Ones and Zeros, On and Off Switches, All Sane Systems Require Downtime
- I, Reader: A Nod to Asimov’s I, Robot
- Robots and Readers: A Tight Coupling of Container and Content
- Does Technology only Extend Thought? Does It also Supplant It?
- Machine Life: The Final Prejudice
- RB-34 Prefers Slushy Novels
- Creative Reading: A Golden String
- Creative Reading by anemone achtnich
- Creative Reading: The Art of Self
- Creative Reading: Thinking with Other Minds
- Creative Reading: The Art of Self, Take 2
- Creative Reading: The Discovery of Other (Thinking with the Minds of Others, Take 2)
- Creative Reading: The Mathematics of Self, Other and Extension
- What Books Changed You?
- I’ve always admired people who, in a pinch, are better than their principles
- Every Extension Breaks a Rule
- The Trajectory of Reading: Creative Contribution
- I Read, Therefore I Write
- What Readers Write May Not Be Literature, But It Might Become So
- “Narrow it down to … the upper left-hand brick”: Phaedrus
- “No one that he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before”: Phaedrus
- Using a Blog to Draft a Book Idea: 9 Observations
- From Reading to Writing to Publishing with Digital Media
- Birth of the Reader-Writer
- To Read a Book is to Ignore 4000 Others
- Quantity has a Quality all its Own
- The Web is Re-Wiring My Brain
- How the Web Works for Readers: Thin Connections Lead to Rich Connections
- The Accidental Programmer
- Definitions of Hacking
- Ways of the Reader-Hacker
- Ways of the Reader-Hacker II: Breaking the Rules
- Ways of the Reader Hacker III: Two Bright Ideas
- A Hacker’s Reading List
- Ones and Zeros, On and Off Switches, All Sane Systems Require Downtime
- The Information Race and Pushing the Button
- How to Make an Elephant Statue
- Every Story Deserves a Good Ending
- Expressions of Offworld
- “Would I start to resemble a book myself?”
- Myth of the Reader-Hero
- Print is Digital
- Am I Still Chasing that First Reading High?
- Do Robots Read? Yes I Do (Conclusion to “I, Reader”)
- I, Reader: A Book Outline
- Reading List for Next Draft of I, Reader
Offworld, Pt. 1
In the universe of Asimov’s I, Robot, humans are fearful of robots, so laws are made that robots must go offworld to labour on distant planets. It often seems that technology can labour for us in some unseen place. It is an illusion.
I, Reader has explored how the reader is extended toward others with digital technology on the web. Readers write, and they hack. Yet a hack is just a rough cut, not something to be endlessly perfected, but something to be walked away from. Just as no one can digest our food for us, no one can digest our information for us. Digital technology at its most basic is about ones and zeros, on and off switches. All sane systems require downtime. The best of reading still requires switching off technology at times.
‘Offworld’ is the second last theme in the I, Reader series. Any good definition of the benefits of technology to reading requires a boundary, a statement of the limits of technology to reading. The Offworld theme is about the benefits of turning off the lights of technology, and journey unaided through the lesser lit corridors of the self and the unconscious. The destination is a world of answers to the original questions that set us on the path of reading.
Prophecies of the end of the book also tend to include the end of … novels, literature, English departments, libraries, reading skills, intelligence. In short, the end of the world.
Another good title for this theme, “The End of the Internet”. As in Google’s end page for its reader, as in the _limits_ of the Internet. What it can’t do.
One of those maps of the Internet would be useful to show this.
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