age: From traditional to Digital to Mobile Digital Literacies

TUTALENI I. ASINO; KUSHAL JHA; AND OLUWAFIKAYO ADEWUMI

https://open.library.okstate.edu/learninginthedigitalage/chapter/literacy_in_the_digital_age/

Literacy is an enigma. While it is easy to agree that everyone should be literate, the conversation around what being literate looks like, and what the term itself is even means depends much on who is leading the conversation and who has a stake in the conversation. The term itself has historically been defined as “possession of the complementary mental technologies of reading and writing, literacy is not only difficult to define in individuals and delimit within societies, but it is also charged with emotional and political meaning” (pg. 12). This perceived simplicity has at times led to many including news reporters and various academic scholars to refer “to whole societies as “illiterate and uncivilized” as a single referent, and “illiterate” is still a term which carries a negative connotation” (Wagner (1991, pg. 12). Of course, such characterization, although still rampant, they are at least being questioned. At last literacy is being considered much more widely, and being recognised as integral to a culture where it is embedded with functions and meanings.

Claire Kramsch

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/language-as-symbolic-power/language-as-symbolic-power-in-the-digital-age/F4FA34EF4F9A0893292028A10FEA8D19

This chapter continues our exploration of language as symbolic power in the digital age. It explains first what the digital revolution is about and what Vaidhyanathan meant by the phrase “the googlization of everything.” We then consider the nature and the role of Facebook and Twitter in providing platforms for the exercise of symbolic power. How are we to conceive of social media and the Internet as symbolic systems? I discuss the importance of taking into account algorithms and the algorithmic control of information and knowledge as we use the Internet to teach language and language-mediated knowledge. The digital revolution is also clearly a social and cultural revolution. I discuss the current spread of what Rieffel has called “connected individualism” and the hunger for attention that accompanies the pressure to participate on social media. Finally, I reflect on the current phenomena of post-truth and disinformation in the information age, and on the potential and risks involved in Google Translate.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

Embodied Cognition is a wide-ranging research program drawing from and inspiring work in psychology, neuroscience, ethology, philosophy, linguistics, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Whereas traditional cognitive science also encompasses these disciplines, it finds common purpose in a conception of mind wedded to computationalism: mental processes are computational processes; the brain, qua computer, is the seat of cognition. In contrast, embodied cognition variously rejects or reformulates the computational commitments of cognitive science, emphasizing the significance of an agent’s physical body in cognitive abilities. Unifying investigators of embodied cognition is the idea that the body or the body’s interactions with the environment constitute or contribute to cognition in ways that require a new framework for its investigation. Mental processes are not, or not only, computational processes. The brain is not a computer, or not the seat of cognition.

N. Katherine Hayles

https://books.google.com/books/about/Postprint.html?id=0-DfDwAAQBAJ

Since Gutenberg’s time, every aspect of print has gradually changed. But the advent of computational media has exponentially increased the pace, transforming how books are composed, designed, edited, typeset, distributed, sold, and read. N. Katherine Hayles traces the emergence of what she identifies as the postprint condition, exploring how the interweaving of print and digital technologies has changed not only books but also language, authorship, and what it means to be human.

Alexander R Galloway, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/121/423015/shaky-distinctions-a-dialogue-on-the-digital-and-the-analog/

Upon reading Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s 2019 essay “An Ecology of Operations: Vigilance, Radar, and the Birth of the Computer Screen,” I ended up having an extended email dialogue with the author, which has been condensed and edited here. What struck me most about Geoghegan’s essay was a fundamental question: Are computers a visual medium, like cinema or photography, or are computers better understood in nonvisual terms? While a term like “surveillance” evokes visual metaphors of watching and monitoring within computational capitalism, what if digital media operate more through “capture” and other nonvisual metaphors, as Phil Agre has argued? Geoghegan and I began by discussing the relation between computation and visuality, but it soon became clear that we had very different positions on the nature of the digital and the analog. The conversation turned toward a slightly different set of questions: What is the digital? What is the analog? Both terms appear elementary at the outset. Yet they turn out to be teeming with technical and philosophical nuance. Conventionally speaking, digital technologies represent the world via discrete units, while analog technologies operate through continuous variation. At the same time, discrete and continuous techniques are some of the oldest in human culture, evident in poetry, music, metaphysics, politics, and many other areas. So do the narrow definitions of digital and analog tech also migrate into domains like aesthetics and philosophy? Would a digital aesthetics follow the principle of discrete units? Would a digital philosophy be discrete as well? And what would that mean in practice? Digital devices are ubiquitous in contemporary life, yet, as this dialog reveals, some of the most basic questions of the digital age have yet to be answered.

