This is great: a librarian identifies curiously common references to “cuddling” in newspaper discussions of print and electronic books. As in, nobody is ever going to use an e-book reader because you can’t “cuddle” (up with) it.

Preferably, it appears, by a fire. Because apparently everybody’s got a fireplace that they read in front of, and without a proper fire, chair, smoking jacket, and appropriate analog print media, there’s no reason to spend hard money on a book, magazine, or newspaper.

My favorite rejoinder is the one outlier: “Forget about the warmth a real book offers when you cuddle up with it by the fire. People spend so much time on buses and planes, in boring meetings, or at kids’ soccer practices or hockey games.”

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about sites of reading and the different physical relationships to text they require. It’s fascinating how particular sites and ways of reading crowd out others — often to make a new activity seem MUCH more new than it really is.

Dan Cohen’s has a lucid and thoughtful post about the recent Smithsonian 2.0 meeting. In it there’s a paraphrase (from memory, he says) of David Recordon’s vision of the future of the Smithsonian:

Before I visit Washington, I want to be able to go to the web and select items I

I love Ron Rosenbaum’s takedown of Billy Joel; you really have to dislike someone to go to the lengths taken by Rosenbaum to document, distill, and identify what makes them so bad.

My favorite part, though, is Rosenbaum’s side-snipe at Jeff Jarvis:

Besides, some people still take Billy seriously. Just the other day I was reading my old friend Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog, and Jarvis (the Billy Joel of blog theorists) was attacking the Times’ David Carr. (Talk about an uneven fight.) Carr was speculating about whether newspapers could survive if they adopted the economic model of iTunes. Attempting a snotty put-down of this idea, Jarvis let slip that he’s a Joel fan: As an example somehow of his iTunes counter-theory, he wrote: “If I can’t get Allentown, the original, I’m not likely to settle for a cover.” Only the hard-core B.J. for Jeff! (“Allentown” is a particularly shameless selection on Jarvis’ part, since it’s one of B.J.’s “concern” songs, featuring the plight of laid-off workers, and Jarvis virtually does a sack dance of self-congratulatory joy every time he reports on print-media workers getting the ax.)

See, this is the thing: there’s a weird way in which the entire attack on Billy Joel just allegorizes Rosenbaum’s frustration with Jarvis. Read RR’s December article, “Is Jeff Jarvis Gloating Too Much About the Death of Print?” if you’re not convinced.

In the medieval university, the seven classical liberal arts were split into two categories.

The trivium included modes of argument and thought: logic, grammar, and rhetoric.

The quadrivium were the sciences, bodies of knowledge with particular content: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music.

Brittanica identifies the liberal arts of the modern university as literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science.

Wikipedia’s more expansive definition is arguably better: art, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, history, mathematics, and science.

But what are the emergent liberal arts — liberal arts 2.0?

I think the best way to think about this is not to think of the “new” liberal arts as supplanting the “old,” but as a complementary set, like painting, architecture, and sculpture as the new, humanist plastic arts during the Renaissance. Like the trivium and quadrivium, we have the octet of “modern” liberal arts and a set of newer concerns.

With that proviso in mind, here is my fairly conservative attempt at a list:

Art

Design

Photography

Music

*

Languages

Literature

Philosophy

*

History

Politics

Economics

*

Mathematical Sciences

Natural Sciences

Biological Sciences

*

Food, Ecology, and the Environment

—

What do you think?

Update: Let me just clarify that I’m not just using these terms in the way that they’re understood in colleges and universities. So by “economics,” I don’t only mean what you learned in ECON 101 or the work of professional economists, but a broad and flexible consideration of labor, exchange, incentives, and value as they affect… anything.

Likewise “photography” doesn’t just mean snapping pictures but learning how to read, think, produce, and talk about images, whether still or moving. Art is the aesthetic dimension of anything independent from its use. Design is the aesthetic dimension of anything dependent upon its use. And “aesthetic” is about beauty, yes, but also perception. “Food” is about cooking and eating, but also about our relationship to plants and animals and to each other and our industries oriented around nutrition. Maybe “ecology” would be a better (or at least more encompassing) term. Languages includes speaking, writing, typing, and natural and programming languages. And so on.

