Marzo 2012
12 post
Life and Code: The Kind of Programming Journalism Needs (Is Simple) →
lifeandcode.tumblr.com
Computer programing is a vast domain, stretching from embedded systems that end up being the brain of your refrigerator to vastly sophisticated algorithms that let Wall Street traders
defraud the publicdetect and capitalize on trends.The good news for people who want to learn how to program…
“Print will survive. Books will survive even longer. It’s print as a marker of prestige that’s dying.”
—
Tim Carmody, in his piece, Wikipedia Didn’t Kill Britannica. Windows Did.
Carmody argues that Britannica began to die long before Wikipedia was around, likely around the time of the advent of Microsoft and Encarta CD-Roms. He’s not too sad about it though, because he likens Britannica to a marker of prestige more than an actually valuable, usable information source.
In short, Britannica was the 18th/19th equivalent of a shelf full of SAT prep guides. Or later, a family computer.
“I suspect almost no one ever opened their Britannicas,” says Appelbaum. “Britannica’s own market research showed that the typical encyclopedia owner opened his or her volumes less than once a year,” say Greenstein and Devereux.
“It’s not that Encarta made knowledge cheaper,” adds Appelbaum, “it’s that technology supplanted its role as a purchasable ‘edge’ for over-anxious parents. They bought junior a new PC instead of a Britannica.”
In another piece on the subject (this one in Slate) Farhad Manjoo also believes Britannica is fairly useless as an information source and rather, Wikipedia is sort of our savior.
My advice is to make the wiser, cheaper choice, one that will prove more helpful to your kids in the long run: Pay nothing to Britannica and teach your young ones to use Google and Wikipedia. While there are many legitimate complaints to be leveled at Wikipedia (rarely, it gets things wrong; sometimes, its entries are vandalized), the free, crowdsourced encyclopedia is better than Britannica in every way. It’s cheaper, it’s bigger, it’s more accessible, it’s more inclusive of differing viewpoints and subjects beyond traditional academic scholarship, its entries tend to include more references, and it is more up to date.
Most importantly, learning to navigate Google and Wikipedia prepares you for the real world, while learning to use Britannica teaches you nothing beyond whatever subject you’re investigating at the moment.
In that regard, Manjoo seems to have a point. Learning to fact-check is a key media literacy skill useful not only of journalists and writers but news consumers as well.
Don’t buy what Britannica’s selling. Its reliance on expert authority may yield mostly accurate information, but it teaches kids to believe everything they read. If you pay for this service, you’re building a cocoon of truth around students who’ll one day enter a world where everyone claims to be an expert—and where a lot of those people are lying. If you want to learn to suss out the liars, there’s no better training than Wikipedia.
Thoughts?
(via futurejournalismproject)
“IN A CULTURE that favors sensation, the fact checker is an anomaly, perhaps even anathema. He is the brakes on editors and writers racing toward deadline intent on dazzling readers at the expense of edifying them. He is the schoolmarm tsk tsking. He is the public defender for the unrepresented, the downtrodden, the forgotten—the facts. DAVID ZWEIG”
—What Do Fact-Checkers and Anesthesiologists Have in Common?
Tony Judt: A Final Victory by Jennifer Homans | The New York Review of Books →
nybooks.com
I was married to Tony Judt. I lived with him and our two children as he faced the terror of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was a two-year ordeal, from his diagnosis in 2008 to his death in 2010, and during it Tony managed against all human odds to write three books. The last, followingIll Fares the Land and The Memory Chalet, was Thinking the Twentieth Century, based on conversations with Timothy Snyder.1 He started work on the book soon after he was diagnosed; within months he was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine, but he kept working nonetheless. He and Tim finished the book a month before he died. It accompanied his illness; it was part of his illness, and part of his dying.
The book is a history of twentieth-century thought. It begins with his reflections on Jewish idealism and Jewish suffering in Europe and ends with a devastating account of the failure of American politics in the post–cold war world. It is also an intellectual autobiography—of sorts. “Of sorts” because Tony rarely wrote in the first person, and the autobiographical sections of the book were wedged in, almost reluctantly, between the ideas, the history, the politics, and the ethical dilemmas that were central to his life.
This doesn’t mean that the book is not personal. For Tony, ideas were a kind of emotion, something he felt and cared about in the way that most people do about feelings like sadness or love. This, as the book shows, goes back to the beginning—even before the beginning—of his life: Tony was named after his father’s cousin Toni, who perished as a young girl in Auschwitz. As he was growing up, his father passed on his own passion for left-wing politics and European history as a form of parental love: Tony’s thirteenth birthday present, which he devoured, was Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume study of Trotsky. Ideas and the need for historical explanations ran deep, back then and right through to Thinking the Twentieth Century.
Nessuna frase è troppo lunga →
internazionale.it
Pico Iyer, Los Angeles Times, Stati Uniti
“Le tue frasi sono troppo lunghe”, mi ha detto un’amica che insegna inglese all’università, e ho capito che non intendeva farmi un complimento.
Il copy editor che ha riletto meticolosamente il mio ultimo libro usava trattini gialli intorno alle mie proposizioni multiple per suggerirmi di spezzare le frasi o metterci meno cose dentro. Entrambe le reazioni non potevano essere più gentili e ragionevoli, ma quello che forse la mia amica e il mio collega non hanno capito è questo: scrivere frasi sempre più lunghe è il mio modo di protestare – e insieme cercare di salvare i miei eventuali lettori – contro il bombardamento delle frasi brevi.
Quando ho cominciato a guadagnarmi da vivere scrivendo, ho avuto l’impressione che il mio lavoro consistesse nell’offrire al lettore qualcosa di rapido e concreto, che non si potesse ottenere in altra forma: uno scrittore era una macchina per raccogliere dati, pensavo, e come giornalista avevo il compito di andare per il mondo e raccogliere dettagli, appunti visivi e immediati come quelli della televisione. Avevamo bisogno soprattutto di fatti. Ed ero convinto – e lo sono ancora – che se guardavi il mondo abbastanza da vicino potevi intuire in anticipo le sue mosse, come capita con un fratello o un amico: Don DeLillo o Salman Rushdie non sono mistici, ma sono in grado di dirci dove andrà il mondo domani perché lo seguono molto attentamente.
Eppure, al giorno d’oggi il pianeta si muove troppo rapidamente anche per un Rushdie o un DeLillo, e molti di noi abitanti del mondo privilegiato hanno accesso a più informazioni di quante ce ne servano. Desideriamo fortemente qualcosa che ci liberi dal sovraffollamento contingente e ci consenta di vedere le cose in una prospettiva più ampia.
Nessuno scrittore può competere, in rapidità e immediatezza, con gli sms, le notizie flash della Cnn o i feed rss, ma qualsiasi scrittore può cercare di restituirci la profondità, le sfumature – gli “spazi vuoti” come li chiama Annie Dillard – che su molti schermi non appaiono. Non tutti vogliono essere ridotti alla clip di un’intervista o a un adesivo.
E qui entra in scena (spero) la frase lunga: una raccolta di proposizioni così sfaccettata e generosa e abbondante nei toni e nelle suggestioni da poter contenere la quasi-contraddizione, l’ambiguità e tutti quei luoghi della memoria o dell’immaginazione che non possono essere semplificati o tradotti in parole povere, e consentire al lettore di conservare nella mente e nel cuore tante cose insieme mentre scende, come lungo una scala a chiocciola, sempre più in profondità dentro se stesso e dentro quelle cose che non si lasciano comprimere in un “o questo/o quello”. Ogni proposizione ci porta sempre più lontano da conclusioni banali – o almeno questa è la speranza – e lontano dal riduzionismo, come se lo scrittore fosse un dentista che dice “apra di più” per poter sondare gli spazi più teneri e trascurati del lettore (anche se in questo caso non si occupa della bocca ma dello spirito).
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