Joanna Moorhead

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/dec/03/how-to-raise-happier-kids-in-the-digital-age

How much is too much TV for babies? Are these online games safe for a 12-year-old? And how do you talk to teenagers about porn? Experts give advice to help your children thrive online

Jessica Winter

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-and-fall-of-vibes-based-literacy

I looked online for help, and learned that our Brooklyn public school’s main reading-and-writing curriculum, Units of Study, is rooted in a method known as balanced literacy. Early readers are encouraged to choose books from an in-classroom library and read silently on their own. They figure out unfamiliar words based on a “cueing” strategy: the reader asks herself if the word looks right, sounds right, and makes sense in context. My daughter was taught to use “picture power”—guessing words based on the accompanying illustrations. She memorized high-frequency “sight words” using a stack of laminated flash cards: “and,” “the,” “who,” et cetera.

Learning and working in the digital age: Advancing opportunities and identifying the risks

Annelies Goger, Allyson Parco, and Emiliana Vegas

https://www.brookings.edu/research/learning-and-working-in-the-digital-age-advancing-opportunities-and-identifying-the-risks/

The rapid expansion of new technologies into every sector has co­ntributed to the proliferation of alternative models of education, learning, and skill signaling in global labor markets. From digital badges to bootcamps to learning and employment records (LERs), a wide range of public, private, and nonprofit initiatives and platforms have emerged to address ongoing demand for education and skills among employers and workers alike. Within the next five years, 50 percent of all employees will need reskilling and 40 percent of core skills are expected to change (World Economic Forum, 2020).

Elyakim Kislev Ph.D.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/society-50/202206/how-space-and-time-actively-interact-in-digital-age

Technology is an obvious game-changer in the way we communicate with one another and has changed how time has progressed for human societies. People can now be closer than they have ever been, even across far distances. Manuel Castells’s space of flows concept highlights this connection perfectly. In short, the space of flows is the observance of how space and time actively interact with a digital age society. So, even though New York City may be distant from other cities across the Atlantic Ocean, it is connected to London because both cities can easily contact each other and are therefore close in the space of flows perspective.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/02/i-want-to-savour-every-word-the-joy-of-reading-slowly

Bragging rights seem to go to people who devour books, but, as this impatient reader found, turning the pages over many days or even weeks can immerse one deeper in the writer’s world

Jake Offenhartz

https://gothamist.com/news/500-drones-to-swarm-nycs-skyline-thursday-in-new-advertising-ploy

At least 500 drones will depart the shores of New Jersey on Thursday evening, flickering over the horizon in a choreographed dance meant to evoke the experience of swiping colorful treats on a phone screen.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/12/when-ai-can-make-art-what-does-it-mean-for-creativity-dall-e-midjourney

Image-generators such as Dall-E 2 can produce pictures on any theme you wish for in seconds. Some creatives are alarmed but others are sceptical of the hype

AI bot ChatGPT stuns academics with essay-writing skills and usability

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/04/ai-bot-chatgpt-stuns-academics-with-essay-writing-skills-and-usability

Latest chatbot from Elon Musk-founded OpenAI can identify incorrect premises and refuse to answer inappropriate requests

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/31/ai-assisted-plagiarism-chatgpt-bot-says-it-has-an-answer-for-that

Silicon Valley firm insists its new text generator, which writes human-sounding essays, can overcome fears over cheating

Matteo Stocchetti Editor

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16c9hdw

The Digital Age and Its Discontents is a book project inspired by Sigmund Freud’s reflection on the downsides of progress. Similarly to that influential work, this project is a study of the downsides of digitalization and the re-organization of the social world that seems to be associated with it—what we refer to as the ‘digital age’. Unlike Freud’s work, however, in this project, we reject the deterministic aspects of this re-organization and, more in line with critical social theory, we seek to conceive and construct alternative possibilities. In this effort, the role of education is fundamental.

https://www.unesco.org/en/education/literacy/need-know

Acquiring literacy is not a one-off act. Beyond its conventional concept as a set of reading, writing and counting skills, literacy is now understood as a means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich and fast-changing world. Literacy is a continuum of learning and proficiency in reading, writing and using numbers throughout life and is part of a larger set of skills, which include digital skills, media literacy, education for sustainable development and global citizenship as well as job-specific skills. Literacy skills themselves are expanding and evolving as people engage more and more with information and learning through digital technology.

Woman’s name and tiny sketches found in 1,300-year-old medieval text

Donna Ferguson

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/28/womans-name-and-tiny-sketches-found-in-1300-year-old-medieval-text

For nearly 1,300 years, no one knew it was there. The name of a highly educated English woman, secretly scratched on to the pages of a rare medieval manuscript in the eighth century, but impossible to read – until now. Academics have discovered the Old English female name Eadburg was repeatedly scored into the surface of the religious text, using a method that kept it hidden from the naked eye for more than 12 centuries.

