THE POWER OF PRINT: THE CASE FOR PAPER & INK IN THE DIGITAL AGE (Fall 2027, St. Martin's Press). Tech writer, currently printmaxxing. https://nitter.cf/t.co/t1Q3ANUT4H
Dallas, Texas
Joined November 2009
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Case study in the power of print: TikTok creator @jackbenedwards reaches millions with his videos, but always dreamed of seeing his work in physical form. He's now a books columnist for @EsquireUK and made a video about the thrill of tracking down a copy of the magazine.
Stephen Harrison retweeted
Memorization has an unfairly negative reputation. I recently spent a few hours memorizing the names of all the countries in the world and it's such a clear improvement in how well I can understand and reason about other topics. Memorization is scaffolding for more complex ideas
I’ve been testing it out and like the clean design, lack of follower counts, and not publicly showing Likes.
Question: will Colophont consider a feature to support printing articles that are hosted on the site?
The response to Colophont has been so warm & generous. I hope you all find it helps your work connect with a wider, more engaged audience.
Tons of great writing on the site already. X didn't show me this @BurialMagazine, but Colophont knew I'd love it.
colophont.com/post/cmvsitbyk…
Stephen Harrison retweeted
You all need to understand that there is a well-funded movement to kill Wikipedia as an institution. The dream of an internet that provided universal access to knowledge was a mirage. It threatened too many powerful people, so now we have AI summaries and illiteracy.
One reason I've been advocating for print is simply that we've lost all balance. Americans spend 8 hours a day on screens and check their phones 144 times daily, while print reading has fallen 40% over the last two decades. Marshall McLuhan was right... 1/2
Stephen Harrison retweeted
Reading is one of the best things you can do and costs like $20 for six hours, tops. In many cases it's free. The people who make it possible live in penury and the whole modern economy is organized against it.
“Print puts the voices of everyday people on a more equal social plane with those of their social superiors […] All you have access to is the author’s mind. And we all look much more equal on the inside.” —James Marriott, The New Dark Ages
I just finished @j_amesmarriott’s “The New Dark Ages” on my flight to San Jose and thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the book’s dour depiction of contemporary reading culture. Marriott has made some of these same points recently on the podcast circuit, but he’s even clearer and more spirited here in printed form. (Proving that the medium truly matters.)
I thought Marriott was especially strong in articulating the benefits of writing, how writing itself has shaped our consciousness, and why the return to “oral culture” through podcasting and digital video is filled with so much incoherent rambling. Marriott has several banger lines in the book, including a few on TikTok (“a kind of dadaist absurdity, a nihilistic tornado of content”).
Marriott also successfully weaves details from his personal life, including his Shakespeare-centered childhood and his own struggle with phone addiction. He offers a memorable image of kicking his phone beneath the couch to help him focus on reading a book.
I wasn’t fully persuaded by some of his political points, such as his argument that the post-literate transition will likely lead to authoritarianism and the end of Western liberal democracy. Most of the politicians he names as models of post-literate politics are on the right. I certainly want to avoid a world where screens are right-coded and print is left-coded. (Some may say we’re already there, but I’d say the situation is more nuanced.) I suspect my reservation about his political argument is partly strategic: In my view, those of us who have strong beliefs about the importance of literacy should build the widest possible coalition. It’s much easier to accomplish things if we can depoliticize them, particularly here in the U.S.
Then again, I think Marriott is absolutely correct about how smartphones have led to a “Great Simplification” and a general dumbing down of the culture. Marriott’s clarity about the role of smartphones is so important. I’m very tempted to share this message with my fellow passengers on this flight: Put down your damn phones and read something deeply, preferably in print.
5 ⭐️ /highly recommend this short book
This WaPo piece makes two common mistakes in describing the “screen inferiority effect.”
1. Downplaying the problem. By telling readers they recall “slightly less information” from screens than paper, the article ignores how the problem compounds over the time. A small thorn in the side can still do real damage in the long run.
2. Ignoring the mindset difference. People have developed digital habits from interacting with screens where they change contexts every 45 seconds. That mindset doesn’t go away simply by swapping the screen. By contrast, most of us are more likely to associate paper with a slower, deeper mode of attention.
.@joeljmiller has a good counterpoint to this: books have not even kept up with inflation over the past thirty years.
Compared to services and other entertainment options whose costs have skyrocketed, books are relatively cheap.
millersbookreview.com/p/no-b…
.@rgcooke has a fantastic book on Wikipedia that just came out today. Deeply researched and beautifully written, the book offers insights into the personalities and debates that shaped “the last enyclopedia humans will ever write.” Highly recommended.
Growing up, I learned the order of questions to ask as (in order of importance) who, what, where, when, why, and how.
Today I think “how” is the most important question because it probes the environment, the medium.
The “how” matters more than the “what” most of the time.
I have been taking a short sabbatical from covering Wikipedia as a journalist, but I did want to take the opportunity to boost this short story “Sunshine Hills Reality Edit” by fiction author Tina Connolly and recently published by Future Tense Fiction. I'll include links in the comments.
The premise is that America has split into several autonomous regions, each with their rival Factpedia. “Groups began branching Factpedia to support and solidify their own Reality Edit,” the protagonist says. “And now you can turn to the appropriate set of Factpedias (among thousands) to support whatever Reality Edit floats your boat and proves all your opinions to be positively, inarguably correct.” Although you may suspect the story to focus on digital knowledge and edit wars, the characters ultimately place great importance on the role of physical books. The narrator observes that “every time you return to that printed page, the words will remain the same.” The quality of typographical fixity is extremely valuable in this fictional world (as in ours).
Connolly’s short story pairs beautifully with a response essay from @monikajones, a writer and researcher who happens to also be a long-term Wikipedia editor. She notes that facts exist in relationship to one another and to the people who curate them. “As artificial intelligence systems break the link between information and informer, we’re forced to grapple with how to seek answers in an ecosystem devoid of context,” Sengul-Jones writes. Ultimately, both Connolly and Sengul-Jones suggest that the “answer” is to treat knowledge as an outcome of human relations and dispel the lie that knowledge can be generated by the neutral vessel of technology.
A British startup has established a way for publishers to certify their books as “organic” meaning written by real people, not AI.
As Ted Chiang says in the piece, “The knowledge of how something was created cannot be separated from your experience.”
wired.com/story/organic-lite…
