via socks-studio.com
In a new book, “Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality,” Stanford University psychiatrist Dr. Elias Aboujaoude argues that the time we spend on the Internet doesn’t just cause us to have online alter egos. It influences who we become and how we interact with others when we’re offline as well.“I see my book as my attempt at dissecting this thing called an e-personality – the changes that happen in our personalities when we go online, the new traits that we take on,” he said. “What I see, more and more, we are starting to resemble our avatars.”
At the core of science fiction is the notion of extrapolation, of asking, “If this goes on, where will it lead?” And, unlike most scientists who think in relatively short time frames—getting to the next funding deadline, or readying a product to bring to market—we think on much longer scales: not just months and years, but decades and centuries.That said, our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it’s to suggest all the possible futures—so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go. George Orwell’s science-fiction classic Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future. Those wishing to get in on the ground floor of discussing where technology is leading us would do well to heed Alvin Toffler’s advice by cracking open a good science-fiction book and joining the conversation.
Nobody has said it better than the art historian Rainer Crone, who worked closely with Warhol from 1968 onward, and recently wrote that Warhol’s unique contribution to contemporary art was “the rejection of authorship as an essential feature of authenticity and originality.” I guess that means that the death of originality is a new form of originality.Such circular reasoning explains why Jeff Koons, the creator of sculptures based on the image of a balloon dog, recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to a company selling bookends that represent a balloon dog and to the manufacturer of said dogs. It is doubtful Koons could win this one in court. We have all watched at a street fair as somebody twists long balloons into dogs or other animals. So what can Koons say is really his? The man has made his reputation as an appropriator—as an artist who borrows images and styles and ideas more or less wholesale from other more or less creative spirits. He himself has been sued for copyright violation four times, which may help to explain his eagerness to establish some legal precedent for appropriation as a form of creation. It is easy to make fun of Koons. But to the collectors, dealers, curators, critics, and historians who have invested time and in many cases considerable sums of money in his work and that of Warhol and other appropriators, the originality of the death of originality cannot be taken lightly. I think there is some concern that the artists will not finally escape what Sir Joshua Reynolds, in speaking about artists’ appropriations from other artists to the students at the Royal Academy in 1774, referred to as “the servility of plagiarism.”
teaching e-books
I’ve been teaching The Lord of the Rings pretty much every year for the past decade, and as a result my old copy of the one-volume paperback edition has gotten pretty battered. Moreover, I…
from an interview with Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines
JB: You have not had long-term plans in general. You have eschewed that.
HK: Not long-term plans in the meticulous, detailed sense. What we’ve had is a strategic plan, which is really a definition of us, what do we think we ought to be, how do we think we ought to function, what kind of debt-equity ratio do we think we ought to have, that sort of thing - defining what we are, number one, strategically. Okay, this is our strategy, now that’s behind us. Our strategy is simple but ironclad. I mean, you know, you have to have discipline too to adhere to a strategy. Like, we’re not going to do some things that could generate more revenue because we simply don’t do those things. We’re not going to run our costs up 80% to get the last 20% of revenue that’s available, as an example.
Then, what values do we have? They’re very simple as well. And having simple, clearly expressed values enables you to move much faster because instead of studying things extensively, in many cases you’re prepared to say, just instantaneously, No, we don’t do that, or, Yes, that is something that we do, and we’re interested in it. But if it’s clear-cut, then you can act much more quickly. So speed, quickness is very important. And I think people have to learn that -
JB: Yes, working at the university I would say so. (HK laughs.)
HK: - and the fact that you never can obtain perfect knowledge. You have to include that realistically and up front. I’m never going to have perfect knowledge. Okay, that means when I make a judgment I’m taking a risk by definition. If you can’t have perfect knowledge, you’re taking a risk, but you have to be prepared to take those risks. You have to be prepared to make those judgments. And you have to be prepared to move ahead. And you have to be prepared to correct quickly any mistakes that you might make - quickly - not have mistakes that you’re so egotistical about, getting back to humility, that you say, “Oh my Lord, I can’t do anything about this because it’ll admit I was wrong.” You know what I mean: Say, “Well, I was wrong. I’ve got to correct it, instantaneously.”
Google is not evil, but neither is it morally good. Nor is it simply neutral—far from it. Google does not make us smarter. Nor does it make us dumber, as at least one writer has claimed. It’s a publicly traded, revenue-driven firm that offers us a set of tools we can use intelligently or dumbly. But Google is not uniformly and unequivocally good for us. In fact, it’s dangerous because of our increasing, uncritical faith in and dependence on it, and because of the way it fractures and disrupts almost every market or activity it enters—usually for the better, but sometimes for the worse. Google is simultaneously new, wealthy, and powerful. This rare combination means that we have not yet assessed or come to terms with the changes it brings to our habits, perspectives, judgments, transactions, and imaginations.
Back in dial-up days, when Google launched it was just a blank screen with a box, so it loaded fast. Later, when the dot-com crash came, in 2000, it put venture capital into the fiber optics and servers other companies were disposing of super-cheap. It literally sank billions into the ground and built massive server farms, so it could have redundancy in its content. We like to think of Google as ephemeral because it’s ephemeral in our lives, but it’s actually a pretty heavy industry. There’s metal, wire, and glass at the heart of Google’s success, not just brain power. Google likes to make the claim that two guys in a garage could invent a better search engine tomorrow and wipe Google out, but that’s just not true. There’s more to Google than algorithms.