These are sciences with a body of knowledge, yes, but they’re also ways of thinking about things, the world, individual people, societies. Your average boring object sitting on your desk or table right now can be thought of in terms of its history, its design, its economics, its politics, its physics and chemistry, etc. And if you take a look at the newspapers, blogs, and books you read, they’re usually doing one or more of these right now — reframing a problem that you thought about one way in the light of another.

“Music” or “Astronomy” are still disciplines, but they don’t mean the same thing that they did in the Middle Ages. The liberal arts for the new millenium doesn’t just change what the arts are — it changes what they mean.

Robin’s note: Weird, new comments seem to be broken on this post. Don’t worry, we’ll continue the conversation on another one, soon.

Tim’s note: Comments are back!

It’s just what the title says it is:

Once you start watching TED talks, ordinary life falls away. The corridor from Silicon Alley to Valley seems to crackle, and a new in-crowd emerges: the one that loves Linux, organic produce, behavioral economics, transhistorical theories and

The great historian and librarian Robert Darnton weighs the consequences of the Google Books settlement:

Google has no serious competitors. Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books several months ago, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and ineffective in comparison with Google. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all over again. If the settlement is upheld by the court, only Google will be protected from copyright liability.

Google’s record suggests that it will not abuse its double-barreled fiscal-legal power. But what will happen if its current leaders sell the company or retire? The public will discover the answer from the prices that the future Google charges, especially the price of the institutional subscription licenses. The settlement leaves Google free to negotiate deals with each of its clients, although it announces two guiding principles: “(1) the realization of revenue at market rates for each Book and license on behalf of the Rightsholders and (2) the realization of broad access to the Books by the public, including institutions of higher education.”

What will happen if Google favors profitability over access? Nothing, if I read the terms of the settlement correctly. Only the registry, acting for the copyright holders, has the power to force a change in the subscription prices charged by Google, and there is no reason to expect the registry to object if the prices are too high. Google may choose to be generous in it pricing, and I have reason to hope it may do so; but it could also employ a strategy comparable to the one that proved to be so effective in pushing up the price of scholarly journals: first, entice subscribers with low initial rates, and then, once they are hooked, ratchet up the rates as high as the traffic will bear.

This is Darnton’s bleaker vision; at other points, he suggests that digitization may still yet create a new Enlightenment. On balance, it looks like there are winners, losers, missed opportunities, and new possibilities, but mostly a lot of work still to be done.

Claire Potter at HNN/Tenured Radical challenges the idea that the image of Barack Obama will raise black student achievement:

White liberals seem to be particularly entranced by the notion that persistent social equalities are a result of low self-esteem, rather than racial and class inequality. By the 1940’s, self-esteem arguments had moved into progressive, anti-racist social science through the black doll-white doll test designed by influential African-American psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark, used as evidence in Briggs v. Elliott (1952), and later, to much greater effect, in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). As Waldo E. Martin has noted, this test was not without critics on both sides of the issue, many of whom saw methodological flaws in the Clarks’ experiments. However, the gravity of the moral issues at stake, Martin argues, meant that arguments about self-esteem resulting from the study nevertheless became powerful visual evidence in what stands out as a classic liberal decision by the Warren court.

In particular, I like her take on contemporary trends in educational assessment:

A crucial issue here is the continuing mania for using public school children as a vast pool of customers for corporations specializing in both mass curriculum distribution and in the endless testing through which students — on pain of humiliation, summer school, and being held back a grade — are asked to regurgitate these educational products. (I use the phrase “educational products” consciously: currently, a standard curriculum in the United States is to education what Cheeze Whiz is to cheese.)

