Book reviews from LibraryThing

Over the last few years most of my writing online has been on the LibraryThing website, a social niche for book people. LibraryThing’s main product is an easy way to catalog book collections with as much or as little detail as you like. On the social side, it provides book-related local information (on the web […]

What the Internet looks like

Gallery Interweb is a collection of “artistic renderings of the Internet,” from film clips to prose. (Thanks to Robin Sloan and Snarkmarket.)

Take, for instance, these campy clips from two 1995 movies, Hackers and Johnny Mnemonic:

teh kidz r alright

I was recently directed to yet another complaint about the decline of literacy, the corrosive intellect-leaching power of digital technology, and our collective guilt for letting Western civilization subside into a mire of tweets, blogs, and gaming.

iPhones Have Consequences, by Sally Thomas, is a witty, engaging essay on the subject, supported by memorable anecdotes. I believe it delves deeper into the question than most such efforts, and it’s well worth reading.

I feel I must address her argument that the present college generation is dumber than we forty-somethings, seeing as I’ve argued exactly the opposite. It’s my view that the forty-somethings are the dumbest generation currently on offer, and the so-called “twixters” or “tweens” are more curious than we, and have read more and thought about more than we had at their age.

Twitter for beginners

I’ve been signed up at Twitter for most of a year now, without any clear idea of what to do with it. David Pogue’s recent blog posts on the topic have helped clear the mental block: Twittering Tips for Beginners, including: “Don’t tweet about what you’re doing right now.” Uh, really? The Twitter Experiment, or […]

My dumb generation

Neil Howe, writing in the Sunday Washington Post, makes the case that my 40-something generation is in no position to criticize the intellectual attainments of today’s youth; in fact, we qualify as the “dumbest generation” currently on offer. (Thanks to Mike O’Connor for mentioning the article.) Howe shows how the generation born in the years […]