To offer underinformed speculation, one wonders if Facebook faces the same dynamic as Craigslist: users might be turning to more specialized services that do a better job at narrower social media functions, hence Mark Zuckerberg’s unilateral decision to purchase Instagram, a start-up that may well have proven a formidable threat to one of the core functions of Facebook that accounts for so much of it’s stickiness, i.e., obsessively clicking through the photographs of friends and acquaintances. Twitter, of course, has a flourished as a vehicle for status updates, and indeed it has enabled the rise of the gourmet food truck business model, among many other things.
In the absence of any meaningful regulations and restrictions, IVF has also brought with it precisely the kind of consequences that many people caught up in the so-called “panic” worried about two generations ago. True, we don’t “decant” our babies in the laboratory, à la Huxley’s “Brave New World,” but between the embryos we keep on ice and the ones we create and destroy for scientific research, the normalization of paid surrogacy and the freewheeling marketplace in eggs and sperm, we live in a society that has commodified both reproduction and human life itself in ways that would have seemed dystopian, not only to the social conservatives of an earlier era, but to many of its liberals as well.James Watson wasn’t mistaken, in this sense, about the consequences of the breakthrough; he was just wrong about how society would respond to them. The slippery slope was entirely real; going down it just turned out to be a relatively comfortable experience.
What if the upgrade cycle no longer defines digital innovation? What if certain technologies and methods are mature? It makes more sense to interpret the popularity of Massively Open On-line Courses as a sign of the stabilization of Internet-delivered content, rather than some ground-breaking innovation that would result in a Khan Academy Google Doodle a hundred years from now. If that’s the case, then institutions like the University of Virginia should be on exactly the opposite course, not trying desperately to catch the latest wave but rather promoting the slow growth of their existing, successful digital initiatives. This could be called “incrementalism” but I prefer the term “slow innovation” and it focuses not on identifying hot, new trends, but deep investment in digital commodities, by which I mean the infrastructure, expertise, and research that utilize the growing stable of mature methods, libraries, and technologies. That’s what the university should do, and the library in particular, which then affords motivated scholars the opportunity to expend their effort on sophisticated, pathbreaking work. How do I know this would work? Take a look at the incredible work coming out of the University of Virginia as a result of its sober and long-term commitment to digital innovation.
Salman Rushdie was the target of a notorious fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic republic of Iran, 23 years ago. Now, the author of The Satanic Verses is the subject of an Iranian computer game aimed at spreading to the next generation the message about his “sin”.The Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and Implementation of his Verdict is the title of the game being developed by the Islamic Association of Students, a government-sponsored organisation which announced this week it had completed initial phases of production… .
Little has been revealed about the game but its title suggests players will be asked to implement Khomeini’s call for the killing of Rushdie.
When did it happen that the experience of going to a sporting event became less coherent than the experience of watching one on TV? Was that Super Bowl III? The Dream Team? Wimbledon is, in essence, a far-reaching and multilayered network, a system of information flow overlaid on top of a (relatively, in terms of pure scale) small and insignificant tennis tournament. There are multiple rooms of stats loggers; there are research departments; there are cables as thick as your leg; there are swarms of young couriers pollinating the press room with information sheets and quote sheets and hints about Wi-Fi passwords. It’s not chaos, the input/output cycle of the Apparatus; it’s order on full blast, and its single driving purpose is to make two weeks of complex and largely simultaneous tennis effortlessly comprehensible to you, the viewer at home. Every simple story line the media spoon-feeds you is the result of furious analytic labor inside the Apparatus. Johnny Mac can break it down because someone was on hand to give him a sandwich. You don’t catch much of this at home. That’s how the cameras are set up — so you don’t see the other cameras.
Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats. The neural network taught itself to recognize cats, which is actually no frivolous activity. This week the researchers will present the results of their work at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Google scientists and programmers will note that while it is hardly news that the Internet is full of cat videos, the simulation nevertheless surprised them. It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items.
