McDonaldization
23 Wednesday Sep 2009
Posted in Uncategorized
Monthly Archives: September 2009
Is The Internet Making Us _________?
21 Monday Sep 2009
Posted in Books, Technology and Web, Writing
Is The Internet Melting Our Brains?
Salon had an interview with Dennis Baron, author of A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. He discusses how every new technological medium has had it’s detractors. From the written text, to the telegraph, to the printing press; they all had strong contrarians that saw these technologies as “the end of civilization as we know it”. Check out Plato on written words:
I start with Plato’s critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They’re not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down — the ultimate irony.
via BB
Food For Thought Links
20 Sunday Sep 2009
Posted in Food for Thought Links
Tags
Books, Carl Jung, Facebook, Homosexuality, Paul Graham, Personality, Psychology, Publishing, Social Networking
The Holy Grail of the Unconscious
The Ny Time Magazine article tells the story about the lost book of Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology. For almost 100 years, the red leather bound book has been the subject of speculation and controversy. Sarah Corbett writes about the struggle to get it published. Below is a snip of what it’s about:
“The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.”
I want to read that.
“You wanna know how I know your gay? You like Coldplay.” That’s a line Paul Rudd says to Seth Rogen in the 40 Year Old Virgin. Well, that man-child joke is soon to become obsolete if this project is proven valid, which I doubt. Two MIT students created a software algorithm that studies a person’s Facebook profile and they claim it can predict if the person is gay.
Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.
via Meta Filter
Paul Graham on publishing and it’s shift and fight between selling content or selling the medium.
Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.
via Snarkmarket
Being Likable
16 Wednesday Sep 2009
Posted in Personal Development
The Importance of Being Likable
There’s a popular saying that begins “If your not offending someone, you’re doing something wrong”. There’s a truth to that and the lesson behind that phrase is that you’re never going to satisfy everyone. But a lot of people use that to give themselves permission to be cynical jerks. Scott H Young’s post discusses this and how plain old niceness has been given a bad name.
Being nice. Nice isn’t wimpy, it’s just not being rude. Often people with lower confidence try to become more confident by being a jerk. Truly self-assured people don’t need to do this, so the most genuinely confident people are also often nicer.
Charles Darwin Film Too Controversial?
16 Wednesday Sep 2009
Posted in Film and Television, Videos
Tags
Creation, a movie about the life of Charles Darwin and his “atheist essay” The Origin of the Species is sadly and predictably too controversial. The film hasn’t found a distributor yet because studios are afraid it will offend a lot of stupid people. I mean, creationists. But I agree that this movie is controversial. It’s controversial that these people actually had the nerve of making a film about a dude that likes looking at birds and collects bugs and expects Hollywood to distribute it.
Challenge Vs Skill
16 Wednesday Sep 2009
Posted in Personal Development
Tags
I’m Not Here to Make Friends
14 Monday Sep 2009
Posted in Videos
In the latest This American Life podcast, the theme was “Frenemies”. The idea was about people that stay in friendships that are awful. Basically people that have friends that are almost their enemies. Thus frenemies. The story of note was about the video embedded above. It was made by Rich Juzwiak and he tells the story of what compelled him to make the video.
This video gives me an excuse to say something that’s been on my mind. While it’s a harsh thing to say and something that people would hold on to saying in real life, (the irony couldn’t be more poignant) most people think of saying that and say it in more subtle ways. It happens in jobs for example. But another place it happens is in the “social media sphere”. It’s not as blunt as “I’m not here to make friends”, but using social media to give advice about social media, is like people smiling and shaking your hand while holding on their other hand a copy of “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.
Infinite Jest – Review
13 Sunday Sep 2009
Like many, I got interested in reading this mammoth of a book and the author David Foster Wallace in general by reading Kottke.org. The tipping point that got me into actually buying the thing was an article he republished about Infinite Jest being an influence on Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, which after finishing the novel I have to say that yes, there are many similarities, but Infinite Jest isn’t just about a weird and messed up family. Not that I found that disappointing in any way.
So What is Infinite Jest About?
It’s really hard for me to answer that easily because: 1) There’s no doubt I missed a lot of things and I’m sure it needs a second reading. 2) It’s more theme driven than plot driven. The closest thing to a plot synopsis you’ll find is that it’s set in the near future were the US ends up with a big waste and ecological problem. The government in this future is an Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N) and is blended with corporations that control media and for some reason renamed the calendar. It centers around a family called the Incandezas that lead a Tennis Academy and a staff manager of an AA rehab center called Don Gately. Their lives are intertwined because they live in the same area, Boston, but also because of a mysterious veiled woman called Madame Psychosis, which appeared in many of the films of the Incandeza patriarch. Like “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane, the gimmick in what you can call a plot, is the tracking of a supposed lethal film that James Incandeza made.
