Miscellaneous

For Your Consideration – 8

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

(Although I assume that this sort of thing goes without saying these days, I thought I should nonetheless throw out the typical reminder that linking below does not necessarily imply wholesale endorsement.)

“Loss and Gain, or the Fate of the Book”:

“Whether the book survives or not, I am firmly of the opinion that itought to survive, and nothing will convince me otherwise. The heart has its beliefs that evidence knows not of. For me, to browse in a bookshop, especially a second-hand one, will forever be superior to browsing on the internet precisely because chance plays a much larger part in it. There are few greater delights than entirely by chance to come across something not only fascinating in itself, but that establishes a quite unexpected connection with something else. The imagination is stimulated in a way that the more logical connections of the Internet cannot match; the Internet will make people literal-minded …

To refuse to use the new technology in the hope of preserving old pleasures will not work because to do so would be no more authentic or honest than Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess. The regret is genuine; the refusal is not.”

“Out of Touch: E-reading isn’t reading”:

“New research continues to emphasize the importance of mind wandering for learning. It turns out that not paying attention is one of the best ways of discovering new ideas. Reading books, whether silently or aloud, remains one of the most efficient means of enabling such errant thinking. As our bodies rest, our minds begin to work in a different way. New connections, new pathways, and sharp turns are being made as we meander our way through the book, but also away from it. There is no way to tell if anyone is actually paying attention anymore as I read, including myself. This seems to be one of the great benefits of reading aloud, that you can think of something else while you do it. We may be holding the book together, but our minds are no doubt far apart by now. The fairy tale is the first story of childhood because it tells of such leaving behind (parents and home), of entering the dreamscape of the woods—and the mind. It tells of the crooked path of change. How can one know where reading books ends and dreaming in books begins?”

“Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore”:

“This summer, hackers destroyed my entire digital life in the span of an hour. My Apple, Twitter, and Gmail passwords were all robust—seven, 10, and 19 characters, respectively, all alphanumeric, some with symbols thrown in as well—but the three accounts were linked, so once the hackers had conned their way into one, they had them all. They really just wanted my Twitter handle: @mat. As a three-letter username, it’s considered prestigious. And to delay me from getting it back, they used my Apple account to wipe every one of my devices, my iPhone and iPad and MacBook, deleting all my messages and documents and every picture I’d ever taken of my 18-month-old daughter. Since that awful day, I’ve devoted myself to researching the world of online security. And what I have found is utterly terrifying.”

“Google Now: behind the predictive future of search”:

“In a single app, the company has combined its latest technologies: voice search that understands speech like a human brain, knowledge of real-world entities, a (somewhat creepy) understanding of who and where you are, and most of all its expertise at ranking information. Google has taken all of that and turned it into an interesting and sometimes useful feature, but if you look closely you can see that it’s more than just a feature, it’s a beta test for the future.”

“Gamer’s Paradise: Worshipping At The iOS Altar”:

“Game designer and academic Ian Bogost says the iPhone is a bit like a rosary. I have this way of refreshing my Twitter feed even when it doesn’t need reading, thumbing the touchscreen with a tactile pull-and-release, a sort of nervous lozenging that makes a popping noise when I let go.”

“How to Live Without Irony”:

“The ironic life is certainly a provisional answer to the problems of too much comfort, too much history and too many choices, but it is my firm conviction that this mode of living is not viable and conceals within it many social and political risks.”

“The Science and Art of Listening”:

“Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes. But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.

Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.”

“Axe worship”:

“Personally, I just like chopping for its own sake. There’s something warming about the ritual of it and the sense of provision. Place, stand, breathe, swing, cut. Watching the wood. Watching the radial splits out from the centre, marking the place to bring the axe down, waiting for the faint exhalation of scent from the wood as it falls. Like cooking, it provides a sense of sufficiency and delight but, unlike cooking, log-chopping has a particular rhythm to it, like a form of active meditation. You do, very literally, get into the swing of it.”

For Your Consideration – 7

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

“Welcome to the Future Nauseous”: Some jargon and neologisms, but interesting perspective.

“We aren’t being hit by Future Shock. We are going to be hit by Future Nausea.  You’re not going to be knocked out cold. You’re just going to throw up in some existential sense of the word. I’d like to prepare. I wish some science fiction writers would write a few nauseating stories.”

“The World Is Not Enough: Google and the Future of Augmented Reality”:

“It is The Future. You wake up at dawn and fumble on the bedstand for your (Google) Glass. Peering out at the world through transparent screens, what do you see?”

