The orthodox view among online pundits has been that paywalls and subscription fees won’t work for general-interest newspapers, that people simply won’t pay for a bundle of news online. Last year, media blogger Jeff Jarvis dismissed The New York Times’s metered plan as “cockeyed economics.” Earlier this year, Nieman Lab blogger Martin Langeveld opined that “newspapers are slowly digging their graves by building paywalls.” It seems likely that 2012 will be the year when we stop hearing such gloomy proclamations. Well-designed versioning strategies, spanning various devices, formats, functions, content bundles, and access plans, will provide smart newspapers with new ways to charge for their products, in both digital and print form, without sacrificing the unique opportunities presented by online distribution. That won’t mean the end of the industry’s struggles, but it does portend a brighter future. And that’s good news.
What would “ethical browsing” or “ethical social networking” entail? Never using sites that exploit facial-recognition technology? Refusing to do business with Internet companies that cooperate with the National Security Agency? These are the choices we’ll have to make if we don’t want the Internet to become an ethics-free zone. After all, unreflective use of technology—just like unreflective shopping—does not a good citizen make.But let’s not allow Internet companies off the hook, either. Of course, Google and Facebook are different from rapacious corporations exploiting poor farmers or underage children. Neither company is building surveillance tools that would be used by dictators. What they do, however, is help create the apposite technical and ideological infrastructure for such tools to emerge in a seemingly natural manner. This doesn’t provide strong grounds for regulation—but it opens the door for citizen activism, boycotts, and, if all else fails, civil disobedience.
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But embracing this mystery comes at a price. If, like the archbishop of Canterbury, your faith is a kind of “silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark”, then think very carefully before you open your mouth. Too often I find that faith is mysterious only selectively. Believers constantly attribute all sorts of qualities to their gods and have a list of doctrines as long as your arm. It is only when the questions get tough that, suddenly, their God disappears in a puff of mystery. Ineffability becomes a kind of invisibility cloak, only worn when there is a need to get out of a bit of philosophical bother.
(And by the way, that quote from Rowan is taken out of context from an article that takes it out of context. Baggini couldn’t be bothered to find out what the Archbishop really believes, or even what he was saying in that moment.)
I used to play chess expecting to win, but this game [politics] was not about winning or losing. It was about losing. From the beginning the position was a dead loss.
“From my interactions with Dick, I know that many of these musings were written while he stayed up all night, sometimes in an alcoholic haze, while perusing his favorite source, Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy (edited by Paul Edwards). He also retained a healthy sense of humor about his supposed tutelary spirit. ‘On Thursdays and Saturdays I would think it was God,’ he told me, while ‘on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I would think it was extraterrestrial. Sometimes I would think it was the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences trying out their psychotronic microwave telepathic transmitter.’” — Charles Platt
The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.
[McDonald’s] had by now, according to their sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered if it was to the same person. Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position. How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairy tale “How the Sea Became Salt.” Someday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won’t even have to go outside.
The meaning of marriage begins in the giving of words. We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word. And this must be an unconditional giving, for in joining ourselves to another we join ourselves to the unknown. We can join one another only by joining the unknown. We must not be misled by the procedures of experimental thought: in life, in the world, we are never given two known results to choose between, but only one result that we choose without knowing what it is.Marriage rests upon the immutable givens that compose it: words, bodies, characters, histories, places. Some wishes cannot succeed; some victories cannot be won; some loneliness is incorrigible. But there is relief and freedom in knowing what is real; these givens come to us out of the perennial reality of the world, like the terrain we live on. One does not care for this ground to make it a different place, or to make it perfect, but to make it inhabitable and to make it better. To flee from its realities is only to arrive at them unprepared.
Because the condition of marriage is worldly and its meaning communal, no one party to it can be solely in charge. What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you — and marriage, time, life, history, and the world — will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.
Garry Wills, in a rather passionate review [of All Thngs Shining] in the New York Review of Books, has registered complaints about various points of scholarly detail in Dreyfus and Kelly’s exposition. This led to an exchange of published letters. Unfortunately, neither the review nor the letters illuminate the main issues that Dreyfus and Kelly are concerned with.
That depends on what you mean by “illuminate.” Wills argues that Dreyfus and Kelly repeatedly get their history, their facts, and their interpretations of texts wrong, “as if philosophy were a warrant for making false statements, over and over.” Wallace seems to be saying, as Dreyfus and Kelly seem so say in their reply to Wills, that none of that matters. That’s a really, really bad way of doing philosophy, it seems to me.