Stephen Harrison

Does anyone else bristle at this framing? WSJ says blue books are “torturing” students with hand cramps, and “nobody likes them.” Listen, students have been outsourcing everything to AI and cheating their way through college. Blue books should be celebrated as a return to authentic human learning.

“Print puts the voices of everyday people on a more equal social plane with those of their social superiors […] All you have access to is the author’s mind. And we all look much more equal on the inside.” —James Marriott, The New Dark Ages

I read this short book today on my flight and found it concise, forcefully written, and quite persuasive.

@chrislhayes.bsky.social writing about print in “The Siren’s Call”

. @rgcooke.bsky.social has a fantastic book on Wikipedia that just came out today. Deeply researched and beautifully written, the book offers insights into the personalities & debates that shaped “the last enyclopedia humans will ever write.” Sharing a sample paragraph that I’ve chosen at random.

Growing up, I learned the order of questions to ask as (in order of importance) who, what, where, when, why, and how. Today I think “how” is the most important question because it probes the environment, the medium. The “how” matters more than the “what” most of the time.

A British startup has established a way for publishers to certify their books as “organic” meaning written by real people, not AI. As Ted Chiang says in the piece, “The knowledge of how something was created cannot be separated from your experience.” www.wired.com/story/organi...

Sure, e-readers are less distracting than phones, but they still differ from reading on paper. Research from Anne Mangen’s team suggests that screen readers have more difficulty mentally mapping a book and recalling the order of events within a story. The “screen inferiority effect” is real.

This Guardian article finally gets it right. Most coverage of the return to physical media frames it entirely as nostalgia when the real drivers are privacy, preservation, & sovereignty. Gen Z is leading the charge because they’re acutely aware that streaming platforms can’t be trusted.

There are a lot of similarities between real life Wikipedia editors and the characters of the techno-thriller "The Editors" by @stephenharrison.com youtube.com/shorts/kiK9i...

@stephenharrison.com shares his journey from a tech journalist covering @wikipedia.org to a techno-thriller author of The Editors. Full Optics Podcast episode will be live on Saturday 05 at 10 AM EST , 2 PM GMT youtube.com/playlist?lis...

It's finally here! This Saturday, we will premiere our Optics Podcast episode with @stephenharrison.com. In this episode, we will dive into @wikipedia.org , the aim for neutrality, and the editing wars. Tune in on Saturday at 10 AM EST / 2 PM GMT. Link: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Worth noting that Pope Leo’s background is Augustinian. St. Augustine is the patron saint of printers. www.ncregister.com/cna/pope-leo...

This story is one of Lovett’s best. It’s rare that anything on Wikipedia gets a true conclusion, much less a relatively happy one where the parties agree they both made honest mistakes. Sometimes “assume good faith” works.

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. —Marshall McLuhan, 1964

new from me (and not an April Fools thing): I spoke in depth with @ilyaslebleu.bsky.social, the Wikipedia editor who first proposed the ban on A.I.-generated text in English articles. we talked about the idea-to-policy process, the disagreements along the way, and what other platforms can learn:

One lovely part of book research is reading these deep cuts

*sigh* There comes a time in every millennial’s life when you’re officially recast as the old guy. Thanks to @vox.com for making me sound ancient in this otherwise fantastic piece about Wikipedia’s role in the age of AI. www.vox.com/culture/4787...

The Internet Archive stores physical books, preserving them as a back-up to digitization. Whereas AI companies despise the physical world so much they’ve shredded millions of books and tried to hide the evidence.

Pizza Hut is a core memory for me, the spot where we had so many class pizza parties. They were special, yes, but also just a normal part of mid-’90s childhood life. Now it’s a place of pilgrimage for anyone desperate enough to be “swaddled in a warm 20th-century embrace.”

This one is for the Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman fans: “The medium is the metaphor” > “The medium is the message”

As a thought experiment, I’ve been updating the references in a few passages from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). What do you think?

Most writing about the Attention Crisis is gloomy, for good reason. But I appreciate this little book by Prof. Alan Jacobs because he highlights the rewards that come from the struggle of deep reading, as in this passage:

the Onion needs to update this for 2026 to mention AI summaries & give us one cause it’s too long

I love this new term “critical ignoring” because it points to yet another benefit of print. Our phones flood us with an endless amount of low-quality info that’s incredibly hard to ignore. By contrast, a physical book is a single-purpose device that excludes the background noise and lets you focus.

Eighty-four percent of Americans say they’ve adopted analogue habits to create boundaries with screens. Writing in notebooks leads the list at 32%, followed by reading printed books at 31% and using paper calendars at 28%.

Among the many topics missing from this piece is any discussion of the medium. Harry Potter was a print phenomenon, with most readers encountering the books in physical form, and huge in-person launch events. It’s not only that politics have changed. It’s that we’ve become increasingly disembodied.

This news means a lot to me. I'm writing my first nonfiction book, THE POWER OF PRINT, about why we think differently with paper versus screens, and why we should all aspire to reclaim our print brains. Coming 2027 from St. Martin's Press. @stmartinspress.bsky.social

Anyone marking Wikipedia's 25th anniversary today can believe it’s an incredible success story for commons-based peer production and that there're aspects of the site that sometimes piss them off. Let's hope it lasts a while longer. My latest for WIRED:

Microblogging is just a catastrophically bad form of human interaction. If you sat down to design a system specifically meant to make people act out and create harassment mobs, you'd be hard pressed to build something more effectively toxic.

Anyone else conflicted by this Atlantic essay? I agree with the author that the “democracy depends on reading” line won’t be effective. Then again, promoting reading as a “vice” seems like a mistake, especially now as so many folks are starved for wisdom/virtue/healthy pleasures.

As we start 2026, I’m grateful for the sharp, thoughtful people I’ve met on Bluesky, but I also want to keep in mind what my favorite contemporary philosopher says about posting:

Gotta love the do-it-yourself gumption in Adler’s 1940 guide How to Read a Book. “With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more.”

One of the underrated benefits of print is the variety of forms. Heavy textbooks, faintly musky paperbacks, pocket-sized primers… Whereas digital tools tie the experience to a single, uniform environment. The knowledge sticks less, and we struggle to transfer what we’ve learned to other contexts.

We all know McLuhan’s, “The medium is the message.” He also said, “As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation.” By his logic, AI was always going to flip the framework, producing new appreciation for analogue forms. Let’s hope we make the most of the reversal.