Psychology Today Staff

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/neuroplasticity

(accessed on 1/17/23) Neuroplasticity is the brain’s capacity to continue growing and evolving in response to life experiences. Plasticity is the capacity to be shaped, molded, or altered; neuroplasticity, then, is the ability for the brain to adapt or change over time, by creating new neurons and building new networks. Historically, scientists believed that the brain stopped growing after childhood. But current research shows that the brain is able to continue growing and changing throughout the lifespan, refining its architecture or shifting functions to different regions of the brain. The importance of neuroplasticity can’t be overstated: It means that it is possible to change dysfunctional patterns of thinking and behaving and to develop new mindsets, new memories, new skills, and new abilities.

Readers Digest

https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/lifestyle/technology/how-technology-is-changing-our-reading-habits

As modern technology permeates virtually every aspect of society, the simple pleasure of reading is no exception. With such a wide range of platforms and devices available to the everyday reader, the physical book, while not yet extinct, may end up going that way. Continue reading to find out the many different ways in which technology has transformed our reading habits in recent years.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/01/is-modern-life-ruining-our-powers-of-concentration

Is the ping of a text stealing our focus or do we just lack willpower? And could mindless scrolling ever be good for our brains? Elle Hunt unpacks some surprising truths

https://strategic-plan.sas.upenn.edu/emerging-academic-opportunities/advancing-integrated-knowledge/humanities-digital-age

The remarkable proliferation of digital and computational technologies is impacting scholarship across the academy. Captured loosely under the rubric “digital humanities” (but in fact embracing methodologies and scholarship from the social and natural sciences), these technologies have transformed the way humanists work. A spirit of ambitious experimentation is taking hold as researchers tackle questions about history, the arts, and culture in radically new ways, producing both new knowledge and new ways of knowing. From computers that can read massive amounts of digitized writing, scholars can extract major historical, aesthetic, and cultural patterns that were previously invisible to them; using geographic information systems (GIS), researchers can present complex histories in the form of interactive maps; and employing 3D-modeling technologies, students of the ancient world can produce immersive recreations of archaeological sites and artifacts. These new technologies invite a mode of research that is inherently collaborative. Projects can involve fairly large teams drawn from multiple institutions, and with collaborators drawn not only from traditional humanities departments, but including linguists, computer scientists, librarians, information technologists, and student assistants. This team-based approach best takes place in spaces that resemble laboratories.

A Brief History of Books How books went from handwritten scrolls to digitized publications

Google Arts & Culture

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/a-brief-history-of-books/OAXR-SPrQmOCew?hl=en

Books have been a part of our daily lives since ancient times. They have been used for telling stories, archiving history, and sharing information about our world. Although the ways that books are made have evolved over time, whether handwritten, printed on pages, or digitized online, their need remains timeless. Take a read through this brief history of books...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/research-area/human-language-technologies/?

Researching software and systems that bridge the linguistic divide between people and machines to make communicating with computers as natural as speaking with family and friends.

SOUTH-EAST EUROPEAN CENTER FOR SEMIOTIC STUDIES New Bulgarian University

https://semiotics.nbu.bg/en/digitasc

What is DigitAsc? Digital Age in Semiotics & Communication, a journal from the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies at the New Bulgarian University and founded by Prof. Kristian Bankov, explores the new forms of knowledge, social and linguistic interaction, and cultural phenomena generated by the advent of the Internet. A topic is chosen for each issue by the editors’ board, but the topics will be always related to the issues of the digital environment. The topic is announced with a call for papers and will also be available on our Facebook page (facebook.com/DigitASCjournal) The working language of the journal is English. It uses double-blind review, meaning that both the reviewer’s and the author’s identities are concealed from each other throughout the review process. The journal will be published bi-annually by the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies and the New Bulgarian University Publishing House. The purpose of the journal is to provide a collaborative work field for scholars interested in researching new phenomena in the dynamic digital world. Our main purpose is to build a scientific bridge between the fields of semiotics, communications, social sciences and the problems of the digital era. We believe that our collaborations can raise the level of understanding for modern digital phenomena, providing both a solid theoretical framework and profound applied research. The pilot issue summarizes the whole research program of the Center and the journal in particular. It is open to various problems concerning developments in digital culture and phenomena. We are interested in working with scholars from different research and applied fields, such as semiotics (both applied and theoretical), communication studies, marketing and advertising, linguistics and literary studies, anthropology and ethnography, cognitive science and psychology, and computer science. More specifically, our interest is directed to: New forms of knowledge; New media and the immersive e-consumption of experience; New forms of social relations in the age of social media; New habits of communication and self-expression/representation; Online corporate communications; Digital narratology and e-fiction; Digital grammatology; Digital audio-visualisation; Internet linguistics.