The Difficulty Thing
The book doesn’t get called gargantuan because people exaggerate. It’s 1088 pages, with almost 400 footnotes, some of those footnotes have footnotes, and some footnotes are paragraphs and pages long. But it only took me like 8 weeks or so to get through it and I’m not really that fast of a reader. (Logging my reading status on Goodreads helped a lot.) People that praise or dislike this book argue about its length as what makes it difficult or perceived as difficult. But it’s not the length that makes it daunting.
In Kottke’s forward for the InfiniteSummer.org book club, he states that you don’t have to be an english major to enjoy Infinite Jest and I agree with that to an extent. But this isn’t exactly a Harry Potter novel. There’s third person perspective, first person perspective, and sometimes the author-knows-it-all-perspective. Confusing back and forth in time. Extensive digressions. The fact that I had to take peeks at sites like InfiniteSummer to get some handle on it proves that you really can’t just sit down alone and have fun reading the adventures of Hal Incandenza.
So What Do I Think About It
*Some Spoilers
As I mentioned at the start, I have to read this a second time. I want to read it a second time. I need to read it a second time. It is intriguing, brutal, funny, disturbing. There are legless wheelchair assassins. There’s a film J.O. Incandenza made called Blood Sister: One Tough Nun that I hope Tarantino makes one day. A child eats fungus. A tennis player wins games while holding a gun to his head, threatening to kill himself it he doesn’t win, while playing tennis.
The only negative criticism I can give it is that you can’t really look at it as a work of fiction. Not in the traditional sense. While I found some of the characters interesting, it was really hard for me to really like a character. To root for them or hate them. They’re all neutral. But I guess that’s part of the point of this novel. Wallace’s inside joke and wink is that what’s entertaining about the story it’s is non-entertainment and unsatisfying story arc. It’s like a very long thesis about addiction and entertainment that uses plot and characters as props.
So I would definitely recommend it to people that enjoy reading, but not to anyone that’s looking for something to read.
A Listomania – The Cheeseburger of Essay Forms
11 Friday Sep 2009
Posted in Writing
Saying that list type articles are mostly linkbait isn’t a profound insight. By now, we have been so inundated by the “10 Ways to x”, that we’re really numb to it and Cracked.com was fun for one month. But Paul Graham’s essay reminded me that lists are better as writing tools than a way for a reader to acquire knowledge.
Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure—figuring out what in high school we’d have called its “outline.” Not explicitly, of course, but someone who really understands an article probably has something in his brain afterward that corresponds to such an outline. In a list of n things, this work is done for you. Its structure is an exoskeleton.
Sadly a lot of them aren’t exoskeletons, but something someone is forcing into a numbered list.
People Aren’t Geniuses, They Only Make Works of Genius
11 Friday Sep 2009
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate writes about genius-dom. He discusses Me and Orson Welles, an upcoming Richard Linklater film about Welles rise. He also writes about other artists that we have dubbed genius.
Has the term been applied somewhat—or wildly (Tarantino?)—indiscriminately of late? And have the prerogatives of genius too often been used to excuse transgressions or mediocrity? (“Not his best work, but he’s a genius!”)
Those are precisely the questions—the nature of genius, the profligacy of genius, the questionable allowances made for genius—that are at the heart of Me and Orson Welles, which is perhaps Linklater’s most ambitious film and is scheduled to be released this Thanksgiving. I think it will cause a stir. Oh, let’s not be restrained: When I saw it, I found it amazing and moving.
Chiefly because of Welles, his genius and his tragedy. The film celebrates the triumph of Welles’ genius, but it also gives us a Welles who abuses the prerogatives of genius in ways we know will eventually cost him. The future casts a melancholy shadow over the proceedings.
He concludes at the end of the essay that instead of tagging artist’s as geniuses, we should only tag their work as genius. I agree, but I still don’t like the idea of genius. First, genius-dom is controlled by the high brow society. If you’re low educated you’ll never understand what’s so great about Picasso. Second, most of the time it’s in hindsight. It took some years, about a decade or so, for Citizen Kane to become one of the greatest films of all time. Third and lastly, it implies that people have unique and inherent talent that comes out of nowhere… or mythical muses in a soul. And this inherent talent myth is something that the neuroscience field keeps debunking everyday. It’s not that I’m against holding people’s work and art in high esteem, but the genius idea should be left back with the guys with wigs of the Renaissance.