“Active” video games distributed to homes with children do not produce the increase in physical activity that naïve parents (like me) expected. That’s according to a study undertaken by the Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and published early this year in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Previous studies have shown that adults and children who play active video games, when encouraged in an ideal laboratory setting, engage in moderate, even vigorous physical activity briefly. The Baylor team wanted to determine what happened when the games were used not in a laboratory, but in actual homes… .They found “no evidence that children receiving the active video games were more active in general, or at any time, than children receiving the inactive video games.”
I had been interviewing her for the book I wrote about the Holocaust, and by the time I had the brief conversation I am about to tell you about, I knew of some of the things she had suffered, and I can tell you that they were the kind of things that strip all sentimentality away, that do not leave you with any mushy illusions about the value of Western culture, of “civilization” and its traditions. I just want you to know that before I tell you what she told me, which was this:We had spent a long day together, talking about sad things — talking, in fact, about the erasure of a culture, the unmaking of a civilization, as total and final as what Vergil described in Book 2 of the Aeneid; there are, after all, as many Jews left today in the city this lady had lived in as there are Trojans in Troy. We were tired, night was falling. Because I didn’t want to leave her with sad thoughts that night, any more than I want to leave you with sad thoughts today, I tried to lead the conversation to a happier time.
“So what happened when the war was over?” I asked softly. “What was the first thing that happened, once things started to be normal again?”
The old lady, whose real name had disappeared in the war along with her parents, her house, and nearly everything else she had known, was now called Mrs. Begley. When I asked her this question Mrs. Begley looked at me; her weary expression had kindled, every so slightly. “You know, it’s a funny thing,” she told me. “When the Germans first came, in ‘41, the first thing they did was close the theaters.”
“The theaters?,” I echoed, a bit confused, not dreaming where this could be leading. I didn’t know which theaters she meant; I thought, briefly, of the great Beaux Arts Pantheon of an opera house in Lwów, with its Muse-drawn chariots and gilded victories, a mirage of civilization, the 19th century’s dream of itself. She had told me, once, that she had seen Carmen there, when she was a newlywed. But she wasn’t talking, now, about operas in Lwów, or about the 1930s; she was talking about theaters in Kraków, where she and her husband and child ended up once the war was over.
“Yes,” she said, sharply, as if it ought to have been obvious to me that the first thing you’d do, if you were about to end a civilization, would be to put an end to playgoing, “the theaters. The first thing they did was close the theaters. And I’ll tell you something, because I remember it quite clearly: the first thing that happened, after the war was over and things got a little normal — the first thing was that the actors and theater people who were still alive got together and put on, in Polish, a production of Sophocles’ Antigone.”
When the rector of the Board, Helen Dragas, declared late last week that she was unsatisfied by the fact that she saw the University of Virginia falling behind other major universities in the deployment of digital classroom innovation, we were shocked. Why didn’t she just ask us?UVa’s innovative digital reputation is one of the reasons I moved here five years ago. I have taught online, and so have many of my colleagues. If she had asked, I would have introduced Dragas to six or seven of my colleagues, including distinguished professors of computer science, English, religious studies, and engineering. I would have taken her to our world-renowned Scholars’ Lab and introduced her to the staff members who guide students and professors through the use of powerful digital platforms and tools.
Like a kindergartner, Slaughter seems to think that she – and women in general – should somehow be exempt from universal realities that have nothing to do with gender inequality and everything to do with the fact that you can’t defy the laws of physics. Forget biological clocks. Time and space do not magically expand because you’d like to be two places at once or do more things than can fit into a 24-hour period or even a life span. Somebody might want – and have the talent – to be an Olympic gymnast, a Nobel-winning mathematician, and a professional ballerina, but there are age and health and time limitations involved. There isn’t a policy in the world that could change the fact that if you choose to be in Washington five days a week , you can’t also be at home tucking in your children and dealing with their issues back in Princeton.Did Slaughter, despite her intelligence, somehow imagine that she could be an involved, engaged parent while living in another city for two years? Did her inability to anticipate the fact that she might miss her children and they might miss her make this the fault of feminism, or just a case of not completely thinking through one’s decision? Where is her responsibility in this, and what does this have to do with inequality?
Life involves dozens of choices on a daily basis. Some are big and some are about which toilet paper to buy – less soft and more economical is a trade-off for plush and expensive. The secret to happiness? Pick one, and don’t complain that it’s too rough or expensive.