“Life in the eternal hotel” was the phrase I coined on what I think was my first-ever comment on Snarkmarket, now almost five years ago. The idea is to try to push how far we’d be willing to swap ownership of objects for subscribtion to services:

There are some things that we own that we expect to be permanent, or nearly so, and other things that we own that automatically have a limited shelf life: light bulbs being the best example. Nobody names a light bulb because, even if you legally own it, you don’t own it in the sense of having a long-term personal investment: you use it, it breaks, and you throw it away. Speaking of which, I’d love to have services for trash bags, toilet paper, paper towels, printer ink, soap, shampoo, shaving cream, razor blades, deodorant, laundry and dishwasher detergent (or perhaps laundry and dishwashing services?), contact lenses, and (at least sometimes) food. (Not that life in the dorms was all that wonderful.) It’d be great if you could have all of those pumped into your house like gas, water, or electricity…

The question is to what degree people will be willing to accept an impermanent relationship to certain kinds of things. I doubt that there is anything intrinsic to most objects that would preclude us from using them temporarily: our impulse to name or to fetishize comes from our sense of long attachment, rather than the other way around. Of course, there are cultural differences to be overcome. Some people couldn’t see themselves without owning a car, but could easily not own books (instead reading periodicals, at the library, or not at all); for me, despite my Detroitness, it’s now the other way around. A better question to ask is whether we could live without any sense of permanent ownership: life in the eternal hotel.

Kevin Kelly has something similar up today, with a post called “Better Than Owning“:

Sharing intangibles scales magnificently. This ability to share on a large scale without diminishing the satisfaction of the individual renter is transformative. The total cost of use drops precipitously (shared by millions instead of one). Suddenly, ownership is not so important. Why own, when you get the same utility from renting, leasing, licensing, sharing?

But more importantly why even possess it? Why take charge of it at all if you have instant, constant, durable, full access to it? If you lived inside of the world’s largest rental store, why would you own anything? If you can borrow anything you needed without possessing it, you gain the same benefits with fewer disadvantages. If this was a magic rental store, where most of the gear was stored “downstairs” in a virtual basement, then whenever you summoned an item or service it would appear at your command.

The internet is this magic rental store. Its virtual basement is infinite, and it provides omni-access to its holdings. There are fewer and fewer reasons to own, or even possess anything. Via omni-access the most ordinary citizen can get hold of a good or service as fast as possessing it. The quality of the good is equal to what you can own, and in some cases getting hold of it may be faster than finding it on your own in your own “basement.”

Obviously, for beauty of expression and clarity of imagery, I think “eternal hotel” beats “magic rental store.”

But mull this over with me. What is happening here? And what’s happened in the five years between Robin talking about Rhapsody and Kevin Kelly talking about, um, Rhapsody that may have changed how we look at this?

Clusterflock: Paper is the New Internet.

Cf.: The Printed Blog, Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet, Meet the New Schtick.

Ha! Alessandra Stanley does my work for me: This was a day best captured by image, not narrative, she says.

In all this talk of narrative and database (here and here) I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned one of the most familiar kinds of databases: the photo gallery!

All the way from LIFE’s breakthrough use of rich, stand-alone photography to TIME’s avalanche of online galleries and (of course) the Big Picture, there’s a rich tradition here. And the best of ’em aren’t linear sequences that tell a story from start to finish; they’re collections of contrasting moments that, together, deliver a gestalt.

Photo galleries have been one of my favorite ways to track the entire election, and I think there’s truth to what Stanley says about today:

Anchors, compelled to say something, reached for trite metaphors and hyperbolic expressions of wonder (“Our secular version of a miracle,” according to one CNN commentator) that didn’t begin to match the reality unfolding live behind them. The best narration was wordless.

I’ll extend that critique to printed commentary, as well. The flurry of op-eds over the weekend, all packed with world-historical language trying to Put It All In Perspective, fell flat. Just give me the image.

Not even Obama’s speech — which I liked — could match the raw image of him, uh, delivering it. William Gavin, a former speechwriter for Nixon, said this over at the NYT (emphasis mine):

But the setting — the first African-American standing there in the bright winter sunshine as our new president — had an eloquence all its own. I think we will remember this occasion more for the man who gave it than for the words he said. He could have stood there for 20 minutes of silence and still communicated great things about America.

I claim the image for the Team Database. Your move, narrative.