I knew about his devotion to fresco and marble, but I didn’t really think of it phrased thusly. I have this beautiful image of a Charlton Heston-esque Michelangelo grunting and shouting this while he punches through his apprentice’s canvas doodlings.

But why was there this innovation then? Was there some new method of weaving? Or was it that Leonardo mixed up the good paint?

I keep meaning to read The Agony and The Ecstacy, the book is supposed to be much more than the movie.

Tim’s right: things have never not been changing.

Your digression on writing and technologies brings to mind something I learned just last week, at my ripening age, on a visit to Florence. Maybe everybody else knows this, but I was stunned to learn (and then realize the obviousness of) this fact: Michelangelo’s unchallenged mastery of the art world was undone because he wouldn’t embrace new technology: oil paints and canvas.

To him, painting *was* murals and frescoes. He saw some of the early oil works on canvas and even blessed the technique mildly as being good enough to stir some emotion in women and children. According to the guide I was reading, though, his attitude was something like “real men paint walls.”

But oil-on-canvas meant something very important: painting went mobile. Works of art could be shipped around, shared, compared. The average art viewer probably saw her exposure to different works multiplied many times.

Oh, and about the same time Michelangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel, another Florentine did make the move to the new technology: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

I love this meditation on the continuous technology of paper and the contrast with typical point-to-point histories. I’m all for necessary compression and shorthand when it comes to discussing history, but something is lost when the compression artefacts are treated as data in an argument or a development process. It reminds me of something I was thinking about at a recent talk Peter Norvig gave at Berkeley about the uses of AI in helping us progress knowledge. At 3:23 in the video I linked, he gave a very shorthand history of physics and specifically says, “This is the process of theory formation. Here’s a guy, we’ll call him Isaac …you can apply [his] model to make predictions and do the kind of things we did at my former job at NASA . .so it’s great that that approach works, of course it took a couple thousand years before we got sombody who was smart enough to come up with a model like that, so we’d like a process where we can iterate a little faster, we want a more agile theory development then having to wait all the way from Aristotle to Newton to get those kinds of advances.” At 53:35 I asked him about applications of AI research to extracting models from Google Scholar, but I deliberately phrased my question to point out that there were quite a few iterations between Aristotle and Newton, most famously Kepler and Galileo. It’s one thing to sweep the tiny curves and turns of science history under the rug when you want a big picture and some hooks to hang basic concepts on. David Politzer, a 2004 physics Nobel Laureate said during his speech, “We want to bring our students as quickly as possible to the frontier of current understanding. From this perspective, the actual history, which involves many variants and many missteps, is a only a hindrance. And the neat, linear progress, as outlined by the sequence of gleaming gems recognized by Nobel prizes, is a useful fiction. But a fiction it is. The truth is often far more complicated.”
The same could be said of any major technology’s history. I think better approximations of that complicated truth can’t be so blissfully ignored when you’re actually trying to reproduce the process in an AI–or make sweeping conclusions about how science should be done, or how technology marches.

2) A lot of the effects of Snarkmarket writing were probably first felt on Short Schrift; I don’t know if I could really identify how my writing has changed just over the last year. (The last month, that’s different.)

But, including writing for Short Schrift, Snarkmarket has affected my style and content in a few ways. I think I wrote last year that Snarkmarket made me as interested in the future as I had been in the past. It definitely made me more interested in “media,” which I then proceeded to define somewhat more broadly thanks to folks like Ezra Pound, Friedrich Kittler, Harold Innis, and Marshall McLuhan.

But in terms of style and audience, it hasn’t invented too much out of whole cloth (I’m sure there’s a Robin Sloan or Matt Thompson pastiche that I’ve got in my repertoire that I didn’t before), but has encouraged me to be less afraid of some of my tendencies.

For instance, last year I gave a paper at MLA about being a dad. Blogging made me much less afraid to bring my personal life to an academic context. I wrote an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Ed last summer that I was able to turn into a futurist parable, EPIC 2014 style. I probably would have played that safer.

And my style in parts of my dissertation, where I break from academese — it’s not actually Snarkmarket, but Nietzsche and McLuhan and Derrida and Kittler and (he’s always there somewhere) Bill Watterson — I might have censored, or convinced myself to censor. Instead, I’ve opted for the striking formulation, putting my language 150% above full conviction.

Also, feedback has been and continues to be awesome. From seeing which posts catch on, which get tweeted and forwarded and linked to, which quotes people pull, I have a better sense of how to grab a generally interested audience by the shoulders and say, “take a look — this is awesome. You should know about it.” And I think that ethos of not assuming but showing importance (not through proof but descripton) I probably learned from you guys.

Two things. First, this line sorta blew my mind: “Snark­mar­ket was the first blog I read.” Now you’ve got me thinking about the first blog I read… what was it? Jay Rosen’s PressThink? Instapundit? Talking Points Memo v0.1? Wow.

Second, I’m curious: How has writing here changed the way you write elsewhere (e.g. for academic purposes)—if at all? How have the different spheres, the different “publics,” interacted inside your head—again, if at all?

“Writing — and read­ing — are everywhere, in almost every medium. It’s not even worth listing them all. We’re saturated in literacy.”

Reminds of Dennis Baron’s “From Pencils to Pixels…” which had a formative influence on me years ago when I first read it. I have my freshman comp students read it every semester, and it seems to make them aware that they highly textual, despite the insistence of the generations that preceded them telling them they are not.

From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology
http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/pencils.htm

As an aside, I just want to say that I think “nerdiest Snarkmarket blogger” would be a hard-fought and inconclusive battle.