Jeremy Price's Library tagged identity → View Popular

Filter:
All
Annotated

17 Nov 09

26 Oct 09

The End of Solitude - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

chronicle.com.proxy.bc.edu/...3708 - Preview

technology culture web self identity

Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants.
If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
20 more annotations...
- So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can.
- Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism.
- The Romantic practice of solitude is neatly captured by Trilling's "sincerity": the belief that the self is validated by a congruity of public appearance and private essence, one that stabilizes its relationship with both itself and others. Especially, as Emerson suggests, one beloved other. Hence the famous Romantic friendship pairs: Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Melville.
- Modernism decoupled this dialectic. Its notion of solitude was harsher, more adversarial, more isolating.
- In modernism, the city is not only more menacing than ever, it has become inescapable, a labyrinth
- The soul is forced back into itself — hence the development of a more austere, more embattled form of self-validation, Trilling's "authenticity," where the essential relationship is only with oneself.
- Solitude becomes, more than ever, the arena of heroic self-discovery, a voyage through interior realms made vast and terrifying by Nietzschean and Freudian insights. To achieve authenticity is to look upon these visions without flinching;
- But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined.
- Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing.
- A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity.
- As a result, we are losing both sides of the Romantic dialectic. What does friendship mean when you have 532 "friends"? How does it enhance my sense of closeness when my Facebook News Feed tells me that Sally Smith (whom I haven't seen since high school, and wasn't all that friendly with even then) "is making coffee and staring off into space"? My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, they have no time at all for solitude.
- But at least friendship, if not intimacy, is still something they want. As jarring as the new dispensation may be for people in their 30s and 40s, the real problem is that it has become completely natural for people in their teens and 20s. Young people today seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, can't imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others.
- The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.
- There is an analogy, it seems to me, with the previous generation's experience of boredom. The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern.
- Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state.
- Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom.
- And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct.
- But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and this should come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind.
- The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau's "darkness."
- The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.

21 Oct 09

The Atlantic Online | November 2008 | First Person Plural | Paul Bloom

www.theatlantic.com/...multiple-personalities - Preview

psychology philosophy identity

26 Aug 09

Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman

personas.media.mit.edu - Preview

identity technology web internet art

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is
our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights
and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from
multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world,
where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods
of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

apophenia: am I an academic?

www.zephoria.org/...am_i_an_academi.html - Preview

academia research identity

12 Jul 09

Conspicuous conservation | Marginal Utility | PopMatters

www.popmatters.com/...08032-conspicuous-conservation - Preview

environment identity consumerism activism

02 Jul 09

Trickster at the Crossroads, by Erik Davis

www.levity.com/...trickster.html - Preview

trickster identity religion myth

Sacred Stories of the Ordinary, By Lawrence Kushner

www.aril.org/kushner.html - Preview

jewish religion identity technology

What Are We Thinking About When We Are Thinking About Computers?

web.mit.edu/...routledge_reader.html - Preview

technology identity bricolage

15 Mar 09

How Jews Look on Vimeo

vimeo.com/3396883 - Preview

jewish identity culture religion appearance video education

16 Jan 09

Tintin Coming Out In America? — Crooked Timber

crookedtimber.org/...tintin-coming-out-in-america - Preview

tintin comics identity

15 Jan 09

Ethics of the Fathers: Chapter Two - Ethics of the Fathers: Translated Text

www.chabad.org/...Chapter-Two.htm - Preview

jewish talmud pirkei avot identity

Rabbi [Judah HaNassi]* would say: Which is the right path for man to choose for himself? Whatever is harmonious for the one who does it, and harmonious for mankind.

30 Dec 08

The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism

jcmc.indiana.edu/...wellman.html - Preview

identity social community culture network research technology web

18 Nov 08

Velveteen Rabbi: Going forth into something new (Radical Torah repost)

velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/...ew-radical-torah-repost-1.html - Preview

jewish religion self identity renewal

10 Aug 08

In Medias Res: Noah (and Herder) on Obama on Language

inmedias.blogspot.com/...rder-on-obama-on-language.html - Preview

language identity bilingual education policy

15 Jun 08

Jewish in America - Waltham, MA - The Daily News Tribune

www.dailynewstribune.com/...Jewish-in-America - Preview

art identity waltham local brandeis exhibit jewish culture

28 May 08

Conversations Below Sea Level: Geert Lovink

blog.ulisesmejias.com/...s-below-sea-level-geert-lovink - Preview

media technology identity agency ethnicity interview

23 Apr 08

Occam’s RazR » Blog Archive » The End of Identity Politics

occamsrazr.com/...the-end-of-identity-politics - Preview

identity politics tagging

1 - 20 of 76 Next › Last »

Showing 20▼ items per page

Selected Tags

identity

Related Tags

Top Contributors

Click in to find related links.

Groups interested in identity

WPPS NEWS

Members (5)

bookmarks (437)
CIPP Information Privacy & Security News

Members (8)

bookmarks (731)
Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

Members (130)

bookmarks (1628)

Related Lists on Diigo

Online identity research

Collection of resources for...

Items: 277 | Visits: 2313

Created by: Adam Bohannon
Digital Citizenship for Educators

Some resources for educator...

Items: 15 | Visits: 176

Created by: Shelley K.
Dissociative identity disorder research

List or resources for my re...

Items: 12 | Visits: 219

Created by: Adam Bohannon

Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »

Join Diigo

Jeremy Price's Library tagged identity → View Popular

ZEEK: Articles: The New Aliya

ZEEK: Articles: Skipping A Beat: The Cohen Brothers' A Serious Man

The Immanent Frame » So you want to be a new atheist

The End of Solitude - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Atlantic Online | November 2008 | First Person Plural | Paul Bloom

Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman

apophenia: am I an academic?

Conspicuous conservation | Marginal Utility | PopMatters

Trickster at the Crossroads, by Erik Davis

Sacred Stories of the Ordinary, By Lawrence Kushner

What Are We Thinking About When We Are Thinking About Computers?

How Jews Look on Vimeo

Tintin Coming Out In America? — Crooked Timber

Ethics of the Fathers: Chapter Two - Ethics of the Fathers: Translated Text

The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism

Velveteen Rabbi: Going forth into something new (Radical Torah repost)

In Medias Res: Noah (and Herder) on Obama on Language

Jewish in America - Waltham, MA - The Daily News Tribune

Conversations Below Sea Level: Geert Lovink

Occam’s RazR » Blog Archive » The End of Identity Politics

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Top Contributors

Groups interested in identity

WPPS NEWS

CIPP Information Privacy & Security News

Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

Online identity research

Digital Citizenship for Educators

Dissociative identity disorder research