Nicholas Carr at his (consistently essential) blog, Rough Type: Itâs revealing that, before the arrival of the net, people didnât talk about âauthenticityâ as we do today. They didnât have to. They understood, implicitly, that there was something solid behind whatever show they might put on for public consumption. The show was not everything. The…
Category: Internet & Media
“It’s an Alien Life Form”: David Bowie on the Internet’s Exhilarating and Terrifying Potential
There’s been a lot of ink spilled in the last thirty years, both physical and digital, explaining and exploring the phenomenon that is the Internet. From the enthusiastic optimism of such influential figures as Clay Shirky and Seth Godin, to the heavily cautious middle ground of such figures as Douglas Rushkoff, to the all-out pessimism…
Teeming Links – August 9, 2019
Before the links, a brief screed that arose spontaneously from some well in my psyche: If you’re a writer or another type of creator, never compare your gift to that of others. Your particular gift of vision, subject matter, passion, skill level, style, approach, and the life circumstances in which these all exist and unfold…
My interview for This Is Horror – Part Two
Here’s the second and final part of my recent interview for the This Is Horror podcast. Co-hosts Michael David Wilson and Bob Pastorella conducted the whole thing skillfully, so hats off to them. Readers who have followed the saga of the birth of Horror Literature through History may be especially interested to hear that I…
Your smartphone is built to hijack and harvest your mind
At the beginning of each semester I tell my students the very thing that journalist Zat Rana gets at in a recent article for Quartz when I deliver a mini-sermon about my complete ban on phones — and also, for almost all purposes, laptops — in my classroom. A smartphone or almost any cell phone…
Art, creativity, and what Google doesn’t know
From an essay by Ed Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University: We are all centaurs now, our aesthetics continuously enhanced by computation. Every photograph I take on my smartphone is silently improved by algorithms the second after I take it. Every document autocorrected, every digital file optimised….
Our smartphone apocalypse, animated by Steve Cutts
This remarkable animation comes from the hand (or computer) of illustrator and animator Steve Cutts, famed for such things as 2012’s Man, which packs an unbelievable punch. So does the one I’ve chosen to post here. Cutts created it for last year’s hit song “Are You Lost in the World Like Me?” by Moby and…
‘Videodrome’ and Marshall McLuhan: The New Flesh meets the New Media
Here’s the ever-reliable Nick Ripatrazone discussing the inspirational influence of Marshall McLuhan on David Cronenberg as the latter was conceiving and making 1983’s Videodrome, which Ripatrazone characterizes — correctly, I think — as “perfect viewing for 2017 — the year a man baptized by television becomes president.” The article also provides an able introduction to…
How reading can save us from the digital dispersion of the self
Here are some choice passages from an insight-rich essay by historian James McWilliams at The American Scholar, in which he discusses two major and complementary options for dealing with digital technology’s epochal assault on the stable self: first, take serious and substantial steps to humanize the digital world; second, retain (or return to) a serious…
Why I’m fed up with Amazon
In the past I have both 1) praised Jeff Bezos for displaying what looks like a true love of books and reading, and 2) highlighted Amazon’s bullying and heavy-handedness in the publishing industry by linking to Steve Wasserman’s damning 2012 article “The Amazon Effect,” in which Wasserman, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times…