24/7 Ideas

Why is Sigourney Weaver's stage name called "Sigourney Weaver" since her real first name is Susan?

2011-10-15T06:36:00.000-07:00

Born in 1949, she changed her name in 1963 to "Sigourney", after the character "Sigourney Howard" in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (her
own birth name, Susan, was in honor of her mother's best friend,
explorer Susan Pretzlik).

FROM BOOK:

“I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. “How long were we in there?”

“Why, about an hour.” “It was — simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore I wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.” She yawned gracefully in my face: “Please come and see me. . . . Phone book . . . Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard . . . My aunt . . .” She was hurrying off as she talked — her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door.''

Fell falls in love in 'New Taiwan' all over again with new 'fun' -- and scholarly -- tome

2011-10-15T06:34:00.000-07:00

''Government and Politics in Taiwan'' is an essential text for any
course on freewheeling Taiwanese politics, Communist Chinese Party
politics of brainwashing and mind control (sic),
and will be useful to students worldwide, especially those in Beijing
and Shanhai mystified at Taiwan's success in the modern world.
The has a November 6 pub date and is available now for pre-ordering.
The tome has already garnerned some
very good reviews, with Robert Ash of the Taiwan Studies Program at
the University of London, noting: "Fell’s [book] offers an accessible,
authoritative and comprehensive
interpretation of Taiwan’s political development through the period of
authoritarian rule [during Martial Law days] to the establishment of a
fully-fledged democratic
system of governance [under the modern KMT and DPP parties]."

Shelley Rigger, a political science professor at Davidson College in
the USA, could not hold back
her enthousiam, noting: "Fell’s new book is ....brimming with
enthusiasm for its subject and affection for its readers, ....Thanks to [his]
.....heartfelt engagement with
his topic, readers will gain both a comprehensive knowledge of a vast
scholarly literature and a gut-level appreciation for Taiwan’s lively
political scene.'

NOTE: Dafydd Fell is a British scholar from an island nation who focuses on Taiwan studies from his base in London. He often visits the island nation on the other side of the world, too.

UPDATE: 7-Eleven chain store in Taiwan recalls Hitler key chain, doll. Game over

2011-09-28T20:27:00.001-07:00

To make a long story short, after the wire services ran a story about a convenience store chain in Taiwan selling cartoonish images modelled after what appeared to be a Hitler face and armband, although modified as a parody and not designed to promote Nazi thinking, the chain store's CEO decided to recall the items from all 4,500 stores nationwide. Game over.

However, it took a few days of follow-up news reports from the Agence France-Press news agency, the Deutsche Press-Agentur German News agency, Taiwan's own Central News Agency, the Chinese-language Liberty Times and CNN for the recall to be finalized. But did anyone in Taiwan learn anything from this Hitler brouhaha? Probably not. Another Hitler cartoon or parody sighting will occur again, within the year, and always with the same naive and innocent intentions.

There is no antisemitism in Taiwan; repeat: there is no antisemitism in Taiwan. But there is a lack of education in schools and in society at large about issues such as the Holocaust or the Nazi period in Europe. And the lack of education is not just about Jewish or Israeli history, it's also concerns ignorance about events taking place far away in Africa or Europe or South America. Remember, Taiwan is a small island nation just off the coast of China, just south of Japan, and while it boasts one of the most hospitable and friendly people on the face on the Earth, due its own history as an island batted back and forth between neighboring Asian powers -- and long ago by the Dutch and the French and the Spanish, not to mention the American presence during the Vietnam War period -- Taiwan is a very unique place.

Blogger Mark Lee, who designed of the recent Hitler items, admitted that while the figure’s appearance was inspired by Hitler, the cartoon was not meant to endorse any of Hitler’s views. In addition to depicting the dictator’s famous mustache, the caricature also wears a red dollar-sign armband and, in one version, has its arm raised in the fashion of the iconic Nazi salute. Lee told reporters that the doll was meant to represent a dictatorial angry boss, and the whole thing was a parody. He said he loves Israel and he loves the Jewish people, and he meant no harm at all. But now he has learned a lesson, at least on a personal level, and that's good.

"I wanted to use it to satirize some bosses,” Lee told Agence France-Presse (AFP). “In the eyes of disgruntled employees, many bosses are greedy and dictatorial and like vampires trying to suck money from them. I was actually making fun of Hitler, mocking him. I know who he was, of course, he was a very evil man."

''Hi, I'm Mark!'' -- Hitler 'lookalike doll' on sale in convenience stores in Taiwan

2011-09-25T07:10:00.000-07:00

LINK FOR 7-11 DOLL ON SALE NOW:
http://www.pcstore.com.tw/immark/M07273286.htm

LINKS TO DOLL MAKER/SELLER. created by ''LIGHT-FORCE'' in Japan or Taiwan
www.wretch.cc/blog/markleeblog

http://www.immark.tw/

New Hitler lookalike dolls are for sale at 7-ELEVEn convenience stores in Taiwan today. Seems as if images of Adolph Hitler, the German Nazi
dictator, have a special place in the marketing hearts of Asian advertising agencies and PR mavens. From Japan to India, from Taiwan to Vietnam, images of Hitler make the news at least once a way, and not in a good way.

Ten years ago, for example, in Taiwan, a promotional campaign for German-made space heaters featuring an image of Hitler sparked outrage from both German and Israeli trade and culture officials in Taipei. The ads were quickly taken down and apologies were made by the marketing people involved. It was a big mistake they said, sorry sorry.

The resulting news story made headlines for Reuters and the Associated Press in 1999. Could this happen again?

Fast forward to 2011. A new Hitler doll has surfaced, this time being sold by someone calling himself Mark Lee and apparently

designed by a doll firm in Japan.

The doll is a UCB and sells for US$15 at local 7-ELEVEn convenience stores in Taiwan now. The "cute" Hitler lookalike sports an unmistakable Hitler moustache, a Hitler right hand "salute," a Hitler combover for hair, and a red Nazi-looking armband on the doll's arm. Ouch.

Will this doll be for sale in 7-ELEVENs in Taiwan next week after the news gets out that another Hitlet lookalike doll is being merchandised
online and in stores now? Are the 7-ELEVEns in Japan also selling this cute UCB doll?

Will Asians ever understand what Hitler did during World War II or is that "story" just too far away for Asians to grasp? It happened in 1999
and it happens from time to time all over Asia, from India to Japan. Now it's happening in Taiwan, again. Laugh or cry? Your call.

Back in 1999, to recap in older news story, a Taiwanese company provoked an angry response because of an advertising campaign using large subway billboards featuring a cartoon figure of a smiling Adolf Hitler. The advertisements are for German-made electric space heaters.

Israeli and German culture and trade officials in Taipei said they were appalled by the ad.

The maker of the space heaters, DBK, based in the southwest German city of Kandel, said it would of course order an immediate halt to the ad campaign.

The ad showed Hitler in a khaki uniform and black jackboots, his right arm raised high in a Nazi salute. Above him is a slogan that said "Declare war on the cold front!"

There were no swastikas in the ad, but the Hitler figure wears a red arm band on his left arm with a white circle bearing the German manufacturer's name.

"We decided to use Hitler because as soon as you see him, you think of Germany. It leaves a deep impression," said a Taiwanese PR man who worked in the company's planning and design department. He had not inkling of what was going on, but after learning more about history, he said sorry sorry, too.

He said the company had not been worried that the public would have a negative reaction to an ad that features a man who oversaw the killing of millions of Jews during World War II.

"Most people in Taiwan are not that sensitive about Hitler," he said during the 1999 gaffe.

Uri Gutman of the Israel Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei in 1999 said the advertisement was "unbelievable."

He feared using Hitler's image in such ads would make Nazi atrocities during World War II seem less real.

"It supports the denial of the Holocaust," said Gutman, referring to fringe theories that the Nazis did not kill Jews.

German officials in Taiwan also objected to the ad in 1999.

"We are not happy about this, this is not an appropriate way to make an advertisement," said Hilmar Kaht, then-director general of the German Trade Office in Taipei in 1999.

Kaht said while the intention of the ad back in 1999 was to tell consumers that the space heater is a German product, which he does not object to, he added that: "They should not use any political advertisement, especially not from Nazi times ... It creates a negative image of Germany and legitimizes the crimes of the Nazi regime by playing it down."

"Such an ad would be forbidden in Germany," Kaht said.

German officials in Taipei back in 1999 told the Taipei Times that the advertisement didn't surprise them because they often encounter Taiwanese who admire Hitler and lack a deep understanding of European history.

"Taxi drivers will often tell me Hitler was a great man, very strong," one German embassy official in Taipei said.

