I have more to report on Pacific Standard Time but a channel change seems like a good idea right about now. So here are a few highlights from The Visionary, a portrait of Jaron Lanier by Jennifer Kahn in the New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2011. (I am particularly fond of Lanier and have […]
Technology
In and Out and Back
The Wasatch Mountains in Utah This comment from Bill Keller in the New York Times caught my eye: In “The Uncoupling,” there is a wistful passage about the high-school cohort my daughter is about to join. Wolitzer describes them this way: “The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but […]
Abandoning Old Ones Like Musical Notes: Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier Most of us can recognize people who think like us. It’s the ease we have in following arguments, the familiarity in the way someone moves from one idea to the next. Sometimes it is subtle, but when you share your thinking mother tongue with someone, there is comfort in that shared vernacular. Most […]
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Error and the Adjacent Possible
Kevin Kelly and Steve Johnson (Illustration: Jason Holley, Wired) This is a follow on to my earlier post about Steve Johnson’s new book, Where Ideas Come From. These excerpts are from a conversation between Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants, and Steve Johnson published in Wired: *** Kelly: Really, we should think of ideas […]
- Science
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Books, Google, Intelligence and Neuroscience
Complexity and flow: Never what is seems Nicholas Carr’s latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, continues to spawn conversations regarding what we can and cannot know about the effect of cybertechnology on our brains and cognitive abilities. (A recent post about the book is here with links to earlier […]
I Know Not Seems
(Image: Doug Johnson at The Blue Skunk Blog) In Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, William Powers quotes Henry David Thoreau who wrote that the man who constantly and desperately keeps going to the post office to check for correspondence from others “has not heard from himself […]
- Books
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Marginally Less Focused, Exponentially More Connected
Seo 2, mixed media on canvas, 24 x 48″. From a series commissioned by Catherine Seo, professor of business and management and a social media maven. I painted this series with her hyperconnectedness in mind. Some of you have engaged with me on the topic of the Internet’s impact on the way we think, process, […]
- Technology
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Getting Closer to Wise
Is it a fence or a tree? Or both? A friend described her experience with a therapy technique that has helped her family tremendously. She distilled the approach down to 2 sentences: I am doing the best I can. I can do better. Learning to hold these two dialectical statements as true at the same […]
- Technology
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Discreteness
A watercolor by Renee Collins, from my collection. I don’t know the name that Renee originally gave it, but I’ve always referred to it as “Leaky Margins.” If you spend a fair amount of time online, you have probably come up against The Membrane. It functions a bit like a cell wall, as the boundary […]
- Books
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New Media to Old
Two of my all time favorite blogs have now been transmogrified into a version of themselves as old media (i.e., books). The first was BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet, compiled by my friend and master archivist, the inimitable PK from his very popular site of the same name. Published at the end of […]