Category: Pop Culture

Science Fiction-Media in Transition

Science Fiction-Media in Transition

Butler: I don’t have access to this kind of thing on computer but, oddly enough, what you’re talking about sounds very much like the way I start looking for ideas when I’m not working on anything. Or when I’m just letting myself drift, relax.

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect.

I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

So, I guess, in that way, I’m using a kind of primitive hypertext.

A novel approach to war | ASU Now: Access, Excellence, Impact

A novel approach to war | ASU Now: Access, Excellence, Impact

Fiction is a way to explore future worlds, what-if’s. Though Singer is an author of multiple bestselling books on war, this is his first novel. It is no mere flight of the imagination, however: The book has nearly 400 footnotes.

“We (he and co-author August Cole) grew up reading Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, and we wanted to re-create that experience for people, that sort of fun summer read,” he said. And as for those footnotes? “We’re defense wonks; we set out to write a very different type of book.”

…

Fiction allows us to explore how our attitudes might change and to wrestle with issues.

“Will 3-D printing do to the defense industry what the iPod did to the music industry, totally disrupt it?” Singer asked. “… What would a state-on-state war look like in the 21st century?”

And fiction also helps with information dissemination: People in power are more likely to read a novel than a white paper or policy report.

 

When the Cat’s Away, Digital Artists Will Play | The Creators Project

When the Cat’s Away, Digital Artists Will Play | The Creators Project

New show uses an abstract visual language to depict the intersection of URL with IRL.

A new group exhibition generates both creative and art-focused perspectives towards the neverending back and forth between physical and virtual spheres. From curator Tina Sauerländer, who previously brought us PORN TO PIZZA—Domestic Clichés, an investigation into how porn, pets, plants, and pizza took over the internet, WHEN THE CAT’S AWAY, ABSTRACTION continues this dig into how the web is shaping new behaviors and contemporary senses of well-being.

Science Finally Explains Why Books Smell So Darn Good | Brit + Co

Science Finally Explains Why Books Smell So Darn Good | Brit + Co

Ask an avid reader what their favorite scent in the world is, and the answer is almost immediate: the intoxicating smell of old books. Whether you’re taking a good whiff in an indie bookstore or breathing in the delicate pages of an ancient volume at a local library, there’s no denying that old books smell damn good.

But why exactly is that?

Well, thanks to Andy Brunning, a Cambridge chemistry teacher who devotes his free time to debunking complicated chemistry, you don’t need a master’s degree to find out.

If you go into your local Barnes and Noble and sniff a few different volumes, odds are they all smell a little bit different. This is because each individual publisher has different preferences when it comes to paper, ink and book binding materials, which means that the chemical compounds found in new books are extremely varied. This, in turn, leads to each individual title having a slightly different scent, making the exact smell of new books difficult to pinpoint.
Continue reading “Science Finally Explains Why Books Smell So Darn Good | Brit + Co”

Pelican books take flight again | Books | The Guardian

Pelican books take flight again | Books | The Guardian

The fashionability of Pelicans, which lasted at least into the 70s, was connected to this breaking open of radical new ideas to public understanding – not in academic jargon but in clearly expressed prose. But it was also because they looked so good. The first Pelicans were, like the Penguins, beneficiaries of the 30s passion for design. They had the iconic triband covers conceived by Edward Young – in Lane’s words, “a bright splash of fat colour” with a white band running horizontally across the centre for displaying author and title in Gill Sans. A pelican appeared flying on the cover and standing on the spine. After the war, Lane employed as a designer the incomparable Jan Tschichold, a one-time associate of the Bauhaus and known for his Weimar film posters. His Pelicans had a central white panel framed by a blue border containing the name of the imprint on each side.

In the 60s the books changed again, to the illustrative covers designed by Germano Facetti, art director from 1961 to 72. Facetti, a survivor of Mauthausen labour camp who had worked in Milan as a typographer and in Paris as an interior designer, transformed the Penguin image, as John Walsh has written, “from linear severity and puritanical simplicity into a series of pictorial coups”. The 60s covers by Facetti (eg The Stagnant Society by Michael Shanks), and by the designers he took on – Jock Kennier (eg Alex Comfort’s Sex in Society), Derek Birdsall (eg The Naked Society) – are ingenious, arresting invitations to a world of new thinking.

