Tuesday, January 11, 2005

from boston: sign o' the times

The hotel where I'm staying is nice enough to put the New York Times in front of my door in the morning. What I do is I pick it up, set it on my bed, and then go read the New York Times online.

BTW, people often say that one of the advantages of reading the print versions of papers is that your eyes fall onto interesting stories that they otherwise would not. I've wondered about a variant of this with regard to the online availability of journal articles. Nowadays, because so much content is available online and I can obtain the rest as pdfs through one or another document delivery service, I never have occasion to track down the print version of an article. As much time as this saves me, I remember how enjoyable and edifying it would be to run across interesting articles in the course of looking through bound volumes for an article. I would lose whole weekend afternoons this way in graduate school. Of course, it's easy enough to blow a weekend afternoon online, but it's not quite the same, if you know what I mean.

4 comments:

dorotha said...

my sister hates this about the ease of getting things online these days. with her own students she frets that they will never know the joy of unexpectedly running across an article or book that can help them, but that they wouldn't have found unless they were meandering through the stacks some lonely afternoon.

Anonymous said...

cyberdipity

Anonymous said...

how funny that they put a NY Times outside your door in Boston. Shelley

Anonymous said...

Why wouldn't they put a New York Times outside Jeremy's room? Who do you think owns the Boston Globe?