老美迷台語/要走全台錄萬人說 LO LAT 新竹市

2011-09-19T21:13:00.000-07:00

DAN BLOOM 迷台語/要走全台錄萬人台灣新竹市說 LO LAT

旅居台灣十年的美國人丹布隆（Dan Bloom）喜歡台灣、愛台語，無意中聽到他人說「勞力（LO LAT）」，覺得音調、語意很美，逢人即推廣，發願走遍全台錄萬人說LO LAT，日前從居住的嘉義到台南錄音，很多人受其熱情感動，即使不認識或不懂LO LAT意思，但都共襄盛舉。

丹布隆說，已錄下約一百人說LO LAT，錄到目標數後，打算送給台灣文學館，表達自己愛台語的一分心意，也要剪輯上傳網路；為方便推廣，自己以「小星星」的曲調，譜寫LO LAT之歌「感謝、感謝、真LO LAT，謝謝、謝謝、真LO LAT，台灣、台灣、水噹噹，阿嬤、阿公真愛我，爸爸、媽媽真愛我」，希望有朝一日能獲歌手支持共同推廣。

六十二歲的丹布隆，在中正大學兼差教英文，也教小朋友英文，向周遭人打聽才知道LO LAT是台語「感謝、謝謝辛苦」的意思，但也發現很多人不知道LO LAT，覺得不可思議，這麼美與真誠的語詞，怎麼少人使用，決定盡己之力宣傳。

丹布隆說，六月收錄LO LAT的範圍以雲林、嘉義、台南為主，七月要去高雄、屏東及東部，八月去中、北部。

國、台語不很流暢的丹布隆，為了錄LO LAT，國、台、英語夾雜向陌生人說明，大家看到一個老外對台語如此熱情都被感染，樂於開口說LO LAT。

Engagement Bridge in Chiayi City - Filed in Chinglish Department of Amplification

2011-07-15T06:47:00.000-07:00

Victor Mair writes from the USA: [Photo by Rain Kuo] [[''Hired Actor'' Posing as local mandarin]]

Here is a sign directing passengers in a new Chiayi (Jiayi, in southwestern Taiwan) building that links a bus terminal with a railroad terminal:

The Chinese Mandarin characters say:
xiánjiē qiáo .......銜接橋

I would translate this as "connecting bridge." So how did the makers of this sign came up with "engagement bridge"?

xiánjiē 銜接 usually means "connect; converge; link (up); join" and in some cases "hook (up)" or "articulate".

But xiánjiē 銜接 also has the specialized medical meaning of "engage(ment)", as in "the phase of parturition in which the fetal head passes into the cavity of the true pelvis" (from the American Heritage Dictionary). Online Chinese dictionaries render this sense as 【医】衔接, i.e.,【Med.】xiánjiē 銜接. Perhaps the software chose this sense because of the ordering precedence of "【" (before the beginning of the alphabet). In any event, it was unfortunate that the person(s) responsible for making this sign chose the most specialized and least appropriate of all senses of xiánjiē 銜接, resulting in "Engagement Bridge", which will surely be baffling for speakers of English (for whom the sign is intended, after all). They will probably think it signifies a bridge where people go to propose marriage!

For xiánjiē 衔接, nCiku.com gives "link up; join; connect". That's pretty straightforward and wouldn't have caused a problem.

Most online dictionaries do not have an entry for xiánjiē qiáo 衔接桥; it seems that "engagement bridge" isn't a standard mistranslation. One of the few online occurrences of "engagement bridge" for xiánjiē qiáo 銜接橋 I could find was in a blog about Taiwan (see below in the acknowledgements), and it is talking about the same sign that I am discussing here.

But cf. the fourth definition of the entry for xiánjiē 衔接 in iciba (which is the web interface for Jinshan/Kingsoft Ciba). Since Jinshan/Kingsoft Ciba is so widely used and was the source of what is undoubtedly the most colossal series of mistranslations in the annals of Chinglish, it is plausible that it is also culpable in this case –

Google Translate renders xiánjiē qiáo 銜接橋 as "convergence bridge", which would be just as puzzling for English speakers as "engagement bridge".

Curiously, there's a "Go Between Bridge" in Brisbane. This is suitably translated into Chinese as jiēlián qiáo 接連橋, which is another (more common than xiánjiē qiáo 銜接橋) term for "connecting bridge".

"Go Between Bridge" is unidiomatic in American English, unless it were referring to a place where matchmakers ply their trade. Speakers of Australian English can tell us whether it is idiomatic for them when they want to refer to what we call a "connecting bridge".

Incidentally, architects refer to such structures as "building to building pedestrian bridges". More colloquially, such a bridge may be styled a "skyway," "catwalk," "sky bridge," or "skywalk".

[With a tip of the hat to Brendan O'Kane, Rebecca Fu, Joel Martinsen, Cyndy Ning, and Leinad Moolb, who sent me the photograph that was snapped on a cellphone camera by Miss Rain Kuo from Taichung. Nad said that in the future he hopes local officials putting up English signs in Chiayi and other parts of Taiwan would first check with some Western born native speakers to make sure they are correct.]

pics files

2011-07-04T00:53:00.000-07:00

Is Australian motivational guru and writer Bradley Trevor Greive gay perhaps, the way Leo Buscaglia was also gay? Why not come out and admit it and embrace his gayness, if he is gay? Anybody know?

2011-02-01T23:54:00.000-08:00

Is Australian ''motivational guru'' and writer ~~Bradley Trevor Greive~~ gay perhaps, the way ~~Leo Buscaglia~~ was also gay? Why not come out and admit it and embrace his gayness, if he is gay? Anybody know? The author of the Blue Day Book and Looking for Mr Right? Just curious. It just seems so, but not sure, and not outing anyone, just curious what internetters think, or know about BTG. Because for all his money and fame and 9 billion books sold, he has not found love. Why not?

Many famous artists remain in the closet all their lives, from Tom Cruise to Leo Buscaglia to Anderson Cooper. It's a shame I think. We need to get
over our hangups about gay people. They are part of this wonderful world, too. BTG, if you are there, answer. And if I am wrong, of course, I am wrong. I often am. Just asking. I do know he was engaged in 2004 but the E was broken off by the women from UK after 7 months. These things happen. But too many things on the BTG website point to a gay artist who doesn't want to admit he is gay to his adoring female fans. Right, BTG? get over it. come out, come out, where-ever you are!

Enjoy life the way God made you. It's okay.

http://btgstudios.com/

National Essay for Foreign Nationals Launched. Great Prizes Offered

2011-02-01T23:46:00.000-08:00

National Essay for Foreign Nationals Launched (sic, no period or semi-colon, just a run on headline) Great Prizes Offered

Sadly, the advert that appeared in local expat newspapers in English was not written by a native English speaker or writer and what was printed was embarrassing, to say the least. The entire advert was poorly worded, poorly written, and hard to read, and it's too bad that whoever was charged with putting out this advert and writing it did not consult a foreign person to at least check the grammar and wording, in order to get it right!

Once again, whoever was in charge of this, probably someone at the Tourism bureau, did not take time to ask a foreigner person to fix the poor English. And this was an advert aimed at foreigenrs in English for an English essay writing contest!

It's too late now. The damage is done. Par for the course! But it does not have to be this way!

Suicide and Public Awareness of Depression (How media report suicides, pro and con)

2011-01-22T19:39:00.000-08:00

Recently, a middle-aged man committed suciide while on a business trip outside his country. He was married, had two lovely children, a lovely wife, a great job, was well-liked by all his co-workers worldwide and loved by all his many friends. Naturally, after the newspaper in Australia reported his death, in a small newspaper story of just two paragraphs, stating that the deceased -- let's call him Harvey Nettleton -- had jumped from the roof of a five-star hotel in Sydney where he was staying during a week-long business trip. Meanwhile, his frends and family back in his home country, Canada, were completely taken aback by the news of this suicide, which seemed to come out of nowhere! Everyone who knew Harvey said he was the life of the party, a good family man, a loving husband, a doting father, a great co-worker, a fantastic colleague, and nobody had a clue as to why he decided that fateful night, after midnight, around 1 am, to jump from the roof, climbing over a security fence and plumeting to his death.. The initirial news story did not say anything
about his slitting his wrists beforehand, but a later news story from the police sources in Sydney, said that Harvey's hotel room had blood on the bed sheets and a knife was found and no suicide note was found, and that the police concluded that he had slit his wrists,, taken the elevator to the top floor, walked up to the roof via a staircase, jumped over the safety fence, and POOF, he's dead. 51 years old! AND NOBODY HAD A CLUE?

When I first heard this news via a blog, I also was curious: what caused the impulsve to commit suidice and why the was media so sloppy and lazy at first in reprting the FACTS. My feeling is that if the man committed suicide due to midlife clinical depression, the media should discuss this just like we discuss cancer and Parkinson's disease and other brain aneurysms now. But because suicide does not haev a name, like HARVEY'S DISEASE we might call it, peoplle in the media are loathe to mention the S word. Or to even
tell readers what migth have been the cause. I mean, something causes cancer, right? So something causes suicide. Shouldn't we be courageous to discuss this now. AND IF WE TALK ABOUT THIS OPENLY IN THE NEWSPAPERS AND WEBSITES OF THE WORLD, MAYBE THIS HELP PREVENT FUTURE SUICIDES FROM TAKING PLACE SINCE PEOPLE WHO SUFFER FROM DEPRESSION CAN BE ABLE TO TALK ABOUT THEIR DISEASE WITHOUT BEING AFRAID TO MENTION IT. THAT IS my MO here.

Here is the news story:

Canadian visitor to Sydney dies in apparent suicide

Staff writer, Sydyey Sun, December 25, 2010

A Canadian man was found dead in a pool of blood on the sidewalk
outside a five-star hotel in Sydney yesterday, police said.

An initial investigation found that Harvey Nettleton, 51, had jumped to
his death from the top floor of the 12-story hotel building before
dawn, police in Sydney said.

An ambulance was sent to the scene soon after the Sydney Fire
Department was informed of the incident, but the man was pronounced
dead, apparently from a fractured skull.

The police have informed the Canadiab Enbassy in
Sydney of the incident.

Police said the man arrived in Sydney on a business visa last Friday
and was scheduled to leave on Monday.

The police said hotel monitors showed that he left his room at
1:18am and took the elevator to the ground floor.

At 2:07am, he took the elevator alone to the 10th floor, from where he
walked up to the 12th floor and jumped off the building.

His body has been taken to the Sydney Funeral Parlor
on Oxford Street, police said.

This story has been viewed ~~23,745,939~~ times.

