Mark Ford

From the London Review dated 2 December 2004

Love and Theft

“Virtual information that appears on your own screen tends to seem, viscerally, less someone else’s than when it’s printed in a book with the author’s name on the cover. The ‘boundless textual promiscuity’ of the web, as Thomas Mallon called it, has also decisively altered the way we think about information; the point is not so much to be good at remembering things, as to be good at finding them quickly. Already web skills are playing an important role in the evolutionary struggle for survival. Will future historians turn first to the wrist and clicking finger in assessing a corpse from our era? Will those who develop RSI soon be the information revolution’s lepers? How soon before our relatively recently acquired skills become as obsolete as the ability to kill a mammoth with a spear or write shorthand or programme a VCR?” [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography