technology & the social » history

16th Century 43 Folders

Ericka — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:56:45 +0000

I recently wrote a term paper where I reviewed the history of personal archiving / personal information management, which I found pretty enjoyable to put together. One of the key early publications in this area was the second book of Erasmus’ De duplici copia verborum ac rerum where he describes what came to be known in English as a commonplace book. To put the following quote in context, the mind was compared to the cells of a beehive in 16 and 17th century Europe.

And so the student, like the industrious bee, will fly about through all the authors’ gardens and light on every small flower of rhetoric, everywhere collecting some honey that he may carry off to his own hive. Since there is such a great abundance of subjects in these, a complete gleaning is not possible, and he will be sure to select the most important and adapt them to the pattern of his work. There are some which can be adapted not only for different, but even for opposite uses, and therefore should be noted down in several places. For example, if you should be treating the incurable cupidity of a miser, you would rightly adapt the fable of Charybdis. Likewise, if you were discussing insatiable gluttony, or the inexhaustible lust of a woman, the same fable would certainly be appropriate.(Translated by Rix and King)

Quality

Ericka — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:23:38 +0000

“… at every epoch and in all countries, most art has been bad. But the proportion of trash in the total artistic output is greater now that at any other period. That it must be so is a matter of simple arithmetic. The population of Western Europe has a little more than doubled during the last century. But the amount of reading–and seeing–matter has increased, I should imagine, at least twenty and possibly fifty or even a hundred times.” Aldus Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay. A Traveler’s Journal, London, 1949. First published in 1934.

Walter Benjamin found Huxley’s view “obviously not progressive.”

This reminds me of some discussions about YouTube and other new media.

public/private

Ericka — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 23:29:12 +0000

The book The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett, originally published in 1974 is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read. It has to do with the history of industrial cities, particularly Paris and London, focussing on public and private conduct and the ways they have changed over the centuries. It’s interesting that the relationships on the street, the stage, and the home of 17 and 18 century cities have so much resonance with online culture today. Public/private boundaries are again being reshaped. I hope I have a chance to explore this in more detail in the future.

Every medium was new

Ericka — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 03:35:52 +0000

The 19th century lies just out of reach. I’ll never get to speak with someone who remembers the previous turn of the century. Part of my fascination with that time between the civil war and WWI is that so much is familiar – photography, electronic communications, Darwinism, relatively widespread literacy, and so much is alien – the clothing, social codes of conduct, much of the vocabulary and styles of writing. It’s the same type of curiosity that lead me to major in anthropology as an undergrad.

My area of interest has been new technologies and the internet, but when it really got interesting is when I started looking at the history of communication technologies from writing to printing to electronic communications like the telegraph, then the radio, TV, etc. Each of these was once new and it’s interesting to see the similarities between the “old new” and the “new new.”

I’d like to highlight a couple books that I’ve found interesting lately on this subject.

When Old Technologies Were New (link to worldcat) by Carolyn Marvin, 1988 is a fascinating and detailed look at the new media in the late 19th century from a social standpoint; for an academic book it’s very readable.

New Media 1740-1915 – an edited collection, Gitelman & Pingree eds., 2003. I wanted to cite the article “Scissoring and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking and Recirculating” by Ellen Gruber Garvey in my blog paper – but it didn’t quite fit in – although it may make it into the next version. I had a good time reading about Zograscopes and other old new media. I actually bought this book, and I’m very selective these days. I usually read it first from the library then decide.

Hope someone finds this interesting & if you’ve read something along these lines let me know.