Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr

"Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction."

- Nicholas Carr, from the Atlantic's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

A New Theory of Distraction - The New York Times

"Another source of confusion is distraction’s apparent growth. There are two big theories about why it’s on the rise. The first is material: it holds that our urbanized, high-tech society is designed to distract us. In 1903, the German sociologist Georg Simmel argued, in an influential essay called “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” that in the tech-saturated city “stimulations, interests, and the taking up of time and attention” turn life into “a stream which scarcely requires any individual efforts for its ongoing.” (In the countryside, you have to entertain yourself.) One way to understand the distraction boom, therefore, is in terms of the spread of city life: not only has the world grown more urban, but digital devices let us bring citylike experiences with us wherever we go.

The second big theory is spiritual—it’s that we’re distracted because our souls are troubled. The comedian Louis C.K. may be the most famous contemporary exponent of this way of thinking. A few years ago, on “Late Night” with Conan O’Brien, he argued that people are addicted to their phones because “they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.” (David Foster Wallace also saw distraction this way.) The spiritual theory is even older than the material one: in 1874, Nietzsche wrote that “haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself”; in the seventeenth century, Pascal said that “all men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” In many ways, of the two, the material theory is more reassuring. If the rise of distraction is caused by technology, then technology might reverse it, while if the spiritual theory is true then distraction is here to stay. It’s not a competition, though; in fact, these two problems could be reinforcing each other. Stimulation could lead to ennui, and vice versa...

...The way we talk about distraction has always been a little self-serving—we say, in the passive voice, that we’re “distracted by” the Internet or our cats, and this makes us seem like the victims of our own decisions. But Crawford shows that this way of talking mischaracterizes the whole phenomenon. It’s not just that we choose our own distractions; it’s that the pleasure we get from being distracted is the pleasure of taking action and being free. There’s a glee that comes from making choices, a contentment that settles after we’ve asserted our autonomy. When you write an essay in Microsoft Word while watching, in another window, an episode of “American Ninja Warrior”—trust me, you can do this—you’re declaring your independence from the drudgery of work. When you’re waiting to cross the street and reach to check your e-mail, you’re pushing back against the indignity of being made to wait. Distraction is appealing precisely because it’s active and rebellious.

Awkwardly honest cards say what you’re actually thinking on special occasions

Notification Trolling

6-Day Visit To Rural African Village Completely Changes Woman’s Facebook Profile Picture - The Onion

ST. LOUIS—Calling the experience “completely transformative,” local 22-year-old Angela Fisher told reporters Tuesday that her six-day visit to the rural Malawian village of Neno has completely changed her profile picture on Facebook. “As soon as I walked into that dusty, remote town and the smiling children started coming up to me, I just knew my Facebook profile photo would change forever,” said Fisher, noting that she realized early in her nearly weeklong visit just how narrow and unworldly her previous Facebook profile photos had been. “I don’t think my profile photo will ever be the same, not after the experience of taking such incredible pictures with my arms around those small African children’s shoulders. Honestly, I can’t even imagine going back to my old Facebook photo of my roommate and I at an outdoor concert.” Since returning, Fisher said she has been encouraging every one of her friends to visit Africa, promising that it would change their Facebook profile photos as well.
From The Onion

(Another) Orwell vs Huxley

What a Fake Tweet can do to Wall Street

"Any news of an attack on the White House is a sign of imminent apocalypse, and the market reacted accordingly: From 1:08 p.m. to 1:10 p.m., the Dow Jones Industrial average plunged more than 100 points, from 14697.15 to 14548.58. Just as quickly though, it rebounded. By 1:13 p.m., it was back above 14690"

Bring prespective through reading

Meet the Facebook version of you - Gizmodo

The wit in your status updates is delightful. The real life version of you always seemed intent on cornering me into a night of drinking wine after work so I could listen to you go on rather humorlessly about money problems and the usual rash of petty resentments against family and colleagues. But the Facebook version of you is one languid little paragraph of blurted bon mots after another. 

And I am crazy about the fact that the Facebook version of you is spiritual bordering on religious and philosophical. The real life version of you is, to be blunt, pretty quick to judge people for believing in anything more than reasonably priced alcohol, entry level luxury cars, restlessness, and chronic dissatisfaction. But the Facebook version of you has spun an enchanted web of a bio that feels like a cross between Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech and the mission statement of an idealist’s filthy commune that I long to spend my remaining years on.....

