As the authors were offering their final points at the end of the Q&A, [Steven] Johnson hit on a metaphor that, for once, everyone could agree on: the city.The city, like the internet, is noisy, distracting, overwhelming, and potentially isolating. But people choose the city for its stimulus and connection, says Johnson, “and for me technology is like that: I know the cost, but I choose it.”
[Sherry] Turkle jotted down the metaphor on her notepad before responding:
“The best artists learned to find solitude in the middle of the metropolitan space,” she said. And “we need to learn to find solitude in the technological space.”
With the iPhone, Apple is building products at a level of quality that may be unprecedented in the history of mass manufacturing. But the only way to know what that means for you, a user of the phone, is to pick it up and feel it, because objectively it does not sound like a big deal. If I tell you the greatest thing about the iPhone 5 is how it “feels,” you’ll accuse me of being a superficial aesthete who cares more for form than function. You don’t care how a phone was built or how it looks; you just want it to work. But I think that argument misses something important about what it means for a phone to “work well”: When you’re holding a device all the time, how it feels affects its functionality. Or, as Steve Jobs might say, how it feels is how it works.
The emphasis in early Christian writings was not on complexity, irreducible or otherwise, but on the beauty, order, lawfulness, and harmony found in the world that God had made. As science advances, it brings this beautiful order ever more clearly into view. Every photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope, every picture from the ocean’s depths, every discovery in subatomic physics, shows it forth. As Calvin wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “God [has] manifested himself in the formation of every part of the world, and daily presents himself to public view, in such manner, that they cannot open their eyes without being constrained to behold him.” And, “[W]ithersoever you turn your eyes, there is not an atom of the world in which you cannot behold some brilliant sparks at least of his glory… . You cannot at one view take a survey of this most ample and beautiful machine [the universe] in all its vast extent, without being completely overwhelmed with its infinite splendor” [emphasis mine]. Note that “atoms of the world” are not irreducibly complex, nor is “every part of the world.” Irreducible complexity has never been the central principle of traditional natural theology.But whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed. In the famous “explanatory filter” of William A. Dembski, one finds “design” by eliminating “law” and “chance” as explanations. This, in effect, makes it a zero-sum game between God and nature. What nature does and science can explain is crossed off the list, and what remains is the evidence for God. This conception of design plays right into the hands of atheists, whose caricature of religion has always been that it is a substitute for the scientific understanding of nature.
Anamorphic art by Georges Rousse | More posts
Rune Guneriussen, via here
In text, where the impact of digital technology came first and most fully, desktop-publishing programs have generated tens of thousands of new publishing ventures such as special-interest magazines. These developments offer the merest glimpse of the possibilities of digital video. Released from the restrictions of mass media, American culture could attain new levels in both the visual arts and literature….The very nature of broadcasting, however, means that television cannot cater to the special interests of audiences dispersed across the country. Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar, it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns. All of world industry is moving increasingly toward more segmented markets. But in a broadcast medium, such a move would be a commercial disaster. In a broadcast medium, artists and writers cannot appeal to the highest aspirations and sensibilities of individuals. Instead, manipulative masters rule over huge masses of people….
Television is a tool of tyrants. Its overthrow will be a major force for freedom and individuality, culture and morality. That overthrow is at hand.
Sometimes, when I’m talking books, people will say, “You’re so well read.” I wish this were true. I was on my way to becoming well read, gobbling up books like Halloween candy, when I realized it was hurting me more than helping. I am now the slowest reader you will ever meet.After taking in a paragraph, I might pause and stare off into the distance for fifteen minutes. I will then read it again, maybe twice more if it’s especially striking, and pick apart its construction. I almost always have my yellow legal tablet in my lap. If I’m reading a chase scene, I might try to understand the mechanics of it, how it uses run-on sentences to create a sense of breathlessness, how it opens up paragraphs with a long string of prepositions to orient us in a city, that kind of thing.
It might take me two weeks or it might take me a month or more to finish a novel, but by the time I close the cover, I know it completely and see it as Neo might the Matrix, as a sparkling string of code that comes together to create an alternate reality. My wife now refuses to crack a book once I’ve read it, because the pages are distractingly blackened with notes.
Sometimes, if a book has a particularly addictive plot, I will force myself to set down the pen. I will read once for the emotional spell the book casts and then I will read it again to study its technique. My wife says I’ve taken the fun out of reading. But really, it’s just a peculiar sort of fun. Maybe more than anything in the world, I delight in stories and language, the way they can be put together and taken apart, the infinite possibilities of these twenty-six letters at our disposal. My mind bristles with forests of sentences, but I no longer feel panicked and lost in the shade of them. I know the way now, slowly.
This same dynamic repeats itself in other crucial realms. President Obama’s dramatically escalated drone attacks in numerous countries have generated massive anger in the Muslim world, continuously kill civilians, and are of dubious legality at best. His claimed right to target even American citizens for extrajudicial assassinations, without a whiff of transparency or oversight, is as radical a power as any seized by George Bush and Dick Cheney.Yet Americans whose political perceptions are shaped by attentiveness to the presidential campaign would hardly know that such radical and consequential policies even exist. That is because here too there is absolute consensus between the two parties.
A long list of highly debatable and profoundly significant policies will be similarly excluded due to bipartisan agreement. The list includes a rapidly growing domestic surveillance state that now monitors and records even the most innocuous activities of all Americans; job-killing free trade agreements; climate change policies; and the Obama justice department’s refusal to prosecute the Wall Street criminals who precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.
On still other vital issues, such as America’s steadfastly loyal support for Israel and its belligerence towards Iran, the two candidates will do little other than compete over who is most aggressively embracing the same absolutist position. And this is all independent of the fact that even on the issues that are the subject of debate attention, such as healthcare policy and entitlement “reform”, all but the most centrist positions are off limits.
We have surrendered our handwriting for something more mechanical, less distinctively human, less telling about ourselves and less present in our moments of the highest happiness and the deepest emotion. Ink runs in our veins, and shows the world what we are like. The shaping of thought and written language by a pen, moved by a hand to register marks of ink on paper, has for centuries, millennia, been regarded as key to our existence as human beings. In the past, handwriting has been regarded as almost the most powerful sign of our individuality. In 1847, in an American case, a witness testified without hesitation that a signature was genuine, though he had not seen an example of the handwriting for 63 years: the court accepted his testimony.Handwriting is what registers our individuality, and the mark which our culture has made on us. It has been seen as the unknowing key to our souls and our innermost nature. It has been regarded as a sign of our health as a society, of our intelligence, and as an object of simplicity, grace, fantasy and beauty in its own right. Yet at some point, the ordinary pleasures and dignity of handwriting are going to be replaced permanently.
The question is: Should we even care?