No sooner had I posted this blog post than I received a polite cease and desist notice from a lawyer in Canada who told me to stop talking about this incident in public. The lawyer wrote to me:

Dear Sir:

Please be advised that I am the general counsel to Harvey's firm, the employer of the late Harvey Nettleton. I have received copy of published statements from you which appear to provide various speculation as to the cause and manner of death of Mr. Nettleton. This correspondence provides what could be construed as libelous and unsubstantiated statements harmful to the reputation of Mr. Nettleton, his family and the firm he worked for. You are hereby requested to cease and desist from any further activity. I am happy to discuss our position and perspective with you should you be so inclined. ~~[If you are not the person who wrote said internet publications, please disregard and delete this email.]~~

TO which i replied:

Hello Lawyer,

THanks for note. I fully understand and I apologize......In no way,
was i trying to cause harm or hurt anyone. I had just
gone online via social media such as twitter to ask friends of his worldwide if they knew
of any other reasons he might have done what he did,
and since i live in Sydney and read the papers here, i just wanted to
let people know NEW FACTS that had emerged
but only IF they wanted to hear the gtrisly news.......i did not force
this on anyone, i assure you sir i am a sensitive person
who cares about human life and his family too......SO YES, I WILL STOP
RIGHT NOW AND NOT POST ANYTHING ANYMORE
about this...and please accept my apologies....My intent was to help
people UNDERSTAND what happened, but since
my online behavior was not so good or constructive, i will STOP NOW...

done deal

thanks for your understanding

i see your point

God rest his soul

NOW MY QUESTION TO MENTAL HEALTH WORKERS AND FAMILY COUNSELLORS AND CLERGY AND NEWSPAPER REPORTERS AND EDITORS WORLDWIDE is this:

SHould we discuss the reasons people commit suicide openly in public and in newspaper stories, or should we keep the entire THING secretive and in the closet of human conciousness? What is your POV, dear readers?

DITTO SEE BELOW

2010-12-29T23:50:00.001-08:00

http://thefutureofreading101.blogspot.com/2010/12/photo-story-of-you-know-who-holding-you.html

photo story of you know who holding you know what book. NOT FOR PUBLIC VIEWING as this is just a visualization and not a real photograph taken in real time

2010-12-29T23:45:00.000-08:00

http://thefutureofreading101.blogspot.com/2010/12/photo-story-of-you-know-who-holding-you.html

The Roof Beneath Our Feet

2010-10-03T20:02:00.001-07:00

The Roof Beneath Our Feet
by Jay Baron Nicorvo, October 2010
Want to become a poet? Spend a summer roofing under the Florida sun.

The summer I was fifteen, my younger brothers and I were instructed to replace the roof on our house. Dane was thirteen, Shawn eleven—the asphalt shingles, weathered and crumbling, were older than all of us. Rainwater had been running in and ruining the drywall. If we wanted, our mom said, we could ask our friends to help with the repairs. She’d buy the materials, rent the tools and make sure we had all the sandwiches we could eat and the Gatorade we could drink.

My brothers and I gathered in secret to mount a counterargument. As the eldest it fell to me to present our case: “We’re kids, Mom. How do you expect us to replace the roof?”

“How? Easy, that’s how.”

“But, Mom—”

“Figure it out. You’re not idiots. And it’s not rocket science.”

So it went, back and forth, for a full month. Our impending responsibility literally loomed over our heads, ushering in a terrific dread where the excitement of the approach of summer vacation should have been instead.

Our labors were needed to maintain our own safety and security—our own shelter—concerns that didn’t usually fall to kids, at least not in this country in this century, but that didn’t faze our mom. When she was Shawn’s age she’d troweled mortar as her father, a mason, laid the bricks that became their house. Our mom couldn’t afford a sense of shame, so, trying another angle, I appealed to her work ethic and sense of duty: “Mom, some of us have jobs. We can’t just take off.”

“Jay, you tell that boss of yours he can find someone else to stock the toilet paper aisle for a few weeks. I got you that part-time job, and worst comes to worst, I’ll help you find another one. Besides, you’ll be the foreman of the roofing crew, and I’ll pay you what they’re paying you at Winn-Dixie.”

I was tempted by the idea of bossing my brothers around under contract, but I’d been doing so on a volunteer basis since our dad went deadbeat, and I knew that a motherly directive wouldn’t sway them to obey my orders.

I tried again to get us out of it: “Mom, you can’t expect us to ask our friends to spend their summer working manual labor.”

“Why not? Those friends of yours’re here day and night. They eat us out of house and home. They can pitch in for a change. Otherwise, they can start hanging out somewhere else. I don’t work sixty hours a week to feed other people’s sons, and we didn’t relocate to Florida to be washed out by some rain.”

In 1987, the year our mom and her sister moved us out of a duplex a mile from the biohazardous Jersey Shore to the picturesque Gulf Coast, the Great International Beach Challenge awarded Siesta Beach a notation for the “whitest and finest sand in the world,” quartz pulverized into a sugary white powder that’s ever cool and squeaks underfoot. This was one of the points our mom used to hard-sell us on our new hometown. But we didn’t even need the beach; we had an in-ground pool in our backyard—in Florida even the shanties come decked out with swimming pools—and after renting the house for a year, our mom bought it for $77,000 thanks to a thirty-year mortgage. Months later, she went in arrears on the loan payments.

The house had been built in 1975 as a two-bedroom, one-bath ranch under a simple gable roof. In 1979, the original owners did an out-of-code renovation. They added a bedroom in what had been the garage. Two more bedrooms, a bathroom, and a lanai were built from scratch along the rear of the house under a pebble-over-tar roof that had no pitch. By 1992, the house was separating along that seam. A ramshackle five-bedroom ranch in Sarasota, Florida, it stood out as maybe the shoddiest structure in a subdivision of stucco-over-block single-story homes on quarter-acre lots parceled off and built in the sixties and seventies. We were only twenty minutes from the Gulf of Mexico and Siesta Beach, but we were a couple of social classes away from its manicured condominium culture.

Whenever we drove along the Gulf, we were reminded that our house was a shithole. We wanted to spend just one night in a condo with a name like the Seabreeze. It would be tidy and well kept. We’d break in if we had to, and when we did, we wouldn’t find roaches as plump as Brazil nuts warming themselves under the crumby toaster, seventies-era puke-toned shag carpets, a septic system that backed up whenever it rained and a roof that leaked buckets.

Shithole that our house was, though, my brothers and I each had our own room and no Jersey Shore landlady screaming through the walls at us in Chinese to shut up. We’d been cramped renters since our parents divorced when I was five. As a single mother getting zero child support, our mom spent seven years climbing out from the have-not ranks of renters, we three sons weighing her down with peer-pressured demands for Izod shirts and Nike sneakers. Her slow, determined ascent required help from her sister, the welfare system, and a short-run second husband before she could afford to live beneath a roof she ostensibly owned.

And after sixteen years of riveting rain and unremitting sun, not to mention the occasional hurricane, that roof was giving way to the elements. Every time it stormed, the newer rooms got wet. Shawn and Dane enjoyed pulling out the pots, situating them precisely under drips. What did they care? They slept in the two original bedrooms, both of which stayed dry. In my room and my mom’s room, the sheetrock ceilings grew sodden and discolored. It was my job to climb onto the roof and patch what holes I could find with roofing cement. This was my apprenticeship.

A week before school let out, I swung my feet to the bedroom floor and set them dreamily down into the everglade that was the soggy shag carpet. I was getting desperate. I knew when it came to matters of consequence we were practically incompetent. Our renovation would bring bedlam, and I began resorting to scare tactics and made-up statistics with the hope that she’d bring in hired help.

None of us knew then that the county jail was where we were all headed, in turn, as we hit our respective bottoms, a kind of rite of white trash passage.
“Mold, Mom. People die from that stuff. They call it the Invisible Killer. Or the Airborne Deadly Toxin. They think it’s the cause of autism. That or vaccinations. They’re not sure. Three out of every ten kids die from mold exposure. You got to get someone legit up there to fix the roof.”

“I already got someone. I got three someones.”

School ended, and while we waited for the delivery of the roofing materials we were allowed a summer vacation. Our mom worked six, often seven days a week, so ours was the neighborhood house of least parental resistance. On that first day of summer, we rode our bikes the mile and a half to 7-Eleven, toting empty cups to fill with Slurpees. Our mom was the assistant manager, and she gave us our pick of the two-day-old deli sandwiches before she threw them out. She asked if we were ready to get to work, and I said, “We’ve got nothing to work with,” before pushing into the humid air outside.

On our way home, overburdened on our bikes with soggy hoagies and melting Slurpees, we gawked at the repurposed white school bus, wire mesh over the windows, parked along the roadside, “Sarasota County Correctional Facility” stenciled blackly across it. The chain gangs, on work release from the county jail in their blazing orange jumpers, were digging out the rain gullies as a couple of uniformed guards in dark sunglasses stood menacingly by with pump-action shotguns. That scene captured my sense of our summer-to-be, only we would work unguarded, and we wouldn’t be grateful to be out under the stern glare of the sun.

None of us knew then—though our mom certainly suspected—that the county jail was where we were all headed, in turn, as we hit our respective bottoms, a kind of rite of white trash passage. We would be arrested and processed at different times for odd and sundry nonviolent offenses. Me for trespassing, retail theft, and felony drug possession. Dane for drunk and disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Shawn for shoplifting and a few DUIs, the first before he had a driver’s license. That summer, our hoodlumism was just beginning to take angry hold of us. When we looked around, our lot seemed too damned little, and we were giving first voice to our collective sense of injustice—We were owed. We hadn’t been granted. We would take. Refusing to beg, we became liars, cheats, thieves. As we grew, we grew increasingly impossible for our honest, upright mom to control. But she didn’t give up, that woman, not on us, not ever, and that summer, her plan was to keep us occupied, and thereby out of trouble, while she saved money she didn’t have by paying us a fraction of what she’d pay a roofing crew.

