Jennifer Howard laughing

Jennifer Howard

Writer, editor, journalist.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Mastodon
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Books
  • Writing
    • Journalism
    • Fiction
  • Editing
  • Contact

Coding and “Computhors”

October 16, 2014

Is this internet killing books? What do poetry and software have in common? Can computers write literature? The Times Literary Supplement asked me to write about three books that take up those questions: The Edge of the Precipice: Why read literature in the digital age?, edited by Paul Socken; Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software, by Vikram Chandra; and From Literature to Biterature: Lem, Turing, Darwin, and Explorations in Eomputer Literature, Philosophy of Mind, and Cultural Evolution.

From the review:

Nostalgia, not the internet, is killing literature. Even if the surfing and grazing and browsing we do online have ruined us for anything longer than a blog post – and I’m not convinced that sustained attention is altogether a lost cause – the cure does not lie in longing for some half- invented time when serious people lost themselves in novels.

Filed Under: Net Life, The Way We Live Now

Previous Post

What I Did With My Summer Vacation

Next Post

This and That, or Where I’ve Been

Recent Writing

  • Schools of Thought Control
  • The Publishing Ecosystem in the Digital Era: On John B. Thompson’s BOOK WARS
  • A paler shade of white: HAVING AND BEING HAD by Eula Biss

Recent Posts

  • May newsletter: analog intelligence
  • February newsletter: Purple, green, and gold
  • January newsletter: Making space

Get my newsletter

Get updates on what I'm working on and what I'm thinking about. Sign up and spread the word. Thanks!

Subscribe

About Jen

Jen Howard sitting in front of a brick wall. She is smiling.

Writer, journalist, editor, gadabout. Book- and nature lover. Washingtonian. LLC. Read more »

Latest Posts

  • May newsletter: analog intelligence
  • February newsletter: Purple, green, and gold
  • January newsletter: Making space
  • December newsletter: Routines vs. resolutions
  • November newsletter: Platform fatigue

Follow Me

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Mastodon
Tweets by JenHoward

Content is © Jennifer Howard or respective owners | Site by Rocketkoi