depuis toujours, on conserve dans les bibliothèques toutes sortes d’objets qui ne sont pas des livres, ni même parfois des documents écrits, du document d’archives aux objets de curiosités, aux peintures, bustes et sculptures, aux collections de numismatique, sans parler des nouveaux supports (DVD, etc.) et des nouveaux médias

Selon le sens littéral (…), ce mot signifie un lieu destiné pour y mettre des livres. Une bibliothèque est un lieu plus ou moins vaste, avec des tablettes ou des armoires, où les livres sont rangés sous différentes classes: nous parlerons de cet ordre à l’article CATALOGUE.

Dans sa définition implicite, la bibliothèque fonctionne ainsi comme une structure de rassemblement, d’organisation et de mise à disposition du savoir. C’est la double articulation, de l’espace physique et du contenu abstrait qui caractérise la bibliothèque moderne.

My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

Of course, it's probably not an either/or proposition. I want both: I want my organic brain to contain vast stores of knowledge and my silicon overmind to contain a stupidly huge amount more.

by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely "human" tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming

In the 1950s, John Von Neumann was quoted as saying that “the ever accelerating progress of technology…gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

spoken language is an evolutionary adaptation, but written language, in every form from cuneiform to unicode, is a technology, so there’s no written mode that isn’t under some sway or other.

Kittler says the typewriter made Nietzsche’s work more aphoristic, but Nietzsche was always an aphoristic writer, so was this a perversion or a purification of his style?

I think Carr’s premises are correct:  the mechanisms of media affect the nature of thought.

there are a host of people, from mathematicians to jazz musicians, who practice kinds of deep thought that are perfectly distinguishable from deep reading.

in either the availability or comprehension of material on scientific or technical subjects

La machine à écrire et la machine à lire se sont rejointes, ont fusionné, même si elles se démultiplient en autant d'outils que de pratiques.

Les développements récents des neurosciences cognitives permettent maintenant d'envisa­ger de véritables programmes d'éducation de l'attention, renseignant sur ses limites et son bon usage. Dans cet univers de multitâche permanent, ce bon usage ne va plus de soi et il est peut-être temps d'envisager une véritable éducation de l'attention, notamment en milieu scolaire, qui prépare dès l'enfance à la vie connectée.

The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement.

The web is an assembly not of things but of shards, of snippets, of bits and pieces.

To move the words of a book onto the screen of a networked computer is to engineer a collision between two contradictory technological, and aesthetic, forces. Something's got to give. Either the web gains edges, or the book loses them.

I would like to see more attention paid to how you go from thinking something to making something. If I’m learning about numbers, how will that help me understand the financial situation that no one in the world seems to understand right now.

So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things: First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. Far out in the "long tail" of the distribution curve — that extended place of low-to-no sales where most of the books in the world live — digital interlinking will lift the readership of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don't know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.

once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves.

Once snippets, articles and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent collection.

significant increases in signal intensity in additional regions controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision