Deima's blog

WHO IS KEVIN KELLY?             WIRED's executive editor and resident techno-optimist. Kelly had asked Sale for an interview. But  he planned an ambush... WHO IS PATRICK SALE?             Author; adored Luddites.  THE CHIEF CONFLICT BETWEEN THE TWO MEN            Kelly had just read an early copy of Sale's upcoming book, called Rebels Against the Future .  It told the story of the 19th-century Luddites, a movement of workers opposed to the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. Before their rebellion was squashed and their leaders hanged, they literally destroyed some of the mechanized looms that they believed reduced them to cogs in a dehumanizing engine of mass production. In early 1995, Amazon was less than a year old, Apple was in the doldrums, Microsoft had yet to launch Windows 95, and almost no one had a mobile phone. But Sale, who for years had been churning out books complaining about modernity and urging a return to a subsistence economy, felt that computer technolog

In the article  Reading in a Whole New Way  Kevin Kelly worries that devices like Apple's iPad nurtures action over contemplation. Funny, because I am reading his article on my iPad..;) In ancient times, authors often dictated their books. Dictation sounded like an uninterrupted series of letters, so scribes wrote down the letters in one long continuous string, likeforexamplehere. Text was written without spaces between words until the 11th century. This continuous script made books hard to read, so only a few people were accomplished at reading them aloud to others. Being able to read silently to yourself was considered AN AMAZING TALENT . Writing was an even rarer of amazing talents at that time. In 15th-century Europe only one in 20 adult MALES could write. Crazy to think that women did not have a right to read at all. Over time, by 1910 three-quarters of the towns in America with more than 2,500 residents had a public library. WE became a people of the book!       I do not kn