More from Ivan Illich’s In the Vineyard of the Text. Excerpts from the first chapter, “Reading toward Wisdom” (page numbers in parenthesis). Previous post in the series: “In the Vineyard of the Text”. There is a line, whose source I’ve forgotten, that goes something like, “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently … Continue reading “Reading toward Wisdom”
A while ago I posted about a rather elaborate Droid X commercial which featured a man’s arm morphing into a mechanical, cyborg arm from which the Droid phone then emerges. This commercial struck me as a useful and vivid illustration of an important theoretical metaphor, deployed by Marshall McLuhan among others, to help us understand … Continue reading “The Things We Make, Make Us”
A while ago, I wrote about what I took to be the convergence of the society of the spectacle and the disciplinary society, the convergence, that is, of the analysis offered by Debord and Foucault respectively. It was in some ways an odd suggestion given Foucault’s expressed hostility to spectacle theorizing, but it struck me … Continue reading Attention and Memory in the Age of the Disciplinary Spectacle
I recently had a conversation with a student about the ethical quandaries raised by the advent of self-driving cars. Hypothetically, for instance, how would a self-driving car react to a pedestrian who stepped out in front of it? Whose safety would it be programmed to privilege? The relatively tech-savvy student was unfazed. Obviously this would … Continue reading Fit the Tool to the Person, Not the Person to the Tool
A day after writing about technology, culture, and innovation, I’ve come across two related pieces. At Walter Mead’s blog, the novel use of optics to create a cloaking effect provided a springboard into a brief discussion of technological innovation. Here’s the gist of it: “Today, Big Science is moving ahead faster than ever, and the opportunities … Continue reading Technology Will Not Save Us
L.M. Sacasas 