Archives and Anachronisms (Page 2)

How Google Dominates Us

August 20, 2011

How thoroughly and how radically Google has already transformed the information economy has not been well understood. The merchandise of the information economy is not information; it is attention. These commodities have an inverse relationship. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. Attention is what we, the users, give to Google, and our attention is what Google sells—concentrated, focused, and crystallized.

Touching History

July 31, 2011

I got a thrill in December 1999 in the Reading Room of the Morgan Library in New York when the librarian, Sylvie Merian, brought me, after I had completed an application with a letter of reference and a photo ID, the first, oldest notebook of Isaac Newton. First I was required to study a microfilm version. […]

Autocorrect, Unexpurgated

April 05, 2011

I mention a certain writer in an email, and the reply comes back: “Comcast McCarthy??? Phoner novelist???” Oops. Did I really call him “Comcast”? No. The great god Autocorrect has struck again. It is an impish god. I try retyping the name on a different device. This time the letters reshuffle themselves into “Format McCarthy.” […]

Patently Absurd (2000)

March 20, 2000

W hen 21st-century historians look back at the breakdown of the United States patent system, they will see a turning point in the case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com and their special invention: “The patented One Click® feature,” Bezos calls it. Not everyone who knows Bezos as the newly minted billionaire founder of the world’s […]

Watch This Space (1995)

July 09, 1995

WHERE HUMAN ANATOMY meets data processing, there are just two important devices: the brain and the wristwatch. The brain is nice, but it doesn’t tell time very well. So, creatures of habit that we are, we strap on that extra thing—a machine worn every day by most adults in the industrialized world to display a […]

The Doctor’s Plot

May 11, 1994

In the world of unidentified flying objects, John E. Mack (or, as his book jacket labels him, “John E. Mack, M.D., the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard psychiatrist”) is a Mark masquerading as a Smart. Mack believes that little gray aliens have been abducting Americans in large numbers and subjecting them to various forms of unwilling sex. […]

Chasing Bugs in the Electronic Village (1992)

December 20, 1992

I couldn’t wait to buy Microsoft Word for Windows — rumored to be the new Cuisinart, Mack truck and Swiss Army knife of word-processing software, full-featured, powerful and, for a writer, the ultimate time-saving device. I was writing a long book, and I wanted the best. One day in January 1990, I finally got to […]

Contact

Find me in the open social web (fediverse; Mastodon): @gleick@mas.to

Mastodon

Literary agent:
Michael Carlisle
at Inkwell Management,
521 Fifth Ave.,
New York 10175.

Or send a private message.