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"And, given all the new platforms that exist solely for the purpose of satisfying curiosity, the web is also a reminder of our perpetual knowledge. The answers, for the most part, are there for us; we just need to take the step of asking the questions. So while it's easy to make fun of the people who broadcast their ignorance, it's much better to celebrate them. They're a collective reminder that, with the world's knowledge newly at our fingertips, the only thing worse than ignorance is indifference."
"Here is a list of peer reviewed papers that I’ve found that only discuss liberal-conservative differences in brain structure and function, in physiology, or in the kinds of stimuli that attract attention. And of course this is only one small area of research on liberal-conservative differences:"
"Here, then, is the second post listing such studies. It is in a different genre: Genetics.
The idea that our political preferences may be at least partly traceable to genetic influences is, it is fair to say, wildly controversial. However, the growing body of science makes it pretty hard to deny. That’s not to say that environmental influences don’t matter–but genetic influences at this point appear undeniable."
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Alice talked in her article about the concept of "technology refusal," but I've found that there seems to be precious little out there in the way of research on this topic. The term itself is used in the context of other educational technologies in an essay by Steve Hodas called "Technology refusal and the organizational culture of schools" from Rob Kling's 1996 collection Computerization and Controversy, but I can't find much that links that essay with anything related to current social networking sites.
"In his new book, The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser looks at the same facts as Cowen but interprets them differently. What Cowen sees as enhancing individual autonomy, Pariser sees as restricting personal development. Instead of constructing personal micro-economies that allow us to make sense of complexity, we are turning media into a mirror that reflects our own prejudices back at us. "
"People's perceptions of the attitudes and experiences of mass collectives are an increasingly important force in contemporary political life. In Impersonal Influence, Mutz goes beyond simply providing examples of how impersonal influence matters in the political process to provide a micro-level understanding of why information about distant and impersonal others often influence people's political attitudes and behaviors. Impersonal Influence is worthy of attention both from the standpoint of its impact on contemporary politics, and because of its potential to expand the boundaries of our understanding of social influence processes, and media's relation to them. The book's conclusions do not exonerate media from the effects of inaccurate portrayals of collective experience or opinion, but they suggest that the ways in which people are influenced by these perceptions are in themselves, not so much deleterious to democracy as absolutely necessary to promoting accountability in a large scale society."
"I’ve been drifting slowly through California for the past three weeks at about 100 miles/week, and several times I’ve been asked an apparently simple question that has become nearly impossible for me to answer: “What are you here for?”
Unlike regular travelers, I am not here for anything. I am just here, like area residents. The only difference is that I’ll drift on out of the Bay Area in a week. The true answer is “I am nomadic for the time being. I just move through places, the way you stay put in places. I am doing things that constant movement enables, just like you do things that staying put enables.” That is of course too bizarre an answer to use in everyday conversation."
"After all, why is it that people want to control their privacy? It isn’t so much that people want to “hav[e] a different image for your work friends or co-workers,” as he sort of innocuously puts it; it’s not an issue of choice for people who need to have a different image for their boss than the one they have in real life. The less the people who sign your paycheck know about you, after all, the less they know that you’re not simply a simple worker-drone toiling away in their sugar fields, and that can be an urgent thing in a time where everyone who works for someone else could be replaced at any time. "
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And here’s the thing: powerful people don’t have to worry about any of that. Just as Hitchens never has to worry about Muslim women telling him what not to wear, neither need the owner of facebook ever worry about being surveilled against his interest or will, or of it mattering much if he is. Knowledge is power not in a Friedman-esque globalization-will-democratize-the-world kind of way, where opening up barriers makes us all the same, but in a much more Foucaultian sense: when you have power, knowledge is the medium through which you exert it (including the ability to believe what you want and make it authoritative). Knowledge without power is forgotten, ignored, and impotent while power without knowledge just creates new “knowledge” (as in Hitchens’ ability to know whatever he needs to know about Muslim women). But since powerful white men can experience that power through their singular and unambiguous identity — and since white privilege is about enjoying the benefits of being the default category without having to do anything to claim it — the sight of people whose identities limit and subordinate them exerting control over those identities becomes a threat, a limit that has to be vaulted over. What Muslim women hid, Hitchens will demand his right to see. And what you make private, Facebook will monetize.
by Roger Schank - "Every aspect of life is an experiment that can be better understood if it is perceived in that way. But because we don't recognize this we fail to understand that we need to reason logically from evidence we gather, and that we need to carefully consider the conditions under which our experiments have been conducted, and that we need to decide when and how we might run the experiment again with better results."
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Consider the modern environmental movement. We take personal responsibility; we accept the role we, individually, have played in destroying the environment, so we focus on the things we can do, individually, to at least not participate in it anymore. You know the litany as well as I do: eat organic, reduce, reuse, recycle, use incandescent light bulbs, take shorter showers, carpool, drive a hybrid, ride a bicycle, et cetera ad infinitum.
And yet, despite this, we know that even if everyone in the world heeded this advice, if we all achieved enlightenment tomorrow and a flowering of global consciousness put us all in tune with a higher frequency or whatever other spiritual or philosophical metaphor you’d prefer, it would not alter our present ecological course.
If people are content to have a politics based on image and identity, without giving a rats ass about actual policies, then yes, indeed, we are living in a center-right nation. If people are primarily concerned with broad platitudes and abstract principles, then welcome to Barack Obama's center-dominated bipartisan world. But if people actually want something done, well, then, welcome to progressive America, because that's what people want when it comes down to brass tacks.
Fred Clark continues to pursue the difference between religion obsessed with moral superiority and one that throws impromptu birthday parties for prostitutes.
"We can either take offense or we can give a party. It has to be one or the other, we can't do both."
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In discussing those I have been describing as members of the Cult of Offendedness and addicts of a counterfeit moral superiority, I do not want to presume that they are acting in bad faith.
They are acting in bad faith, but that's not my presumption, it's my conclusion. I am not attributing malice to them, but rather, having observed and studied their attributes, I am noting that those attributes include a vast reservoir of transparent, naked malice. Pretending not to see that wouldn't be charitable, it would merely be dishonest.
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I recently finished Frank Schaeffer's memoir Crazy for God which recounts, among many other things, his impression of the leaders of the religious right -- people who have chosen as their profession the taking of offense and the propagation of umbrage. Schaeffer describes such people as acting in bad faith, motivated by malice and a disingenuous desire for power. Here is a taste of his description of them:
There were three kinds of evangelical leaders. The dumb or idealistic ones who really believed. The out-and-out charlatans. And the smart ones who still believed -- sort of -- but knew that the evangelical world was shit, but who couldn't figure out any way to earn as good a living anywhere else. I was turning into one of those, having started out in the idealistic category.
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