We came home to find in the driveway a Dumpster as big as a tractor-trailer. Beside it in the crabgrass was a pallet stacked with new asphalt shingles. There were a few five-gallon buckets of roofing tar and rolls upon rolls of felt tarred roofing paper.

When she got home from work, Mom told us to get in the car, a ’72 Oldsmobile Toronado, which was about as long, as aerodynamic, and as fuel-efficient as the Dumpster beside it, and she drove us to ASAP Rental Equipment. There, a bemused and burly salesclerk helped us choose our tool: a shingle scraper. We were told, “That’s all you need to get started, that and some back strength.” After we’d removed all the old shingling, we could come pick up an air compressor and a pneumatic nail gun. The tool made the job real in a way that the building materials had not, but it was the promise of a projectile-producing nail gun that made me quiet, stirring my mom’s suspicion: “Jay, don’t go getting any ideas.”

The next day we slept late, got out of bed and ate lunch. It was 90 degrees in the shade. Relative humidity near 70 percent. Heat index over 100, putting the feels-like temperature on the roof at 105 degrees. Sweat didn’t evaporate—nowhere in the saturated, sultry atmosphere for the moisture to go—so our bodies couldn’t cool themselves. If we stayed on the roof long enough, our core temperatures equalized with the feverish air. We guzzled Gatorade so our heat-exhausted heaves weren’t dry. We worked practically naked.

I was prying old pebbly tar from the roof with the claw of a hammer, Shawn with a garden trowel—Dane had been quick and had called The Tool, the lone shingle scraper, which was like a serrated shovel—or maybe we were taking a breather to pick at the tar on our knees, in our arm hair, when I heard the crash of an overheated body throwing itself off the roof into the pool. Daredevil Dane was invariably first, and cannon-balling down into the kidney-shaped pool we all went, the water just as uncomfortably hot and wet as the air, but that didn’t matter. The thrill was our relief.

When I picked at the blisters on my hands I began to understand the promise of an education: smooth hands, narrow fingers, clean fingernails. Freedom from a life of manual labor and physical drudgery.
Before the afternoon rains, we got in a few hours of demolition work, scraping, leveraging, and shoveling off the age-old tar and pebbles like black peanut brittle. To break up the exhausting monotony of our damnation, we winged old shingles into the Dumpster below, a good level throw as satisfying as a well-skipped stone. Around 3:30 p.m., we giddily watched the clouds tumble in. Rain meant quitting time. When the bolts of lightning in the lightning capital of the country were near enough that the thunder didn’t rumble but cracked—more charged feeling than sound—that was when, lemming-like, we jumped off the roof into the pool. Then we gathered the Visqueen, a thick, construction-grade plastic, and did our inept best to Saran-wrap the plywood parts of the roof we’d exposed to the sopping elements of the Deep South.

The wind picked up and the rain fell, splashing in tremendous, viscous globs like a barrage of hurled eggs. The Visqueen got caught in a gust, great sheets of milky plastic whipping wildly, sailing down the block and winding up in the fronds of a palm tree. When we retrieved the Visqueen, it had holes in it everywhere, and when we did get it secured, it was immediately Slip ’n Slide slick with rainwater. Shawn was the first to go down, our frantic work enlivened by the sound of his Whao! as he slid off the roof, the low eaves depositing him harmlessly, if not painlessly, on the sandy soil. Dane observed that our lives had become like a game of Chutes and Ladders, and Shawn, just getting the hang of sarcasm, said, “Chutes and Ladders my ass—this is Candy Land.”

As the days turned into weeks, I had a tougher time getting out of bed. No matter how much work we did we would never finish. We hadn’t gotten the proper building permits. The bank would foreclose on the house if it didn’t collapse first. We were all sunburned, dehydrated, and heatstroked. The watery blisters on our hands were finally beginning their anguished transformation into hardened calluses, and when I picked at mine I began to understand the promise of an education: smooth hands, narrow fingers, clean fingernails. Freedom from a life of manual labor and physical drudgery.

When we moved to Florida, one of the first things our mom did was enroll us in the newly established Florida Prepaid College Program. There were times we didn’t have phone service. When the phone was on, we functioned as our mom’s secretarial pool, fielding calls while she dodged bill collectors. There was an afternoon when I walked through the front door and switched on the lights. Nothing happened: the electricity had been cut off. Yet every month, our mom, with the help of our aunt, made payments into our respective 2+2 Tuition Plans—two years of community college, two years of a Florida state university. The college education she’d never had for herself, and which didn’t stop her from teaching us that education was more important than electricity.

The roofing job moved into week three and we still hadn’t gotten all the old shingling off. The money our mom was saving by violating child-labor laws shrank as we went through more and more costly Visqueen and as the old plywood sub-roof that wasn’t rotted out and didn’t need replacing began to rot and need replacing. From my bed, half-asleep, I heard the tinny sounds of an unfamiliar ascension—the plink, plink of feet climbing the aluminum ladder. I heard heavy footfalls clomping on the roof accompanied by furious muttering: “Fricka fracken no-good fricka cricka franken hoffen . . .” I pulled the pillow over my head. A Jersey girl, our mom was a world-class curser. “Jay! Jay! Get your lazy ass out of bed, get up on this roof and help me out of this fucking hole! Jay! Goddamnit, Jay!”
I was able to hear her better than I should’ve. I looked up. In one corner of the ceiling, not far from the unbalanced fan wobbling round, was my mom’s leg—tanned and hairless, a pink flip-flop dangling from her toes. As she yelled at me, she started kicking at the air—“Jay! Goddamnit, Jay, I’m stuck!” The flip-fop came flying off and landed on my bed.

Shawn and Dane bolted out of the house and climbed up on the roof. They freed her, and I tore out of bed, pissed. I brandished her sandal as I hollered up through the hole, “Thanks for all your help, Mom!” When no response came, I flung her sandal through the hole. “And don’t forget your flip-flop!”

Shawn was finding a rhythm when an explosion of air, a visible white hiss, burst from the nail gun as the clamp, fastening the hose to it, broke between his legs.
A week later, when we finally did get the last of the old roofing off, we picked up the nail gun and the air compressor from ASAP, and we nailed down the tarpaper. The nail gun had a safety release in the form of a depressor on the muzzle. You had to pull the trigger and press the muzzle against a surface for a nail to discharge. It took me all of two minutes to figure out I could engage the muzzle depressor with a careful finger and pull the trigger, firing nails a good fifty yards. They carried end-over-end, thwick-ing through the air, and as I stood on the roof, I caught Shawn by surprise in the grass below, commanding, “Dance!” as I rained nails down around him.

I had promised not to let Shawn touch the nail gun. Told I was the man of the house, it was my job to keep my brothers safe. It took Shawn a few days to break me down with his constant nagging, interspersed with threats that he’d tell Mom I’d shot him with the nail gun. “I didn’t shoot you. I shot at you. Besides, what’s Mom going to do, chain me to the roof and make me work myself to death? You want to use the nail gun? Here, use the nail gun.” I handed it over without instruction.

The contraption was clunky and unwieldy, attached by a heavy-gauge air hose to the compressor motoring in the grass. Because it weighed eight pounds fully loaded, he used it more like a jackhammer than a nail gun, holding it with both hands between his legs and slamming it hard against the plywood sub-roof. The sound it made was three syllabled: muzzle against sub-roof, discharge of compressed air, nail driven into wood—knock-sht-thwack, knock-sht-thwack—and Shawn was finding a rhythm when an explosion of air, a visible white hiss, burst from the nail gun as the clamp, fastening the hose to it, broke between his legs. The end of the hose caught him in the crotch. He dropped the gun and doubled over, moaning, “My testes, my testes,” rolling down the roof but not off, as the hose flailed in the air. We laughed till we cried, few things funnier to adolescent boys than knocks to the crotch. While I climbed off the roof to kill the hose by cutting off the compressor, Dane stood before it, pretending to charm it like a snake, belly dancing and singing, “There’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance. There’s a hole in the wall where the men see it all.”

When our mom came home, she saw the waste we were making and screamed, “Why not shingle the whole fucking roof with goddamn dollar bills?!”
We moved into week five, our neighbors complaining about the eyesore Dumpster, the indefinite wreck that was our roof, the shingles and nails littering the length of the block, as if a very selective Category 5 hurricane had struck. On his way home from work, Reggie Hill, who lived in the neighborhood, drove by, checking our progress—he did this from time to time—and as he pulled away, he shook his head, smiling, while Dane shot nails that plinked off his trailer. We knew Reggie to get drunk and slap around his two daughters. Once he punched his wife, and the cops were called, but she, fat-lipped and furious, filed no charges. She probably didn’t want to wind up like our mom—alone with children. At least Reggie was there for his family, even if, from time to time, he stumbled drunkenly around kicking their lovely legs out from under them. He had a landscaping business, drove a rusted-out pickup that towed a rickety trailer filled with lawn mowers, weed whackers, and edgers. There was an aura of pleasant menace about him, maybe because he often smelled like freshly cut grass doused with gasoline. He smoked Marlboro Reds and threw Hail Mary passes to us in tight, high-arcing spirals that stung our chests when we caught them. We liked him because he was a father, and he liked us because we were sons.

We’d nailed down the tarpaper, and were making visible progress, but the application of the new shingling stymied us. We knew enough to start at the bottom and layer our way up, but we had no idea how to lay down a straight row. Our first attempt ran snaking into the gutter, up toward the peak, and back down. We tore up the row and began again. Same crooked result. When our mom came home, she saw the waste we were making and screamed, “Why not shingle the whole fucking roof with goddamn dollar bills?!” She rattled us even though we towered ten feet over her. She’d had enough. The drywall in her room and mine was ruined. There was the leg hole in the ceiling, through which Shawn had retributively shot at me with the nail gun as I lazed in bed. The Dumpster rental was costing her by the day, and at last she understood that what was taking her hapless sons and their useless friends a full month could’ve been accomplished by professionals in a day. She was still saving money, but the emotional costs were bankrupting us all. By the end of her tirade, she was in mute tears, and she stormed into the house and locked herself in her bathroom, the ceiling water-stained and falling in around her.

