Links March 24th

The theme of the week is text. Here’s what I’ve read recently about text.

The death of writing – if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google

That last term – narrate – should bring this whole discussion back to the point it never really left. As for the world of anthropology, so for the world of literature. It is not just that people with degrees in English generally go to work for corporations (which of course they do); the point is that the company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed.

I dislike the headline of this piece - it initially prevented me from reading the piece but it’s really a wonderful meditation on writing, stories and narratives in culture.

Futures of Text

A lovely analysis and roundup of the various ways text is used as/for/instead of UI. Plenty to think about here as we race towards natural language, a world where the audio-only UI of Her is looming and we’re all going to be speaking into our dick-tracy-iwatches.

The Billionare’s Typewriter

I can’t quib­ble with the de­tails of your piece. It’s true that Medium and I are op­posed to cer­tain ty­po­graphic short­cuts im­ported from the typewriter.

But by the end, I re­al­ized I dis­agree deeply with Medium about the ethics of de­sign.

Can’t say I agree with all of this but it certainly made me think