- Gizmodo  

Number Of Users Who Actually Enjoy Facebook Down To 4 - The Onion

"...Indeed, the Pew report found that 99 percent of Facebook members could not recall having enjoyed any of the social network’s features at any time since 2009. Of that subset, 74 percent said they had asked themselves “How has my life come to this?” while checking the website multiple times per day, 67 percent said they were “inevitably plunged into an alternating cycle of vanity and self-disgust” when reviewing tagged pictures of themselves, and 52 percent said they had questioned the whole point of life itself after spending half an hour on the site only to realize the most interesting thing they had seen the entire time was a photo of what someone had for dinner..."

the rest at The Onion

A Summary of Walter Benjamin

1. Everything is perfectly reproducible but the act of reproduction devalues things.
2. Reproduction exchanges uniqueness and permanence for plurality and transience.
3. We change our tastes accordingly to enjoy transient things uncritically.
4. As a result we rapidly lose our ability to exercise value judgements - particularly when watching TV or films.
5. The end result is that we lose our critical faculties altogether. We begin to value everything uncritically.
6. Consumer society then satisfies the demand for worthless commodities.
7. As we consume these commodities, becomes overwhelmingly superficial.

From Marcus Honeysett's Meltdown

The Seven Deadly (Online) Sins???

Wikipiphany

Kim Kierkegaardashin Twitter

Someone made a Twitter account that mashes up the sayings of famous philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and famous socialite Kim Kardashian

Here's a few tweets:

Brave New World (is Here!)

"...Huxley also foresaw a disturbing partnership between the state and capitalism but didn’t anticipate how little need for government collusion sophisticated marketers would need to reorder society. In “Brave New World,” the state has suppressed all simple sports because they don’t require lots of expensive equipment to keep the economy humming. Instead, it relentlessly hypes complicated tech-y activities such as “electromagnetic golf.” A couple of generations ago, kids might have bought one baseball glove and one bat that would last for years. Today they instead spend hundreds of dollars on Xbox 360s and games that quickly become boring and demand to be replaced with upgraded versions.

Thanks to subliminal messages repeated thousands of times in nurseries while kids sleep, the “Brave New World” characters grow up conditioned to accept a disposable society in which everyone is always hungry for the latest thing and simply discards the old. Huxley would be surprised to see that no such indoctrination is necessary to make people throw away an iPhone that was state of the art three years ago and line up overnight to get a slightly improved version...."

- Kyle Smith, writing in the New York Post

How Not to Write About Africa - Foreign Policy

"It's hard out here for us old Africa hands. We are desperate to see more coverage of important stories from the continent and for our neighbors to become more educated about the places where we study and work. Yet when we get that coverage, it tends to make us cringe.

Take, for instance, the current violence in northern Mali. In the last six weeks, Mali has experienced a coup d'état and a declaration of independence from rebels who now loosely control half its territory. The recent conflict has displaced approximately 268,000 people as various groups of Islamists and separatist rebels jostle for control of desert oasis cities as a drought-driven food crisis looms with the arrival of the country's hot season. The situation in Mali is by far the worst unfolding humanitarian crisis in the world today, but compared with say, Syria or Afghanistan, you probably haven't heard much about it. 

Or consider the flurry of coverage of Central Africa that followed March's "Kony 2012" phenomenon. First of all, it is frustrating that it takes a viral Internet video or the involvement of Hollywood celebrities to bring attention to the depredations of groups like the Lord's Resistance Army. Even worse, many Africa correspondents file stories that fall prey to pernicious stereotypes and tropes that dehumanize Africans. Mainstream news outlets frequently run stories under headlines like "Land of Mangoes and Joseph Kony," seemingly without thinking how condescending and racist such framing sounds..."

Laura Seay, the writer of the article, "How Not to Write About Africa" (Foreign Policy) with the following questions and conclusion.

"Is it because Africa is still in many Western minds the exotic "other" of movies and imagination? Or perhaps because many Western reporters still approach Africa with a mixed sense of excitement at being somewhere so "unique" and fear of the Heart of Darkness? Or is it simple ignorance about an Africa that, as Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina notes, is never going to look like what the West wants it to look like? I don't have a definitive answer. But I do think we can do better."

This video explains part of the problem and provides a solution too.

 

Reaction vs. Reflection - Kevin Kelly

"Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen "friends" for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it."

- Kevin Kelly, from Smithsonian's article "Reading in a Whole New Way"

The irony is I found this quote on my iPad...

Social Media Explained...in Donuts

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