The next day, Reggie walked into my bedroom at seven in the morning and woke me. He held in his hands what looked like an oversized tape measure. “Get out of bed. Get your brothers up. Meet me on the roof in five minutes.” His command wasn’t angry, yet its sternness was irrefutable. He wasn’t asking. He walked out of my room, leaving the door open, and I heard him assuredly climbing the ladder—tonk, tonk—a moment later.

We joined him on the roof. There he demonstrated the simple genius of the chalk line. The oversized tape measure contained a string on a spool, and in the housing was blue chalk. Reggie stood beside Shawn at one end of the roof, told him to take hold of the tab and go long. As he did, the line, dusted blue, ran the length of the roof. Shawn adjusted his end till it was level. They pressed their ends tightly down, maintaining tension, and Reggie plucked the line a few times, snapping it against the black tar paper. It left a straight blue line, which we followed as we laid shingles Reggie then expertly nailed with the nail gun. By the time our friends showed up around noon, we’d covered a quarter of the roof. At the end of the day, we were halfway finished. We wanted to offer him some thanks, but we didn’t know how or we had nothing to give so we pleaded excitedly with him to jump off the roof into the pool with us.

He couldn’t. He had a bum knee, blown in a high school football game. There was sadness in him as he descended the ladder, a melancholy that was then inexplicable, and our response was to drench him with our practiced splashes as he climbed down.

The following day, he was at our house at 7 a.m. again, rousing us and putting us to work. In less than a week, with Reggie working beside us, we were finished. Our job was accomplished, culminating in the sawing off of the peak and securing over it the ridge cap that served as an attic vent. Giddy with pride, we cajoled Reggie more. “Please, please jump off the roof with us. Just this once.” We loved getting adults to do things they didn’t want to do. In the name of celebration and a job done, he did, his boots on and a lit cigarette bitten between his teeth.

Now that we’re adults, my brothers and I can joke about our mom telling us that roofing is not rocket science. I sit nearly twenty years later in the first house I’ve owned, sheltered under a roof raised, literally, by a retired rocket scientist. I’ve come to see Reggie as an example of what I might’ve become had my time on that roof not convinced me there were other ways for a man to make a living than selling his strength and endurance. Dane and I eventually followed through on the guarantee of a college education afforded us by our mom and aunt and the generosity of the state of Florida. We both attended the local community college, transferred to get our bachelor’s degrees elsewhere, and I went on to get a graduate degree. Maybe because he was younger, or maybe because he admired Reggie more than we did, Shawn didn’t see his time on the roof as a deterrent. “Besides,” I can hear Shawn say, “we were brothers working together on a tough job to make Mom happy, what could be better?” Shawn dropped out of high school and worked construction, cashing in his college fund to buy a truck. He poured slab foundations for a time, worked as a machinist in a tool-and-die shop, and is now the foreman of his own specialized crew. They install industrial skylights in military hangars that cover nuclear submarines and space shuttles. Roofing is not rocket science, but even if it were, there’s part of me—put there by my mom and shared by my brothers—that believes if I have the right tools, the help of my brothers, and a little mentoring, we could send something flying who knows how far.

It’s 1,300 miles from Saugerties to Sarasota, from my part of New York to my mom’s part of Florida. Into Google Maps, I enter her address—4040 Prescott St., 34232—click the satellite view, and zoom in. There it is. Her house. The house where my brothers and I grew up, the blue kidney of the pool occupying a good part of the backyard. But the image—taken from an on-high perspective, seen from space—doesn’t capture the house. It’s mostly a picture of a roof, the roof my brothers and I put over our mom’s head, and after almost two decades it has yet to leak.

Readers like you make Guernica possible. Please show your support.

Jay Baron Nicorvo’s poetry, fiction, criticism, and nonfiction have appeared in The Literary Review, Subtropics, The Believer, and The Iowa Review. “The Roof Beneath Our Feet” will be anthologized in Freud’s Blind Spot: 23 Original Essays on Cherished, Estranged, Lost, Hurtful, Hopeful, Complicated Siblings, to be published by Free Press in November 2010. His first poetry collection, Deadbeat, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. He teaches at Western Michigan University, edits The Ploughshares Blog and is faculty advisor to Third Coast. Recently he moved from Saugerties to Kalamazoo, where he and his wife, Thisbe Nissen, have one newborn, Sonne, two cats, and ten chickens, among them a transgender rooster named Myron (née Myra).

The Last Newspaper - a new show at the New Museum

2010-10-03T19:36:00.000-07:00

The New Museum presents...... “The Last Newspaper” ....a new exhibition inspired by the ways artists approach the news and respond to the stories and images that command the headlines. [Oct 6 to January 9]

including: YOUTUBE video presentation of ''I JUST CAN'T LIVE (WITHOUT MY DAILY SNAILPAPER)'' -- a novelty song about newspapers sung by J. Gale Kilgore of Big Spring; Texas, lyrics by Danny Bloom

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZKIk1Krp8

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The exhibition will animate the Museum with signature artworks and a constant flow of information-gathering and processing undertaken by organizations and artist groups that have been invited to inhabit offices within the museum’s galleries. Partner organizations will use on-site offices to present their research, engage in rapid prototyping, and stage public dialogues, opening up the galleries as spaces of intellectual production as well as display. For visitors, “The Last Newspaper” will be a unique site of dialogue, participation, and critical thinking, posing new possibilities for a contemporary art museum experience. The exhibition is co-curated by Richard Flood, Chief Curator of the New Museum, and Benjamin Godsill, Curatorial Associate.

The partner organizations that will form the active “departments” of “The Last Newspaper” exhibition include: the Center for Urban Pedagogy; StoryCorps; Latitudes; The Slought Foundation; INABA, Columbia University’s C-Lab; Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnlis/Netlab; and Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere. These partners will weave their topics together in on-site offices and a discussion space that will host scheduled programs such as talks and informal conversations between participants, museum visitors, and featured guests such as The New York Times Feminist Reading Groups, a project by Liz Linden and Jen Kennedy dedicated to examining that day’s issue of the newspaper.

A weekly newspaper compiled by partner organization Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Canepa Luna) will report on the events and discussions that take place throughout the galleries during the run of the exhibition. This publication will be distributed, free of charge, to New Museum visitors and will serve as a record of the exhibition’s proceedings in lieu of a traditional catalogue. A second weekly publication, to be called “A Temporary Newspaper,” will evolve from a series of discussions, debates, interviews, and research into the epochal shifts occurring in the global information industry today. The “Temporary Newspaper” team (led by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab: Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture) will engage in the entire publication process, from conception to editorial discussions and design, in full view of the public.

“The Last Newspaper” will also include a selection of important art works from 1967 to the present, in which twenty-seven artists explore their own reactions to the news, the mechanics of its dispersal, or both. Paintings, works on paper, and performance pieces by artists like Judith Bernstein, Andrea Bowers, Sarah Charlesworth, Thomas Hirschhorn, Luciano Fabro, Hans Haacke, Emily Jacir, Mike Kelley, and Wolfgang Tillmans, all disassemble and re-contextualize elements of the newspaper in an effort to take charge of, and remake, the transmission of information that defines our daily lives. Using methods of collage, mimicry, and repurposing, these works deconstruct the newspaper and address the ambiguity about what is “news”.

The earliest work in “The Last Newspaper” exhibition is Luciano Fabro’s Pavement Tautology (1967), which is based on the traditional method of cleaning terrazzo, or tile floors, wherein the previous day’s newspapers are used to dry a freshly mopped floor. The most recent work in the show will be a series of paintings by Nate Lowman which he will create and install every week, working from a newspaper story and/or image that has compelled his attention. William Pope.L will supervise a performative restaging of his seminal work Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) enlisting a team of collaborators to occasionally wander throughout the museum eating the financial daily. A suite of twenty works by Dash Snow, Untitled (2006), follows the downfall of Saddam Hussein as captured on the front pages of New York City tabloids, while Sarah Charlesworth’s Movie-Television-News-History (1979) addresses the coverage of an American newscaster’s on-camera murder by the troops of Anatasio Somoza at a check-point in Nicaragua. Featuring this arresting image as it appeared (often framed by a television window) on the front page of 27 U.S. newspapers, Charlesworth’s work shows the newspapers’ emerging dependency on electronic news formats, but also its import as a temporary but tangible record of events.

In many ways the exhibition is an exercise in citizen journalism whereby the constant re-ordering and annotation of information in both the artwork and the processes of the resident participants becomes an arena for the structuring and restructuring of truths.

PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

Center For Urban Pedagogy
Founded in 1997, Brooklyn-based CUP is a nonprofit organization that uses art, design, and visual culture to improve public participation in urban planning and community design, particularly among historically underrepresented communities. For this exhibition, CUP will present work from the Envisioning Development Toolkits program. Created in partnership with designers and community organizations throughout New York City, the toolkits are interactive teaching tools that demystify complex topics about land use and development. Organizers use them to reach their constituents and build their own advocacy campaigns around such topics as affordable housing and zoning. In this exhibit, CUP's toolkits will be on view, and CUP staff will conduct workshops with the completed Affordable Housing Toolkit, as well as field test hands-on activities from the forthcoming Zoning Toolkit.

StoryCorps
Brooklyn-based StoryCorps gathers the life stories of Americans by having close friends and family members interview each other in specially designed recording stations placed across the country. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 30,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants. StoryCorps Conversations are preserved at the American Folklife Center and at the Library of Congress, and shared through weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition. For this exhibition, StoryCorps will use the New Museum’s visitor experience to research and rapidly prototype new ways to make their hundreds of thousands of hours of recorded information more readily available to the public.

