Alan Jacobs

A landmark study published in 2003 in Psychological Science by Iowa State Professor Craig Anderson and other academics, which surveyed significant research on the topic up until that point, found “unequivocal evidence” that violent television and films, video games, and music, along with other forms of media violence, increase the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts. The effects appear more profound when it comes to milder forms of aggression, but they exist for severe forms, too. For example, one study in Anderson’s survey revealed that violent TV exposure at age 14 significantly predicted assault and fighting behavior at 16 or 22 years of age, even after controlling for a host of variables such as family income, parental education, verbal intelligence, and neighborhood characteristics. Anderson’s research also found that large-scale longitudinal studies provide converging evidence linking frequent exposure to violent media in childhood with aggression later in life, including physical assaults and spousal abuse.

How do you navigate content on the iPad? Scroll or flip? In 1987, the biggest neck beards in tech held conference on the Future of Hypertext and there were two camps ‘Card Sharks’ and 'Holy Scrollers’ and they had an epic fight over the following question: Should you scroll or flip pages on the screen? Who won the fight?

I break tablet reading distances into three main categories—Bed, Knee, and Breakfast—and define the categories by generic use case:

• Bed (Close to face): Reading a novel on your stomach, lying in bed with the iPad propped up on a pillow.

• Knee (Medium distance from face): Sitting on the couch or perhaps the Eurostar on your way to Paris, the iPad on your knee, catching up on Instapaper.

• Breakfast (Far from face): The iPad, propped up by the Apple case at a comfortable angle, behind your breakfast coffee and bagel, allowing for handsfree news reading as you wipe cream cheese from the corner of your mouth.

So: distances near, medium, and far.

The inhabitants of Osh (Ūsh) drive the enemy out with sticks and clubs and hold the town for Babur, from Illuminated manuscript Baburnama (Memoirs of Babur), Walters Art Museum Ms. W.596, fol. 25b

here

You can use my name on your board, I guess, although I generally try to keep off of letterheads unless I am able to be of substantial assistance. When I moved to this address, I went into the office of an interesting looking little institution next door – to find out what they did. So they explained that they set up burn clinics all over the world, and had begun doing this in Viet Nam, and so on. At the end of their explanation, though, they said that I really should have known something about their work already, since I was on their letterhead. A few years back, I had even signed a deeply moving appeal for funds, with photographs and all. Good for me.

The substitution of online for bookstore distribution of books will provide a substantial social saving and, as I said, increase the demand for books by reducing their retail price. As for the effect on publishers and authors of books, there is concern that it will be adverse, but that seems unlikely. A seller tries to minimize his cost of distribution, just as he tries to minimize his other costs; the publisher is the ultimate seller, and the bookstore part of the chain of distribution. But there is an important, and potentially relevant, exception, and that is where a distributor provides point-of-sale services that increase the demand for the product. This is the rationale for resale price maintenance: manufacturers of some goods place a floor under the retail price of the goods, thus deliberately increasing the retailers’ margin, but hoping by doing so to induce them to engage in nonprice competition that will increase the demand for the goods. Bookstore staffs, by decisions they make concerning choice and display of books to carry, and by making purchasing suggestions to customers, can, in principle, increase the demand for books. But these services cannot guarantee the survival of many bookstores, because unless the services are valued by a greater margin than seems realistic to expect, there will be too few customers to defray the bookstore’s fixed costs at acceptable prices.

The question then becomes whether the loss of point-of-sale services that bookstores provide will hurt publishers (and therefore authors, whose prosperity is linked to that of publishers) more than it will help them by reducing their distribution costs. That too is doubtful. As technology continues its forward march, online booksellers will find it increasingly feasible to duplicate and indeed improve on the point-of-sale services that bookstores offer. Bookstores will decline, and perhaps vanish when the current older generation, consisting of people habituated to printed books (as to printed newspapers), dies off. Yet this may well represent genuine economic progress, just as department stores and supermarkets represent progress though they cause the demise of countless small retailers

Back then, the basic unit of Internet buzz was the blog entry. Blogs, which today seem so quaint, gave you the chance to stretch out and make case for… well, whatever the oppressive world of printed matter wouldn’t give you the space to do. When it came to books, a blog post was, at minimum, a relatively stable bit of online enthusiasm. Like happy locusts, or any locusts at all, enough of them could keep you up at night, or blot out the sky. The best ones, though, were well-considered reviews that—even when they didn’t carry the imprimatur of a famous name or publication—put into circulation an account of your book by someone who had read it. Acknowledgment is one thing; that’s why authors lose sleep over landing in the NYRB. Blogs, though, allow for a wide, wide net of coercion, or if you want to be democratic about it, a variety of critical accounts.

Criticism isn’t just a way of conserving time and energy. It’s also an important translation skill. It’s easy to piece together a review that relies solely on comparisons and referents; it’s also bad writing and altogether useless for anyone who doesn’t already know the author, or run in exactly the same circles, taste-wise. A review is, in theory, helpful. That’s what language is for: it makes a movie, record, book, or film into a universal. This kind of communication is tied into consumerism, to be sure, but it’s also part of why—even as all authority comes crashing down—criticism matters. People want to understand, or be advised.

‘Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favor of it,’ McLuhan explained during an uncharacteristically candid interview in 1966. 'The exact opposite is true in my case. Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I’m resolutely against, and it seems to me the best way of opposing it is to understand it, and then you know where to turn off the button.’ Though the founders of Wired magazine would posthumously appoint McLuhan as the 'patron saint’ of the digital revolution, the real McLuhan was more a Luddite than a technophile. He would have found the collective banality of Facebook and other social networks abhorrent, if also fascinating.

Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you’ve got? That’s a question that I think has to be asked. It’s certainly possible that we’ve all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I’m not just talking about Jared Loughner. To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people.

brief iPad reading update