Writing the Elephant
June 18, 2008
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Writing the Elephant
As could have been anticipated, Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” has attracted a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere; but what has struck me more than anything else is the vast diversity of reactions, many of which seem to demonstrate that reading practice of zipping “along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” that provoked Carr into writing this piece in the first place. In my own post I had to distinguish between Carr’s text, my reading of Carr’s text, Charles Cooper’s reading of Carr in his blog post (which first directed me to Carr’s article), and my reading of Cooper’s text! It is as if, because Carr wrote an article of such considerable length and depth, he elicited from his would-be readers those same bad habits that he quoted Bruce Friedman describing:
I can’t read War and Peace anymore. I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.
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Learning to be Stupid
June 15, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Learning to be Stupid
The last time I encountered the work of Nicholas Carr, it was in the review by Mary Eisenhart of his book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google for the San Francisco
Carr devotes the second half of his book to the study of unintended (at least by the innovators and cheerleaders) consequences of the 20th century’s technological breakthroughs and likely parallels in the 21st’s.
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Too Much Chutzpah?
June 15, 2008
Friday, June 13, 2008
Too Much Chutzpah?
This has been one of those weeks when there have been just too many candidates for the Chutzpah of the Week award. Nevertheless, having just written that one of the greatest virtues of our American government is its foundation on a principle of checks and balances, I suspect that the act of chutzpah that deserves most attention is one that seems directed at thwarting that system. This act has received a fair amount of coverage this morning. Nevertheless, in the interest of the very nature of chutzpah, it seems appropriate for me to cite the Al Jazeera English version of this coverage:
The US attorney-general has vowed to go ahead with military trials against foreigners held at the Guantanamo Bay prison despite a supreme court ruling giving detainees the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts.
Michael Mukasey said in Tokyo on Friday that he was disappointed with the decision because it would lead to “hundreds” of cases being referred to the federal district court.
“I think it bears emphasis that the court’s decision does not concern military commission trials, which will continue to proceed,” he said.
“Instead it addresses the procedures that the Congress and the president [George Bush] put in place to permit enemy combatants to challenge their detention.”
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Our Greatest Loss: A Loss of Balance
June 13, 2008
Friday, June 13, 2008
Our Greatest Loss: A Loss of Balance
I have just read Andrew Keen’s latest blog post, “The America that we want back,” with great interest, particularly since it emerged that many (if not all) of the “we” in that post are not Americans. I do not mean this in a pejorative, let alone sarcastic, sense: Whether it began with our winning our Revolutionary War or with the ratification of our Constitution, American has been perceived, particularly by Europeans, as a “grand experiment” in government; and given the historical record of volatility of social systems, particularly those which are constituted rather than simply “emerging” (for better or worse) out of existing practices, the endurance of our system for over two centuries probably deserves to be recognized as an accomplishment. Thus, I both believe and sympathize with this paragraph near the beginning of Keen’s post:
Over a tapas lunch [during the Direct and Interactive Marketing Global Forum in Barcelona], one guy, a very senior Catalan marketing executive, confided in me. “The America we all know, the America of innovation, the America that continually reinvents itself, ” he asked with a childish hopefulness. “Is that America dead? Can Obama reinvent America?”
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On Understanding the Damage Before Trying to Control It
June 8, 2008
Saturday, June 7, 2008
On Understanding the Damage before Trying to Control It
Whether or not Barack Obama reads Al Jazeera English (or has an aide that tracks all of their stories that may pertain to his campaign), he seems to have gotten the message that his “AIPAC debut” was not the best first step towards furthering peace in the Middle East. For one thing Al Jazeera English ran a report of his attempt at damage control through an interview on CNN. Unfortunately, the sort of language he used did not serve his goal very well:
Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations.
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VOX POPULI in Iraq?
June 7, 2008
Friday, June 6, 2008
VOX POPULI in Iraq?
While I have been invoking the vox populi vox dei principle (”the voice of the people is the voice of God”) almost since I initiated this blog, a quick keyword search has revealed that I have applied it almost exclusively to the American populi, often focusing on the populi of cyberspace, again with an American bias. However, I have also held to the principle that vox populi is better embodied in the structures of representative government than it is in the far weaker structures of cyberspace. In this case I have tried to take a more global perspective on representative structures, most recently by writing about the Palestinian problem in terms of a conflict between de facto and de jure representatives. Today I find myself revisiting that conflict with respect to conditions in Iraq in terms of the extent to which the de jure Iraqi parliament provides de facto representation for the general Iraqi population. Read more
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