Slought Foundation
This Philadelphia-based experimental organization, founded in 2002 by Aaron Levy, engages the public in dialogue about cultural and socio-political change through collaborations with cultural producers, communities, universities, and governments. For this exhibition, Slought will animate the entire New Museum with discursive displays about their Perpetual Peace Project, which explores Immanuel Kant's essay on the idea of "peace" with social theorists and political practitioners. Media stations in the interstitial spaces of the museum will accompany a shared community "arena" in the fourth-floor gallery intended for public programming, and a reading room "retreat" between the third- and fourth-floor galleries. For this exhibition, Slought and its partner institutions, including the European Union National Institutes of Culture and United Nations University, have collaborated with architect and designer Ken Saylor, as well as filmmakers Laura Hanna, Alexandra Lerman, and Project Projects.

Latitudes
Latitudes, a Barcelona-based curatorial office founded in 2005, will act as instigators and connectors between the various artworks, departments, and other participants of “The Last Newspaper.” They will conceive, report, write, edit, design, and print a weekly newspaper “THE LAST POST / THE LAST GAZETTE / THE LAST REGISTER...” cataloguing the events and discussions that will take place in the gallery spaces during the duration of the exhibition. This free newspaper will be distributed to museum visitors, and a collected volume of all of the issues will serve as a record of the exhibition’s proceedings.

Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab
Joseph Grima is the current editorial director of Domus magazine and the former director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Kazys Varnelis the director of the Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Along with an expanded network of collaborators, Grima and Varnelis will create The New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space in a performance-based editorial residency at the New Museum. This residency will transform a portion of the exhibition space into a forum for discussion as well as an editorial office. Grima, Varnelis, and their collaborators will publish a weekly publication that will be distributed in the galleries and will also be posted on walls around Manhattan allowing for open public reading.

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere
A Dutiful Scrivener looks at the framework of the obituaries section of The New York Times. Through an interview with Bill McDonald, NY Times Obituaries Editor, A Dutiful Scrivener takes viewers through the journalistic criteria of posthumous representation, writing style, judgment, newsworthiness, and the obituary to be written. We see this as an alter-mausoleum where the logging of one’s achievements and failures is transformed into a process of questioning. How might we critically reflect upon this form of writing, its limitations and word count, in order to sum up a life?

Jeffrey Inaba/C-Lab
New York-based architect Jeffrey Inaba will be working in collaboration with C-Lab, a think tank he directs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation which studies urbanism and architecture and makes policy recommendations, to animate the galleries by examining the role of weather in the news. The focus will be on weather as the single element in newscasts that is simultaneously predicative, interactive (with other stories at the top of the hour news broadcasts), and regularly featured on the front page of newspapers.

Jacob Fabricius/Old News
Jacob Fabricius, director of the Kunsthalle Malmo in Sweden, will continue his five-year-old practice of inviting artists to create newspapers that are themselves compilations of newspaper articles and advertisements gathered over time. Fabricius will present past examples of “Old News” as well as a new issue, commissioned by the New Museum for this exhibition.

ARTISTS
Alighiero e Boetti;Judith Bernstein; Pierre Bismuth; Danny bloom; Andrea Bowers; Francois Bucher; Sarah Charlesworth; Luciano Fabro; Robert Gober; Hans Haacke; Karl Haendel; Rachel Harrison; Thomas Hirschhorn; Emily Jacir; Larry Johnson; Mike Kelley; Nate Lowman; Sarah Lucas; Adam McEwen; Aleksandra Mir; Adrian Piper; William Pope.L; Allen Ruppersberg; Dexter Sinister; Dash Snow; Rikrit Tiravanija; Wolfgang Tillmans; and Kelley Walker.

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YOUTUBE FOR 2 MINUTES EACH:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZKIk1Krp8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

China 86, Taiwan 886, What does ITU have to say to this? Intl ccountry codes are too close for comfort, some say

2010-09-20T06:00:00.001-07:00

'Allow Taiwan's place in ICAO' says Mao Chi-kuo of Taiwan

2010-09-20T05:52:00.001-07:00

Taiwan has long been an important contributor to international civil aviation thanks to its provision of civil aviation services. Yet this key East Asian nation continues to be excluded from the meetings and activities of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a sad state in existence since 1971 that has been to the detriment of international aviation security.

Taiwan’s exclusion is incompatible with its importance to international civil air transport. Situated alongside major Asian flight routes, Taiwan is responsible for the Taipei Flight Information Region (TFIR), which abuts the Fukuoka, Manila and Hong Kong flight information regions. Every year, over 1.13 million flights pass through the TFIR, while 49 airlines operate regular flights connecting Taiwan to 104 cities around the world. The TFIR is central to air transport in East Asia, with some 34.38 million passengers and 14.40 million tons of cargo passing through it annually.

The ICAO oversees civil aviation safety and the orderly growth of the aviation industry. Its mandate covers the entire world. Due to Taiwan’s absence from the ICAO, it has been difficult for Taiwan’s civil aviation authorities to update aviation standards and regulations in line with international norms.

This has had negative consequences for both Taiwan and the ICAO. Taiwan has had to expend considerably more time, money and effort than ICAO members on improving aviation safety and security. For the aviation body, Taiwan’s absence means its goal of seamless global air traffic management operations can never be reached.

Countries around the globe have invested a great deal of resources into improving aviation security since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. All this effort notwithstanding, terrorist activity still rears its ugly head from time to time, with the December 2001 ``shoe bomber” and the 2009 ``Christmas bomber” being two striking examples.

Such incidents highlight a shift in terrorist methodology: as target countries have made their security nearly impenetrable, terrorists now board aircraft at locations where security is less tight. Thus, any nation whose air security efforts differ from or is less effective than the global norm may find itself serving as the takeoff point for an attack. Should terrorists ever be successful in carrying out an attack from such a location, the consequences would be felt globally.

To address this problem, the ICAO initiated the Universal Security Audit Program (USAP) in December 2000. The second cycle of USAP audits began in July 2008, and the process has been helpful in evaluating the aviation security of participating nations. Besides ensuring implementation of Annex 17 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, USAP audits have helped countries plug holes in their security.

The program will not result in a seamless global aviation security network. Despite the ICAO’s stated fundamental principle of universality, not all nations are included in the scope of the audit. Air security concerns will remain even after the program has been completed.

The ICAO should, therefore, invite Taiwan to participate in its meetings and activities as an observer. This would ensure that uniform aviation security measures are in place worldwide and allow for seamless air traffic management operations, meaning safer passengers and cargo in Asia and around the globe.

Mao Chi-kuo is the minister of transportation and communications in Taiwan.

Ground Zero man burns pages from Koran, video down now in most places, world war III has hereby started....in flames...and will end in flames too

2010-09-12T21:14:00.000-07:00

A young American man, about 32 years old, ripped pages out of a Koran and lit them aflame in NYC amid the chaos outside the planned community center and mosque near Ground Zero. “If they can burn American flags, I can burn the Koran,” the unidentified man shouted. “[Americans] should never be afraid to give their opinion.”

http://matzav.com/video-man-ignites-koran-near-ground-zero

http://matzav.com/video-man-ignites-koran-near-ground-zero#comment-59889

The Moslem Threat - A POEM FOR THE NEXT 1000 YEARS - written on the wind

2010-09-12T20:02:00.000-07:00

[a poem found on the Internet on September 11, 2010, no attribution or byline]

The Moslem Threat
puts the world on edge
America teeters
on a shaky ledge

The Moslem Threat
is what it is
''My country 'tis of thee...''
He only cares what's his!

Wake up, America!
It's not too late
Wake up, America!
Don't tempt fate

The Moslem Threat
puts the world on edge
America teeters
on a shaky ledge

Wake up, America!
It's not too late
Wake up, America!
Don't tempt fate

The Moslem Threat's gonna
tear us apart
The Moslem Threat is evil
from the start
The Moslem Threat spells
only one thing
It's do or die,
let freedom ring!

Paul the Octopus: Real or Fake? FAKE!

2010-08-23T01:48:00.000-07:00

it’s fake and a hoax….they grease one pole with aroma good food smells and the other pole or box with bad smell aroma, and of course the animal goes for the good smelling food…it’s all fake….but good fun too

Paul the Octopus: Fake

Here are some facts about Paul The Octopus:

Paul the Octopus also known as “Paul Oktopus”, is a common octopus who lives in the Sea Life public aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany. Paul, who is sometimes called a “psychic octopus” or “oracle octopus,” is famous for his *******alleged ability to correctly predict the winner of soccer matches in which the German national football team is playing: SEE ABOVE

FAKE FAKE FAKE

How we construct reality

2010-08-22T20:22:00.001-07:00

In a recent essay in New Scientist, the psychologist Dorothy Rowe explained that none of us can see reality. We have to construct it from our interpretation of what we perceive, tempered by experience. As a result, each of us exists in our own world of meaning, constantly at risk of being shattered by inconvenient facts. If we acknowledge them, they can destroy our sense of self.

So, to ensure that we won’t be “overwhelmed by the uncertainty inherent in living in a world we can never truly know,” we shut them out by lying to ourselves.

The Digirata, a Desiderata for the Digital Age

2010-08-22T03:00:00.000-07:00

The Digirata

Go placidly amid the hot links and the distractions,

and remember what peace there may be in unplugging.

As far as possible without surrender

be on good terms with all persons online and never never flame others or engage

in any kind of cyberbullying or cyberstalking.

Key in your truths quietly and clearly;

and read what others have to say, too

even the dull and the ignorant;

for they too have their stories and ideas to impart, even if you disagree.