Jenny Diski has written of subscribing in the 60s to “the unofficial University of Pelican Books course”, which was all about “gathering information and ideas about the world. Month by month, titles came out by Laing and Esterson, Willmott and Young, JK Galbraith, Maynard Smith, Martin Gardner, Richard Leakey, Margaret Mead; psychoanalysts, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, historians, physicists, biologists and literary critics, each offering their latest thinking for an unspecialised public, and the blue spines on the pile of books on the floor of the bedsit increased.”

“If you weren’t at university studying a particular discipline (and even if you were),” she goes on, “Pelican books were the way to get the gist of things, and education seemed like a capacious bag into which all manner of information was thrown, without the slightest concern about where it belonged in the taxonomy of knowledge. Anti-psychiatry, social welfare, economics, politics, the sexual behaviour of young Melanesians, the history of science, the anatomy of this, that and the other, the affluent, naked and stagnant society in which we found ourselves.”

…

Owen Hatherley has described the Pelicans of the late 60s as “human emancipation through mass production … hot-off-the-press accounts of the ‘new French revolution’ would go alongside texts on scientific management, with Herbert Marcuse next to Fanon, next to AJP Taylor, and all of this conflicting and intoxicating information in a pocket-sized form, on cheap paper and with impeccably elegant modernist covers.”

Pelican books take flight again | Books | The Guardian

Pelican books take flight again | Books | The Guardian

As the non-fiction Penguin imprint relaunches, Paul Laity tells the story of the blue‑spined books that inspired generations of self-improvers – and transformed the publishing world.

..

“The really amazing thing, the extraordinary eye-opener that surprised the most optimistic of us, was the immediate and overwhelming success of the Pelicans.” So wrote Allen Lane, founder of Penguin and architect of the paperback revolution, who had transformed the publishing world by selling quality books for the price of a packet of cigarettes.

Millions of orange Penguins had already been bought when they were joined in 1937 by the pale blue non-fiction Pelicans. “Who would have imagined,” he continued, “that, even at 6d, there was a thirsty public anxious to buy thousands of copies of books on science, sociology, economics, archaeology, astronomy and other equally serious subjects?”

His instinct was not only commercially astute but democratic. The launching of the Penguins and Pelicans (“Good books cheap”) caused a huge fuss, and not simply among staid publishers: the masses were now able to buy not just pulp, but “improving”, high-calibre books – whatever next! Lane and his defenders argued that owning such books should not be the preserve of the privileged class. He had no truck with those people “who despair at what they regard as the low level of people’s intelligence”.

Lane came up with the name – so the story goes – when he heard someone who wanted to buy a Penguin at a King’s Cross station bookstall mistakenly ask for “one of those Pelican books”. He acted fast to create a new imprint. The first Pelican was George Bernard Shaw‘s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism. “A sixpenny edition” of the book, the author modestly suggested, “would be the salvation of mankind.” Such was the demand that booksellers had to travel to the Penguin stockroom in taxis and fill them up with copies before rushing back to their shops.

It helped of course that this was a decade of national and world crisis. For Lane, the public “wanted a solid background to give some coherence to the newspaper’s scintillating confusion of day-to-day events”.

The Internet Really Has Changed Everything. Here’s the Proof. — Backchannel

The Internet Really Has Changed Everything. Here’s the Proof. — Backchannel

Instead I answer his question. “I am writing about how technology has changed humanity.”

Now he looks nervous.

“Basically, this story is a controlled experiment,” I continue. “Napoleon is a place that has remained static for decades. The economics, demographics, politics, and geography are the same as when I lived here. In the past twenty-five years, only one thing has changed: technology.”

…

“All scientific experiments require two conditions: a static environment and an independent variable. Napoleon is the control; technology, the testable variable. With all else being equal, this place is the perfect environment to explore societal questions like,

  • What are the effects of mass communications?
  • How has technology transformed the way we form ideas?
  • Does access to information alone make us smarter?”

…

As we discuss other apps on his home screen — YouTube, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo — I realize that my line of questions are really just attempts to prove or disprove a sentence that I read on the flight to Dakota. The sentence appears on page 20 of Danah Boyd’s book, It’s Complicated, a study of the social lives of networked teens:

“What the drive-in was to teens in the 1950s and the mall was in the 1980s, Facebook, texting, Twitter, instant messaging, and other social media are to teens now.”

Continue reading “The Internet Really Has Changed Everything. Here’s the Proof. — Backchannel”