- Snobbery: "A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. ... You encounter it within minutes at a party, when you get asked that famous iconic question of the early 21st century, "What do you do?" And according to how you answer that question, people are either incredibly delighted to see you, or look at their watch and make their excuses. ... The opposite of a snob is ... the ideal mother ... who doesn't care about your achievements."
- Materialism: "I don't think we are particularly materialistic. I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It's not the material goods we want. It's the rewards we want."
- Spirit of equality leads to the problem of envy. "If there is one dominant emotion in modern society, that is envy." That idea that anyone is able to succeed (in terms of social status) makes us all envious of those who have succeeded. "There is a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything, and the existence of low self-esteem." -- because we all feel like failures in comparison to those who have higher social status.
- Meritocracy: "A meritocratic society is one in which if you've got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top. ... If you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you'll also, by implication, and in a far more nasty way, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there. In other words, your position in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved. And that makes failure seem much more crushing."
- Unfortunates and Losers: "In the middle ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an 'unfortunate.' Literally, somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may, unkindly, be described as a 'loser.' There is a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser." The result is s higher rate of suicide. "The idea that we will make a society where literally everybody is graded, the good at the top, and the bad at the bottom, and it's exactly done as it should be, is impossible. There are simply too many random factors. Accidents, accidents of birth, accidents of things dropping on people's heads, illnesses, etc."
- Ridicule: "When we think about failure, ... what we fear is the judgement and ridicule of others." Newspapers are the prime carrier or ridicule.
- Tragedy: "An art form devoted to tracing how people fail." This is a more productive response to failure than ridicule. "At one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you've got the tabloid newspaper. At the other end of the spectrum you've got tragedy."
- Transcendence: "The other thing about modern society, and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves."
- Success: "You can't be successful at everything. ... A lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully, are not our own. They are sucked in from ... father ... mother ... advertising. ... So what I want to argue for, is not that we should give up on our ideas of success. But we should make sure that they are our own, ... that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions."
Monday, 17 August 2009
Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success
Alain de Botton's presentation at TED 2009 has greatly inspired me. (And BTW, the podcasts that come from TED are by far the most informative and diverse thought-provokers I have come across.)
Christian Billionaires
- Forbes richest list
- Philip Anschutz, Anschutz Company, 555 17th St., Ste. 2400, Denver, CO 80202
- Thomas, Walter, Raymond Kwok, Sun Hung Kai Properties Limited, 45th Floor, Sun Hung Kai Centre, 30 Harbour Road, Wanchai, Hong Kong
- Andrew Forrest, Fortescue Metals Group, Level 2, 87 Adelaide Terrace, East Perth WA 6004
Saturday, 18 July 2009
Ian Bogost on serious games
In the ABC Fora podcast Serious Gaming , Ian Bogost commented about the role of video games.
He claims that video games are the one form of modern media that embraces complexity rather than shying away from it. The key characteristics of video games are modelling, role playing and world building.
I found his comments on role playing to be the most insightful. He says that an important aspect is to experience what it is like to be constrained by the rules that the role implies. I can see that as a useful dynamic in my 12-year old son's life. As he plays various computer games, he is forced to work within tight boundaries to reach some pre-specified goal. In doing so, he is hopefully building an ability to empathise. He is brought up will such affluence and power that he could easily be blind to the constraints most people experience. Short of an immersive cross-cultural experience, a role-playing computer game may be his best chance to appreciate what its like to maintain a will to succeed and avoid despair in the face of limited choices.
He claims that video games are the one form of modern media that embraces complexity rather than shying away from it. The key characteristics of video games are modelling, role playing and world building.
I found his comments on role playing to be the most insightful. He says that an important aspect is to experience what it is like to be constrained by the rules that the role implies. I can see that as a useful dynamic in my 12-year old son's life. As he plays various computer games, he is forced to work within tight boundaries to reach some pre-specified goal. In doing so, he is hopefully building an ability to empathise. He is brought up will such affluence and power that he could easily be blind to the constraints most people experience. Short of an immersive cross-cultural experience, a role-playing computer game may be his best chance to appreciate what its like to maintain a will to succeed and avoid despair in the face of limited choices.
Thursday, 16 July 2009
"Glut" by Alex Wright
The Sydney UX Book Club is going to discuss Glut at the next meeting so I've been reading it. Here's a few comments and quotes:
It immediately seems a more balanced book than Everything is Miscellaneous, giving more credence to the value of hierarchical information structures.
The first known bibliography was a list of documents kept in the Hittite government archives (from another source I think that was around 1300 BC, around the time of Judges in the Bible).
Great Library at Alexandria (70):
Protestantism is left-brained whereas Catholicism is right-brained. Protestantism, right from Luther's reliance on the printing press, emphasises the written word over the image. (118)
Thomas Jefferson contributed quite a bit to naturalism and was an early supporter of the Linnaean classification system. He considered it a higher honour to be president of the American Philosophical Society than president of the USA. (161)
Wright makes an impressive connection between the stigmergy in the insect world and links in the WWW. Even prior to the Internet, Bush and Otlet saw the meta-data of links being central to the web of knowledge. As people establish and navigate the associative trails between knowledge chunks, the trails themselves become an interesting item to study (199). I don't think Wright mentions it, but Google's PageRank is doing just that: analysing the stigmergy of hyperlinks.
Criticisms of the WWW:
On pages 223 and 228, Wright describes modern computing and the Web as profoundly humanist. I don't know what he means by that.
"Twenty years after Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press, a bare handful of people in Germany and France had ever seen a printed boook. Less than 20 years after its invention, the World Wide Web has touched billions." (229)
Like previous advances in information technology, the Internet has triggered a conflict between literacy and orality (231). The Internet is evolving into a mechanism that allows people to express themselves informally and without the constraints of institutions. The result is far more like an oral culture than a written one. That's an important and fascinating idea. I should not only re-read the final chapter a few times, but hunt down Wright's primary source: Ong, W. J., Orality and Literacy, Methuen, 1982.
It immediately seems a more balanced book than Everything is Miscellaneous, giving more credence to the value of hierarchical information structures.
- "The fundamental tension between networks and hierarchies has been percolating for eons. Today, we are simply witnessing the latest instalment in a long evolutionary drama." (p. 7)
- Taking this tension back to genetics and cultural evolution, however, seems to be stretching the idea too far.
- The Ice Age 40,000 years ago forced people to live closer together and gave the impetus for a whole range of new symbolic behaviours. Social proximity lead to more complex forms of communication and that in turn supported more complex social structures. (40)
- Early forms of art at the same time act as a counter-example to the normal view that art arises as a luxury in the easy time. In fact, art is a necessity when a society experiences hardship. (45)
The first known bibliography was a list of documents kept in the Hittite government archives (from another source I think that was around 1300 BC, around the time of Judges in the Bible).
Great Library at Alexandria (70):
- Established 300BC
- 700,000 works
- Initially had no catalog
- A later catalog had two major divisions -- poetry and prose -- within which authors were listed alphabetically.
- No one knows when the library was destroyed
Protestantism is left-brained whereas Catholicism is right-brained. Protestantism, right from Luther's reliance on the printing press, emphasises the written word over the image. (118)
Thomas Jefferson contributed quite a bit to naturalism and was an early supporter of the Linnaean classification system. He considered it a higher honour to be president of the American Philosophical Society than president of the USA. (161)
Wright makes an impressive connection between the stigmergy in the insect world and links in the WWW. Even prior to the Internet, Bush and Otlet saw the meta-data of links being central to the web of knowledge. As people establish and navigate the associative trails between knowledge chunks, the trails themselves become an interesting item to study (199). I don't think Wright mentions it, but Google's PageRank is doing just that: analysing the stigmergy of hyperlinks.
Criticisms of the WWW:
- Hyperlinks are uni-directional. It didn't have to be that way, and some predecessors of the Web had naturally bi-directional links. (218, 220)
- Web browsers are limited to viewing, whereas other proposals would have more naturally balanced viewing and editing (consuming and producing). (228 and earlier) [This editing ability is of course now being retro-fitted via Wikis, blog comments, Google Wave etc.]
- The Web still carries the legacy of the printed page (229), a woefully inadequate 2-dimensional concept.
On pages 223 and 228, Wright describes modern computing and the Web as profoundly humanist. I don't know what he means by that.
"Twenty years after Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press, a bare handful of people in Germany and France had ever seen a printed boook. Less than 20 years after its invention, the World Wide Web has touched billions." (229)
Like previous advances in information technology, the Internet has triggered a conflict between literacy and orality (231). The Internet is evolving into a mechanism that allows people to express themselves informally and without the constraints of institutions. The result is far more like an oral culture than a written one. That's an important and fascinating idea. I should not only re-read the final chapter a few times, but hunt down Wright's primary source: Ong, W. J., Orality and Literacy, Methuen, 1982.
Wednesday, 15 July 2009
A few good YouTube's
- Jazz version of Night Watch
- John Weeton doing Starless
- Laurie Anderson: Only an expert/maybe if I fall
- Frippotronics
- Finger tapping guitar version of Isn't She Wonderful
- Stevie Wonder live version of Isn't She Wonderful
- Bush and Condi: Hu's in China
Differences in modern media
In a podcast from TED, Clay Shirky makes some interesting points about the distinguishing characteristics of modern media...
"The moment we are living through ... is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history"
Four media revolutions in the past 500 years:
On the Internet, all forms of media exist side-by-side.
The former "audience" can now use the same medium to publish themselves.
Media is now global, social, ubiquitous and cheap.
The "really crazy change" is not that the former audience can speak back to the publishers, but that they can interact with each other.
The key role of this new media is to convene rather than to control communication.
Clay also discusses a great example of how technology usage in Nigeria inspired similar usage in the USA.
"The moment we are living through ... is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history"
Four media revolutions in the past 500 years:
- Printing press
- Telegraph and telephone
- Recorded media other than print: photos, sound, movies
- Radio and television, in which electromagnetic techniques were harnessed allowing to be sent through the air
On the Internet, all forms of media exist side-by-side.
The former "audience" can now use the same medium to publish themselves.
Media is now global, social, ubiquitous and cheap.
The "really crazy change" is not that the former audience can speak back to the publishers, but that they can interact with each other.
The key role of this new media is to convene rather than to control communication.
Clay also discusses a great example of how technology usage in Nigeria inspired similar usage in the USA.
Monday, 14 May 2007
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