Saturday, May 9, 2009

the internet a literary cafe

Great little tidbit in the back of the New Yorker:

The best thing I read this week was a blog post by George Jonas (…) comparing the literary cafés of pre-Second World War Europe to the Internet. The two, he argues, are not unalike:

"A literary café was a cesspool, an insane asylum, but also an oasis of sanity and an outpost of liberty. It depended on the table you picked. Ideas spawned at table six could rescue—or destroy—everyone at table seven. Cyberspace is a literary café with countless tables, that’s all."


3 comments:

  1. I always compared the internet to French-style salons of the late 18th century.

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  2. I like to compare it to an animal shelter: here we are, all locked up in our stacked cages, barking at each other and driving each other mad!

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  3. What a great comparison. The thing I love most about people who write, whether it be professionally or not, is getting to hear voices, tons of different voices.

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