…we’ve got new databases and new search features all to be rolled out this summer, so the posts here at Odyssey Online are about to turn to library services, library services, and library services. Before they do, the Write or Die App (here detailed by Jenny Diski in the London Review of Books blog). These Apps through one means or another are designed to keep fingers moving on the keyboard, keep words going going going, and thus encourage writing. Ms. Diski has a fairly pointed critique of said observes that what is lost is, “…about the space in between the writing, when nothing seems to be happening…Almost always, you do eventually start to write, and it seems that you’ve been considering after all.” That is, what is lost is the pondering, the introspection that comes in searching for words, in crafting in the noggin. Is that the rub? That what we can expect from networked information technology is business: are all the measures of the efficiency of networked information technology quantitative and thus driven by measures like characters and not metaphors? To put this another way, within Diski’s argument is certainly the suggestion that having one’s feet up and staring out the window is the most efficient way to render nature to advantage dressed…
…or the argument in Sallie Tisdale’s still relevant piece in Harpers from 1997 on the value in libraries…