This ad for Internet Explorer can’t be real… can it?
(Source: Business Insider)
Benjamin Franklin is said to have once described democracy as two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty, he went on to point out, is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
“
| — |
Well-Armed Lambs: The Real Way To Get Congress To Understand SOPA | PandoDaily After watching a couple of debates on the SOPA issue, I’ll admit to being more in the dark than when I started — it just seems like one or both parties must be outright lying about the effects of the bill. They’re not debating its merits and downsides as a measure for combating piracy, they just seem to be talking about two different pieces of legislation. My gut says we shouldn’t be doing anything to make it easier for huge corporations to exercise their inherent litigiousness against the little guy, but respecting copyright is legitimate issue and if the bill really would only effect overseas organizations it doesn’t seem unreasonable. But nobody’s giving straight answers to questions about how the bill would actually effect the internet as I use it, so how can one take an informed position? In any case, Benj Franklin certainly had a way with words, didn’t he. |
The nanny-state at its worst. I don’t see how you can possibly argue that restricting access to up-to-the-minute information is the right way to calm a country in the midst of rioting and upheaval. If thugs are using social networks to facilitate criminal activity, let them die by the sword as authorities can monitor the internet just as well as potential violent demonstrators can. Everyone else in the country deserves the right to know if a mob’s headed toward their neighborhood, not to mention the right to try to keep living some semblance of normal life while really scary stuff is happening.
Marcy and Polymathic have done a boatload of favors and beautiful work for me and the organizations for which I’ve worked over the past couple of years, and their new project is mad exciting. Go check it out, spread the word, and help them get a great idea off the ground!
Mark it: this may be the first time Facebook has legitimately gotten me to look twice at a targeted ad. Either their algorithm got better, or I have become a more predictable sort of loser.
Speaking of Truisms
I have THE FUNNIEST story for you about trying to update the clearly outmoded “one in the hand is worth two in the bush” with Evyn but oh! I cannot tell it because it involves admitting far too much about my internet dating habits (and it is still possible that the person who I’ve definitely never met before will follow up on their email titled “one in the bed”).
By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: July 8, 2010Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.
Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.
…
Recently, Internet mavens got some bad news. … Carr argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation….
But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.
The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.
A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.
A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.
These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”
But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.
Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.
It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.
I wanted to trim this more for Tumblr attention span appropriateness, but it’s just too good and too right to chop up anymore. It’s rare that I find myself on the side of any argument defending a system of hierarchy, but in the case of education, which is so closely tied with self-formed identity, it seems totally indispensable. You can’t master calculus until you understand algebra: the latter is a fundamental skill for the former. I think Brooks makes a very compelling argument here that education is, in essence, the discipline of deferring to the people who understand more than we do until we have a good reason to do otherwise. Which is to say, one must self-identify as an educated person in order to challenge whichever heirarchical system of education bequeathed the relevant knowledge in the first instance. This paradox is beautiful and very, very Jewish.
Sample size: exactly 18 of the thousand or so participants in the study were classified as “internet addicts.” So those 18 show a correlation between “internet addiction” and a higher-than-average rate of depression. 18.
GUH. Maybe if I clutch my pearls a little tighter I will have to stop spending so much time on the webz, and thus find myself cured of the biologically-influenced imbalance of chemicals in my brain.
