Changing Literacy and Reading Habits around the Blogosphere

Several posts around the blogosphere relate to changes in literacy and reading from ancient times until today and from today moving into the future.

Steve Wiggins has a cleverly-titled post, “A World Without Borders,” which reflects on how we went from being a world with few bookstores to a world with many to a world where many are closing down.

Suzanne McCarthy went to hear Larry Hurtado speak about early Christian literacy.

I’m including a post at Diglotting about the text critical issue in John 1:18 (μονογενης θεος vs. μονογενης υιος) under this heading because it is an example of something hard for us to imagine – can you imagine trying to discuss a text – whether the Constitution or Harry Potter – and not being able to assume that your conversation partner’s copy said the same thing yours did? The world of handwritten texts is hard for us to imagine.

Jim Davila shared that good high-quality images of the Isaiah scroll from Qumran are now online.

At Inside Higher Ed, Barbara Fister threatens to take away our beer in order to get us to acknowledge the obvious truth that academic journals can be ridiculously expensive. That periodical also has an article about an activist in trouble with JSTOR for his downloading activities.

John Loftus shared a link to my post about evidence for the historical Jesus and shared his own thoughts on the subject.

Jesus Creed, Unreasonable Faith, Joel Watts, Henry Neufeld and P. Z. Myers have all mentioned or discussed Josh McDowell’s recent comments about the internet. The accessibility of information is a good thing, but the fact that most readers of the internet use it uncritically and with no differentiation between different kinds of sources with different sorts of expertise – or none at all – is a legitimate cause for concern, illustrating why we need to be teaching information literacy skills in our educational institutions.

Finally, SF Signal has a post by a book-buying addict struggling to cope with the way ebooks and online shopping can take such an addition to new levels of expenditure.