Where previous generations of Serious Men saw in the concept of Medium but marginal or esoteric wordplay, we in our times seem to attribute to it almost magical qualities, such as the 19th century use of the concept ‘aether,’ which was discovered by Einstein to be an unnecessary postulate. Will we ultimately also…
The digitalization of information has been a hot topic ever since the arrival of the computer. The internet must be the world’s biggest library by now. The classical role of the library is becoming old fashioned and maybe even redundant. The reading-room and lending desk, the definitions of a classic library, are becoming less important to the visitors. What elements of a public library can still draw people to a library?
Internet kills writing? According to Andrea Lunsford, researcher at the Stanford University, it is totally the other way around. There is an immense increase of people starting to write and digital writing is the biggest revolution in writing since the Greek era; bigger than the shift from the oral- to the writing era. Internet improves our writing skills!
‘Blogosphere’, ‘Twittersphere’, ‘Afrosphere’. We’re gradually getting used to a new media terminology whereby we quickly refer to new communication spaces and specified fields as ‘spheres’. As the Twittersphere is still rapidly growing, we might want to look back at Habermas’ classic concept of the ‘public sphere’, which was one of the earliest…