“Speaking in Memes”:

“We’ve developed a kind of meme literacy, a habit of intuiting in real time the potential virality of a speech act — to hear retweets inside words.”

“A Sense of Place”:

“The digital and the physical world are interacting ever more closely. The rapidly declining cost of communications and computing power has already wrought huge changes in the way people go about their daily lives. Digital maps and guides will affect the way people behave in the physical world and bring about yet more changes. The digital and the physical are becoming one.”

How We Talk About Media Refusal, Part 1: “Addiction”:

“This is the first of a series of three posts I’ll be doing in Flow about the topic of “media refusal,” which I define as the active and conscious rejection of a media technology or platform by its potential users. In these posts, I’ll be discussing how popular discourse tends to frame practices of media refusal and what implications these frames might have for the way we understand our participation in media culture.”

“What Words Are Worth”:

“The humanities, encountered primarily in the high school and college years, teach students to recognize a significant question, to make crucial distinctions in the articulation of its terms, to draw consequential conclusions, to assess conclusions in human terms, and to communicate the procedures and results of inquiry. These are all elements necessary for the making of right meaning, and meaning is a singularly powerful shaper of deeds.”

Literary Miscellany

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

In a recorded interview discussing the merits of Longfellow’s poetry, Dana Gioia, a fellow poet and former chairman of the NEA, made some arresting observations regarding the power of lyric poetry. He noted that great lyric poetry, of the sort Longfellow wrote, could weave “a spell of words around the auditor which goes right to the heart” — a reminder that the desire to “get” the meaning of a poem in other than poetic terms can be misguided.

Gioia then went on to tweak Franz Kafka’s metaphor — a book is the axe with which we break the frozen seas within us — for the purposes of understanding what poetry can do:

“A popular poem is this kind of … icepick that cracks this sort of … this composure we have around ourselves and affects us deeply and mysteriously in ways that we might not be able to articulate but that we can feel — our intuition recognizes as genuine.”

This resonated with me and I thought it worth passing along. Poetry, or the poetic imagination, as I have elsewhere suggested, can be a powerful supplement to the dispositions and habits seemingly engendered by technology (huge generalizations there, I know, but I’m going to have to let them lie). Read more poetry.

And while we are on poetry, here are two lines that have recently caught my attention, particularly in light of discussions of self-consciousness and authenticity. The first is from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock”:

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;”

And the second from Emily Dickinson, who elsewhere wrote, “Of Consciousness, her awful Mate The Soul cannot be rid”:

Me from Myself — to banish —
Had I Art —
Impregnable my Fortress
Unto All Heart —

But since Myself — assault Me —
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?

And since We’re mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication —
Me — of Me?

Lastly, I’ll use this venture into the humanities to note the passing of the great scholar and critic, Jacques Barzun. He was 104. As Alan Jacobs tweeted this morning, it is striking to consider that Barzun could remember the First World War. I noted a passage from Barzun not that long ago.

For Your Consideration – 6

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

“A Curious Question Of Vanity, Urgency, Pleasure And Anxiety”: By philosopher Alva Noë.

“Here’s a question, dear reader. I’d like to know what you think. Should kids have cell phones? Just to be exact, should sixth-graders have cell phones? Let me see if I can formulate the issue a bit better: Should I get my son a cell phone? He’s modest in his demands. He says he’ll settle for an iPhone 4. It’s not like he wants the latest model. I am serious. What should I do? I didn’t need one when I was his age. They didn’t exist then. Has the world reorganized itself so that a kid his age really does need a phone?”

“Drunk on Gadgets”:

“The ‘rightful place of science,’ to appropriate Obama’s phrase, is somewhere more humble than the pedestal on which politicians would place it. Technology is not a magic wand, even if presidents would like to wield it as if it were.”

“Generation Whine: Self-pitying twentysomethings and the Boomers who made them”: Article is a bit more nuanced than the title may suggest.

“Kathy Edin, a sociologist at Harvard who studies urban poverty and family life, is one of the most prominent critics of the emerging adulthood theory. The notion that an entire generation is consumed by the desire for ‘identity-based work’ is, she said, ‘completely ridiculous.’ ‘The myopia is galling,’ she added. ‘While people on Thought Catalog are struggling to find themselves, there are young families struggling to survive in an economy where two jobs can’t pay the food bill.'”

“Lonely, but united: Sherry Turkle and Steven Johnson on technology’s pain and promise”: Video.

