Reading
Books that sit underneath the work, with a sentence on why. Personal and incomplete.
Writing and print
The Gutenberg Parenthesis
The term belongs to Sauerberg and Pettitt at Syddansk. Jarvis wrote the book that carries it, and is now credited with the idea about as often as they are.
On Lying and Politics
Two essays on the deliberate lie, written while a lie still required a liar who knew the truth. That condition no longer holds, and it is where my own work begins.
Amusing Ourselves to Death
An engaging operationalisation of McLuhans theory about the medium of TV. If we were amusing ourselves to death in the 80s, what is our fate today?
Orality and Literacy
A foundational book. Ong's account of what literacy did to consciousness is the baseline against which any present condition has to be measured.
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
The case that fixity was an achievement rather than a property of the world.
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Sixty years on, the claim that a public is a historical construction with material conditions still does more work than most of what has replaced it.
The machines
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
Vara writes with the machine on the page and keeps her name on the book. That is a special task in our times.
Superbloom
Carr's best book, and the one fewer people cite. The claim that more communication corrodes understanding is an uncomfortable one for anybody in my line of work.
Invisible Rulers
The best available account of how influence works from the supply side, by someone who has watched it up close. My disagreement is over how much the supply side explains.
The Crisis of Narration
Han is repetitive and frequently right. Information accumulates while narration thins, and a public that cannot hold a story will not hold a truth for long either.
God, Human, Animal, Machine
The best account I know of what happens to metaphysics when the machines get good at speaking. The metaphors we use are old ones and reveal a lot.
When We Cease to Understand the World
Fiction doing epistemology. On knowledge that arrives faster than the capacity to hold it.
New Dark Age
The nearest thing to dark reenchantment written by somebody else. Bridle stops at unintelligibility; the part I want is what fills the room once the world stops being legible.
The Mirror: A History
What happened to the self when the glassmakers of Murano learned to back a plate with tin. Every technology of self-observation since has been a variation on it.
The Norwegian debate
Ekko: Et essay om algoritmer og begjær
The Norwegian book on the attention economy, and the one that made the argument public here before the research caught up with it. Echo as metaphor is beautiful.
Ytringsfrihet annotert
An argument about free expression written in public and revised in public, with the second thoughts left standing in the margin. The form is the point.