Vanessa Vaile's List: culture/lit

• If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

• My bosses at Suck.com, meanwhile, accurately predicted that the Web would soon become something between a gigantic mall catering to the lowest common denominator and an infinite tabloid echo chamber. Their mantra: Sell out early and often.

• My bosses at Suck.com, meanwhile, accurately predicted that the Web would soon become something between a gigantic mall catering to the lowest common denominator and an infinite tabloid echo chamber. Their mantra: Sell out early and often. Why? Because those of us musing about murderous robot showdowns (or scratching out angry cartoons under a pseudonym, for that matter) would all go back to grabbing ankle for The Man sooner than we thought.

      

  What they didn't know, and never could've predicted, was that the Web would also transform itself into an enormous, never-ending high school reunion (See also: hell).
• What they didn't know, and never could've predicted, was that the Web would also transform itself into an enormous, never-ending high school reunion (See also: hell)
• finally safe to proclaim, together, that the information age has officially arrived.
• futuristic "Blade Runner"-esque digital dystopia
• Douglas Rushkoff is currently reconsidering his unconditional love for new media in Frontline's "Digital Nation" (premieres 9 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 2, on PBS, check local listings), an in-depth investigation into the possibilities and side effects of our digital immersion.
• how are we changing what it means to be a human being by using all this stuff?"
• Dilbert-meets-Derrida perspective
• "Most multitaskers think that they're brilliant at multitasking," says Stanford professor Clifford Nass. But "it turns out that multitaskers are terrible at nearly every aspect of multitasking."
• IBM uses "Second Life" to hold virtual meetings between people who live thousands of miles from each other. Each person at the meeting is embodied by a different avatar, and the participants end up feeling like they've met in person,
• Can we hold our Salon meetings this way, and can my avatar be an enormous roach that occasionally hits other people over the head with a crowbar?)

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• the most modern communication tools — blogs, podcasts, YouTube — are actually returning us to an ancient form of media, one in which everyone participates on almost equal footing.
• fundamental human urge to tell our own stories
• Before mass media, before the written word — for all of human history — story-telling was a shared privilege.
• Mass media succeeded in creating a common culture, but did nothing to foster the communities that naturally emerge when people tell their stories to each other.
• Now, finally, there is a counter-trend.
• Howard Rheingold framed it beautifully, when he wrote The Virtual Community, nearly 15 years ago: "Perhaps cyberspace is one of those informal public places, where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall."
• newest digital technologies are returning us to the most ancient form of media — one in which a natural order is restored; our individual stories take center stage

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• For liberals, one of the goals of education is to make upward mobility possible, and upward mobility is usually though of as somehow egalitarian.

• Part One: Humanities Education Today

   

  For liberals, one of the goals of education is to make upward mobility possible, and upward mobility is usually though of as somehow egalitarian
• There are two problems with this way of thinking
• Liberal egalitarianism is thus pretty fragile. It’s less coherent than either socialist egalitarianism or free-market social Darwinism
• Liberal egalitarianism is thus pretty fragile. It’s less coherent than either socialist egalitarianism or free-market social Darwinism

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