“Turkle is often derided as a “Luddite,” while Johnson gets “utopian” a lot. But hearing them describe their positions in person was a chance for them to color in the subtleties. Turkle sees her latest work as “repentant,” after years of championing the benefits of technology, even though she still loves the potential of that technology, while Johnson admits there are costs to his method of engaging with the world through “weak-tie” networks. He also mourns his reduced ability to just sit down and read a book.”

“You Are Not a Switch: Recreativity and the modern dismissal of genius”:

“Recreativity has many proponents and represents a wide spectrum of opinion. Still, it’s striking how easily some of these critics and theorists glide from relatively sensible talk about the role of appropriation and allusion in art to sweeping claims of an ontological or biological nature.”

“Reign of the Tecno-Nanny”:

“What’s at stake in this is that reliance on the techno-nanny to make our decisions and monitor our lives invites us to outsource moral character.”

“Visualizing Vastness”:

“Admit it. You have no real feeling for the size of the solar system. That’s O.K. Nobody else does either. Even knowing the numbers doesn’t help much. If I tell you the Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter and 93,000,000 miles from the Sun, does that give you any sense of the distances involved? No, because the numbers are too big.”

“The 1991 CBC Massey Lectures, ‘The Malaise of Modernity'”: By Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor.

“To Taylor, self-fulfillment, although often expressed in self-centered ways, isn’t necessarily a rejection of traditional values and social commitment; it also reflects something authentic and valuable in modern culture. Only by distinguishing what is good in this modern striving from what is socially and politically dangerous, Taylor says, can our age be made to deliver its promise.”

“Where the Internet Lives: Take a Look Inside Google’s Data-Centers”:

For Your Consideration – 5

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

“How to Make Almost Anything: The Digital Fabrication Revolution”:

“Digital fabrication consists of much more than 3-D printing. It is an evolving suite of capabilities to turn data into things and things into data. Many years of research remain to complete this vision, but the revolution is already well under way. The collective challenge is to answer the central question it poses: How will we live, learn, work, and play when anyone can make anything, anywhere?”

“It Ain’t Necessarily So: How much do evolutionary stories reveal about the mind?“:

“Today’s biologists tend to be cautious about labelling any trait an evolutionary adaptation—that is, one that spread through a population because it provided a reproductive advantage. It’s a concept that is easily abused, and often “invoked to resolve problems that do not exist,” the late George Williams, an influential evolutionary biologist, warned. When it comes to studying ourselves, though, such admonitions are hard to heed. So strong is the temptation to explain our minds by evolutionary “Just So Stories,” Stephen Jay Gould argued in 1978, that a lack of hard evidence for them is frequently overlooked …”

“The Crisis in Higher Education”: Nick Carr on MOOCs.

“Is it different this time? Has technology at last advanced to the point where the revolutionary promise of distance learning can be fulfilled? We don’t yet know; the fervor surrounding MOOCs makes it easy to forget that they’re still in their infancy. But even at this early juncture, the strengths and weaknesses of this radically new form of education are coming into focus.”

Carr continued his exploration of MOOCs with blog posts here, here, and here — all worth reading.

“Hipsters and Low-Tech” and “Hipstertechnoauthenticity”: At Cyborgology, P. J. Rey and Nathan Jurgenson exchange views on hipsters, authenticity, and low-tech. Good comment threads on both posts as well. From Rey’s post:

“Thus, nostalgia for the low-tech/lo-fi/analog is really nostalgia for a time when technology could be mastered–a time when you could fix your own car or bike, a time when you pop open the back of a camera and intuitively understand how it works, a time when you knew where your food came from and how it was prepared, a time when the circuits in electronic were large enough to be visible and an average person could figure out how to repair, replace, hack, and even build them, a time when a device was yours to open and when warranties end-user agreement didn’t micro-manage how used your own property. In short, the appeal of low-tech is it affirms our sense of independence and individuality.”

“Reach Out and Touch Someone: Technology and the Promise of Intimacy”:

“It seems to me that we have moved on, for better or worse, into an age where interactivity is deeply ingrained in our daily lives and that we have the power to make these interactions, these technologies, meaningful. We ignore technological advances at our own risk, I think, but we do not have to succumb to them blindly. We can set the rules. We can make them live up to their promises. That is our job as artists, thinkers and humans. The utopian future promised in the CISCO and Bell Companies advertisements is only ever as real as we make it.”

“Quantum Computing Simplified”: Tall order, not badly executed.

“Quantum computing is based on quantum mechanical concepts. To understand quantum mechanics, we need to shrink down to the size of atoms and molecules. We need to understand how the atoms (or molecules) interact, what causes them to interact, and why they interact. We need to understand the rules or laws of quantum mechanics just like understanding the laws or rules of Chess.”