Avoid angry and aggressive flamers and out of control cyberbullies,

for they are vexations to the spirit of the internet.

If you compare your blog with other blogs that are better and have more visitors,

you may become vain and bitter, so just enjoy your own blog for what it is and don't

worry abut the big guys.

Enjoy your online achievements, as well as your plans for future downtime.

Keep interested in your own blogging, however humble;

it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution who you give your personal details to;

for the world is full of trickery and Nigerian scams waiting

to part you from your money.

Be yourself when you are online,

or, if it so pleases you, adopt a persona.

Use your real name or a pseudonym for your userid,

and let no one steal your password,

especially those pesky phishers.

Take kindly the counsel of your fellow bloggers

and gracefully chat with your Facebook

friends in real time. But don't over do it,

and always take time out to unplug

and enjoy a weekly

''internet sabbath''.

You are a child of the Digital Age,

no less than the SPAM and the pixels;

and you have every right to blog to your heart's content.

And whether or not it is clear to you,

no doubt cyberspace is unfurling as it should,

well, sort of, and you are part of the great equation,

whatever that might turn out to be.

Therefore be at peace with Amazon and Yahoo,

and make of your Kindles and your nooks what you will.

E-readers to the fore!

Whatever your labors and your aspirations,

in the multitasking distractions of cyberspace

keep peace with your soul -- if you still have one.

Remember: With all its sham, mattdrudgery, atomic typos and qwerky (sic) keyboards,

it is still a beautiful online world.

Be cheerful. Use the smilely emoticon as much as possible.

Strive to be a happy camper and unplug often."

Bronze sculpture of poet Desiderata poet Max Ehrmann to grace Terre Haute cityscape

2010-08-22T02:57:00.000-07:00

According to Mark Bennett,writing for the The Tribune-Star in Terre, Haute, Indiana, a bronze statue of American prose poet Max Erhmann, wrote the famous "Desiderata" in 1927, will be unveiled on August 26.

Sculptor Bill Wolfe did the work.
Bennett calls it "a breathtaking piece of art, with the metal likeness of the man who wrote “Desiderata” seated on a park bench, pen and paper in hand, on the northwest corner of the Crossroads of America.|

In addition, Bennett wrote, memorable phrases from “Desiderata,” cast in bronze, will be set in the walkway leading up to Max. The full text of that world-famous poem will be visible to visitors who sit down beside him.

A local Cultural Trail Coalition, formed in 2007, has a mission to create public art pieces honoring internationally known Terre Haute natives, such as Ehrmann. The coalition decided to start with Ehrmann, who chose to stay and work in his hometown instead of moving to literary centers such as New York or Chicago. Some people think he lived in Baltimore, but no, he lived his entire life -- 1872 - 1945 -- in Terre Haute, according to Bennett.

The Desiderata with its timeless advice, became popular with young Americans in the joyrful 1960s and 1970s. That 314-word piece of prose poetry, which he finished in 1927, appears in frames and on posters hanging on walls all over the globe. Its fans are legion.
Now, the world has a place to say thanks to Max, Bennett wrote.

And not only that, now the world can also read a new version of the Desiderata for our Digital Age, and it's written in homage to Mr Ehrmann, according to the website behind it.It's called the Digirata.
"Go placidly amid the hot links and the distractions,

and remember what peace there may be in unplugging.

As far as possible without surrender

be on good terms with all persons online and never never flame others or engage

in any kind of cyberbullying or cyberstalking.

Key in your truths quietly and clearly;

and read what others have to say, too

even the dull and the ignorant;

for they too have their stories and ideas to impart, even if you disagree.

Avoid angry and aggressive flamers and out of control cyberbullies,

for they are vexations to the spirit of the internet.

If you compare your blog with other blogs that are better and have more visitors,

you may become vain and bitter, so just enjoy your own blog for what it is and don't

worry abut the big guys.

Enjoy your online achievements, as well as your plans for future downtime.

Keep interested in your own blogging, however humble;

it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution who you give your personal details to;

for the world is full of trickery and Nigerian scams waiting

to part you from your money.

Be yourself when you are online,

or, if it so pleases you, adopt a persona.

Use your real name or a pseudonym for your userid,

and let no one steal your password,

especially those pesky phishers.

Take kindly the counsel of your fellow bloggers

and gracefully chat with your Facebook

friends in real time. But don't over do it,

and always take time out to unplug

and enjoy a weekly

''internet sabbath''.

You are a child of the Digital Age,

no less than the SPAM and the pixels;

and you have every right to blog to your heart's content.

And whether or not it is clear to you,

no doubt cyberspace is unfurling as it should,

well, sort of, and you are part of the great equation,

whatever that might turn out to be.

Therefore be at peace with Amazon and Yahoo,

and make of your Kindles and your nooks what you will.

E-readers to the fore!

Whatever your labors and your aspirations,

in the multitasking distractions of cyberspace

keep peace with your soul -- if you still have one.

Remember: With all its sham, mattdrudgery, atomic typos and qwerky (sic) keyboards,

it is still a beautiful online world.

Be cheerful. Use the smilely emoticon as much as possible.

Strive to be a happy camper and unplug often."

PRESS RELEASE: A ''Desiderata'' for the Digital Age published by humor web site

2010-08-21T21:07:00.000-07:00

for immediate release:
August 31, 2010
contact: danbloom@gmail.com [online 24/7]

PRESS RELEASE: worldwide, for immediate pick up and online delivery

NEW YORK -- [EMBARGOED UNTIL RELEASED]

"Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence."

Max Ehrmann wrote those words in Baltimore in 1927 as part of a prose
poem he called "Desiderata. It's a Latin word that means"desired
things."
While the text was largely unknown during Ehrmann's lifetime, it has
been widely circulated worldwide since the 1960s.

The popular 1927 poem has other gems, among them:

-- ''As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.''

-- ''Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.''

-- ''Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.''

-- "You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here."

-- "With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world."

-- "Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy."

Now, in this Digital Age, where a different set of boundaries and online
etiquette obtain, one might rephrase some of Ehrmann's lines to read:

"Go placidly amid the hot links and distractions,
and remember what peace there may be in unplugging."

Pundits are calling this new version "The Digirata," in homage to the
original. New lines goe like this:

-- ''As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons online and never never flame others or engage
in any kind of cyberbullying or cyberstalking.''

-- ''Key in your truths quietly and clearly;
and read what others have to say, too
even the dull and the ignorant;
for they too have their stories and ideas to impart, even if you disagree.''

-- ''Avoid angry and aggressive flamers and out of control cyberbullies,
for they are vexations to the spirit of the internet.'

-- ''If you compare your blog with other blogs that are better and
have more visitors,
you may become vain and bitter, so just enjoy your own blog for what
it is and don't
worry abut the big guys.''

-- "Exercise caution who you give your personal details to;
for the world is full of trickery and Nigerian scams waiting
to part you from your money."

-- ''Be yourself when you are online,
or, if it so pleases you, adopt a persona.''

-- ''Use your real name or a pseudonym for your userid,
and let no one steal your password,
especially those pesky phishers.''

-- ''Take kindly the counsel of your fellow bloggers
and gracefully chat with your Facebook
friends in real time. But don't over do it,
and always take time out to unplug
and enjoy a weekly
internet sabbath.''

-- ''You are a child of the Digital Age,
no less than the keyboards and the pixels;
and you have every right to blog to your heart's content.''

-- ''Therefore be at peace with Amazon and Yahoo,
and make of your Kindles and your nooks what you will.''

-- ''Whatever your labors and your aspirations,
in the multitasking distractions of cyberspace
keep peace with your soul -- if you still have one.''

-- ''Remember: With all its sham, mattdrudgery, and broken keyboards,
it is still a beautiful online world.''
And lastly:

''Be cheerful. Use the smilely emoticon as much as possible.
Strive to be a happy camper and unplug often.''

FULL TEXT HERE:
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2010/08/digirata-20-by-anonymous.html

Danny Bloom and the perils of "screening" vs reading on paper surfaces

2010-08-20T01:53:00.000-07:00

hat tip to Todd I. Stark in the known blogosphere:

Inspired by Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows," and more especially by the varied reactions to Nicholas Carr's ideas, I previously posted 3 articles on the subject of how electronic media are affecting our thinking and reading. I'm no expert on this subject, except that I read a lot both online and offline. The posts were a review of Carr, some thoughts on our shifting perception of knowledge and expertise, and some reflection on the concept of deep reading.

Since those posts, a blogger named Danny Bloom wrote to me and asked if I could blog about his ideas on reading on paper vs reading on screens. He seemed very eager and excited about his hunches. Now, I have a readership of about a dozen very smart and curious friends on a very good day, and I don't know Mr Bloom at all, never met him before or heard of him. Still, he was very insistent that I mention his "ideas". So here it is. Danny, who is from Boston and is now a freelance reporter and English teacher in Taiwan, been in Asia since 1991, graduated from Tufts in 1971, never had a real career anywhere as far as I can tell, has been contacting all sorts of people and urging them to write about the issue of reading on paper vs. reading on electronic screens (he coined the term "screening" to mean reading on a screen). He feels that doing brain scans of people while they are reading will turn up important differences between paper reading and screening. Just a hunch, he admits. And he admits he might be wrong, too.

Danny has been lobbying me -- some might call it pestering me a bit too often! -- to one day blog about this and sending me a lot of the variations of the same thing over and over again by email and FB notges saying that screens are different from paper. Okay, here's my POV, Danny: I think it's true, and I prefer paper for various reasons for serious reading, but I'm not sure that this is all discernable readily at the neural level. I think much is cognitive and psychological. And it is hard to tell how much is habit and preference and how much is intrinsic difference in how we are forced to process different kinds of stimuli and use our attention differently. I expect it's a little of each.

