Here’s a new must-watch short film about the ironic reality of so-called “social media” that promise to create real community and human relationship but really function to generate a new kind of loneliness. Beware “liking” or retweeting, which may well unleash waves of paradox that will warp the inner mind, rip a hole in the…
Category: Internet & Media
Teeming Links – August 23, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s invocation comes from author and cultural historian Mike Jay, author of last year’s The Influencing Machine, slated for U.S. publication in January 2014 as A Visionary Madness. The article’s tagline states the basic thesis, which articulates an uncanny experience, sensation, and intuition that we’ve all had with…
‘Visitors’ – The new film from Godfrey Reggio, Philip Glass, and Jon Kane
There simply are no words. And I mean that literally, as you’re about to see. When I learned recently of the imminent release of a new film by director Godfrey Reggio, he of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi fame, I was fairly stunned. Then the sensation was augmented when I watched the trailers. As I explained…
Teeming Links – August 20, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Did somebody say “apocalypse”? Oh, yeah: that was me, here, all the time. And it was also, as it turns out, everybody, everywhere these days. To preface the current roundup of recommended and necessary reading, here’s a rich reflection on this very fact, and on the deeper meanings…
Teeming Links – July 9, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net The presiding reflection for today’s offering of recommended and necessary reading and viewing comes from British novelist and essayist Tim Parks, who elicits an important truth about the silence that so many of us seek, or say we think we seek, amid a culture of clamor: Arguably, when…
Teeming Links – August 2, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I invite you to peruse today’s offering of necessary and recommended reading under the overarching emotional/conceptual rubric of this recent rumination about the extreme value of ambivalence and undecidedness amid our present sociocultural circumstance of frenetic and manipulative opinion-peddling and belief-mongering: We live in a society in which…
Teeming Links – July 30, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net To preface today’s offering of recommended and required reading, here’s a not-so-idle speculation from Damien Walter about the momentous fact of our collective cultural obsession with losing ourselves in the ever more immersive fantasy worlds that digital technology has enabled for us: I am a writer and critic…
Teeming Links – July 26, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net As you browse through today’s crop of fascinating, worthwhile, disturbing, and necessary reading, I invite you to consider not just this particular experience but your online experience as a whole in light of writer Benjamin Anastasis’ recent, impassioned, and insightful explanation of why he has abandoned Twitter. Even…
Teeming Links – July 23, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net For an overall commentary on this particular crop of fascinating, worthwhile, disturbing, and/or necessary reading and viewing, see “Alan Moore: The revolution will be crowd-funded,” recently published at Salon. In this interview, “the ‘Watchmen’ creator talks about his new Kickstarter-funded film series, zombies and the surveillance state.” Most…
Jimmy Carter speaks out on NSA scandal and more: “America has no functioning democracy”
I just caught wind of this, and I find it to be entirely worth bringing to the attention of anybody who hasn’t heard about it. In a word: wow. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is so concerned about the NSA spying scandal that he thinks it has essentially resulted in a suspension of American democracy….