@suethomas

The Shallows and how I stopped reading it in favour of gazing out of the window

Last week I was very pleased to get hold of a copy of Nick Carr's new book The Shallows just in time for a long train journey. Great. I'd have time and space to really absorb it without distraction. The reality, however, was rather different, because for the first time I became acutely aware that it was actually the book itself that was distracting me from the real world. This is how it happened.

via nlabnetworks.typepad.com

Republished here from the Transliteracy Blog

2010/11

This academic year I'm focusing on researching and writing my upcoming book for Bloomsbury Academic Nature and Cyberspace: The Wild Surmise.

An offshoot article was recently published in an e-book produced for the 10th anniversary of the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech, Putting Knowledge to Work and Letting Information Play: The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture edited by Timothy W. Luke and Jeremy W. Hunsinger. It's an honour to have been invited to contribute to this collection and I was delighted that my piece was included. It's called "From gunny sacks to mattress vine: notes on Douglas Engelbart, Tim O'Reilly, and the natural world" and it considers some surprising synergies between these two well-known figures. My conclusion might be a bit of a stretch, but it's an interesting stretch, and I enjoyed putting it together.

I've also written an essay for something completely different - a collection about various aspects of the body. That's being edited now and should be out next year.