I consider this an interesting question but I'm not nearly as excited about it as Danny is, and my concerns are more general than just the nature of screens vs. paper. Especially since the resolution and shading of of screens has drastically improved and will continue to do so.

Japanese Ad Says Wrist Cutting is Sexy.....But it's NOT a real ad, it's a satircal ad in a Japanese exploitation movie called TOKYO GORE POLICE

2010-08-20T00:35:00.000-07:00

The blogopshere is lit up now with this news:

Japanese Ad Says Wrist Cutting is Sexy

Who new wrist cutting could be so sexy? A Japanese commercial for what appears to be a box cutting tool uses a wrist cutting motif - complete with pleated plaid skirt-clad sexy kawaii AV Japanese school girls, of course. With copy like, "Let's go stylish with wrist-cutting. It's cute. When you cut, it doesn't hurt that much. The blood becomes tastier," the commercial fits squarely in the "this would never happen in America" category. But, thankfully, there are still people in this world with a gleefully twisted sense of absolutely politically incorrect humor. And we could all use a dose of that from time to time.

THIS IS NOT TRUE. THE AD DOES NOT EXIST IN REALITY; HERE IS THE TRUTH:

The fake ad is one of many satirical commercials in Japanese exploitation pic called "Tokyo Gore Police."

Enough already of this viral silliness that hurts real people who do have real problems with cutting themselves in many countries, not least of whom was the late Phoebe Prince who committed suicide in Massachusetts in early January 2010 after being cutting herself for several years and being bullied mercilessly by a posse of high school bullies at her school in South Hadley.

The future's in "frankenbooks"?

2010-08-19T21:30:00.000-07:00

The future's in "frankenbooks"?

OPED commentary in the Providence Journal, Rhode Island, USA,
August 20, 2010

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_bloom19_08-19-10_DQJHRUI_v15.29861b4.html

With two important books making waves nationwide this summer — William Powers’s “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” and Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” — academics will be talking up the pros and cons of reading on paper versus reading on screens for a long time to come. More books on the subject are coming out soon.

We might even be talking about something called “frankenbooks” before long, because more and more, electronic books are being released with in-gadget videos, music and photo spreads. These e-books are being characterized as “enhanced” and “enriched,” reports Julie Bosman of The New York Times, who noted in a recent article that “e-books of the latest generation are so brand new that publishers can’t agree on what to call them.”

Let’s call them “frankenbooks.” They really want to be real books, on paper, the way books were meant to be, but their makers, like Dr. Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s famous story, want something novel.

Meet Anne Mangen. She’s a reading specialist in Norway, and in an academic paper published in London in 2008, she listed a few reasons why reading on paper and reading on a screen are different. Dr. Mangen said that:

• Reading on a screen is not as rewarding — or effective — as reading printed words on paper. The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and appreciate what we’re reading.

• Online text moves up and down the screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of completeness.

• The visual happenings on a computer screen and our physical interaction with the entire device and its setup can be distracting. All of these things tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or paper or magazine does not.

• The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine is both a story experience and a tactile one.

The jury’s still out on just how different reading on paper is from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogosphere are getting interesting and heated. I am certain that professors at Brown will have a lot to say about this in future years, too, as textbooks go digital as well.

We have entered uncharted waters, “frankenbooks” and all. Brave new world? Maybe. Or maybe a very interesting, technogically brilliant world! As for me, I like books, and I like the Internet; I feel there’s a place for paper and a place for the ethersphere, in balance, with time for unplugging, too.

It is my belief, as a lifelong reader who has reached his seventh decade, that future MRI and PET brain scans of people tested while reading on paper and reading on screens will help us understand these issues better. This pioneering work is being done now in a few research labs around the world, and the results will be interesting, to say the least.

When I asked a veteran book editor in Taiwan whether he was concerned that the digital age might do away completely with printed books someday, he smiled and said, “We’re still using candles for some things, aren’t we?”

Let the MRI and PET brain-scan research at Tufts and UCLA begin.

The Digirata 2.0

2010-08-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

GO placidly amid the hot links and the distractions,
and remember what peace there may be in unplugging.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons online and never never flame others or engage
in any kind of cyberbullying or cyberstalking.
Key in your truths quietly and clearly;
and read what others have to say, too
even the dull and the ignorant;
for they too have their stories and ideas to impart, even if you disagree.

Avoid angry and aggressive flamers and out of control cyberbullies,
for they are vexations to the spirit of the internet (and remember to spell "internet" in a lowercased fashon, even though Ted Anthony at the Associated Press and Phil Corbett at the New York Times stubbornly
cling to the capital I.).

If you compare your blog with other blogs that are better and have more visitors,
you may become vain and bitter, so just enjoy your own blog for what it is and don't
worry abut the big guys
Enjoy your online achievements, as well as your plans for future conquests.

Keep interested in your own blogging, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution who you give your personal details to;
for the world is full of trickery and Nigeran scams waiting to part you from your money.

Be yourself when you are online, or, if it so pleases you, adopt a persona..
Use your real name or a pseudonym for your userid, and let no one steal your password,
especially those pesky phishers.

Take kindly the counsel of your fellow bloggers and gracefully chat with your Facebook
friends in real time. But don't over do, and always take time out to unplug and enjoy a weekly
internet sabbath.
You are a child of the Digital Age,
no less than the keyboards and the pixels;
and you have every right to blog to your heart's content. And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt cyberspace is unfurling as it should and you are part of the great equation: E = mc2

Therefore be at peace with Microsoft and Yahoo!,
and make of your Kindles and your nooks what you will. E-readers to the fore!
Whatever your labors and your aspirations,
in the multitasking distractions cyberspace keep peace with your soul -- if you still have one.

With all its sham, mattdrudgery, and broken keyboards,
it is still a beautiful online world.
Be cheerful. Use the smile emoticon as much as possible.
Strive to be a happy camper and unplug often.

[An encrypted message found in a bottle floating across a glaring screen in the middle of Manhattan, and keyed in by an anonymous hacker.]

sharia law

2010-08-19T20:43:00.001-07:00

Lawless

‘Sharia’ is a much more abstract concept than ideologues—whether Mideast Islamists or Newt Gingrich—suggest

By Lee Smith
Aug 18, 2010 7:00 AM
Print
Email / Share

Wikimedia; Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images

With a recent CNN poll showing that 68 percent of Americans oppose the plan to build a mosque in lower Manhattan, close to Ground Zero, it is difficult not to conclude that Americans have begun to take a referendum, not necessarily on their Muslim neighbors, but more generally on what they see as the problems posed by Islam to U.S. liberal democracy. In Washington, Newt Gingrich put a name to it in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute when he identified the problem as “sharia,” or what is commonly translated as Islamic law.

Stealthy jihadis and violent ones, said Gingrich, are “both seeking to impose the same end state, which is to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of sharia.” After quoting the Gettysburg Address, Gingrich concluded, “I would argue that the victory of sharia would clearly mean the end of the government Lincoln was describing.”

You’d think the party of Lincoln was made of stronger stuff, but many on the right have taken up the former Georgia congressman’s call to arms. Gingrich, wrote Andrew McCarthy on National Review Online, “has crystallized the essence of our national-security challenge. Henceforth, there should be no place to hide for any candidate, including any incumbent. The question will be: Where do you stand on sharia?”

By making sharia the focus of his fulminations, Gingrich has taken an almost hopelessly abstract concept and weighted it with an existential presence that it has never had in 1,400 years of Muslim history. Sharia is not a concrete legal code; it is the idealized notion of God’s law. Because there is no way to approach what is ostensibly divine except through human agency, sharia as such does not exist except as interpreted by human beings over the long course of Islamic history. The word “sharia” necessarily means many things to many people. Even though Islam is very simple in its basics, including conversion—you are a Muslim if you testify there is no God but God and Muhummad is the messenger of God—the faith comes with a fabulously esoteric scholarly tradition.

The access that Muslims have to sharia is through jurisprudence, or fiqh al-sharia, the comprehension of sharia. In Muslim history there were at least six major Sunni schools of law, with only four remaining (Hanbali, Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i); in Shia Islam there are two major approaches, usuli, based on deriving principles, and akhbari, a scripturalist posture that believes all answers are already written down in the Quran and the sayings of the Shiite saints.

Of course, there is also difference of opinion as to the relevant texts. Except for the Quran, Sunnis and Shiites typically disagree about everything. As for the hadith, or sayings of the prophet, the Sunnis believe the relevant hadith are those of the prophet and his companions, the sahaba; for the Shia, the meaningful hadith are those of the prophet as well as the imams who followed him. To produce fiqh, the Shia also have aql, or intellect, whereas the Sunnis go by the principle of qiyas, or reasoning by analogy, and also ijma, or consensus.

It is doubtful that Islam’s scholastic legal apparatus is what the former House speaker was referring to when he said that sharia “is the heart of the enemy movement from which the terrorists spring forth.” Among other things, he is referring to the notoriously vicious corporal punishments associated with so-called Islamic law as exercised in many Muslim-majority countries. Known as the huddud, these punishments, like stoning and lashing for adulterers, beheading for murderers, and so on, are most famously meted out by Islamist outfits like the Taliban in Afghanistan and also by the terror-propagating Pashtun militia’s two senior state-sponsors, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. There is little doubt that both these countries have had a hand in terrorism, including spectacular operations directed against the United States, like the Sept. 11 attacks. But unless Washington intends to make war on them, rather than putting Islamabad on the dole and selling Riyadh 84 advanced F-15s, as it is planning to do, it is counterproductive to associate sharia with our enemy.

Gingrich is also referring to how Muslims tend to perceive of non-Muslims and the fact that Muslim societies have historically treated non-Muslims as second-class citizens, with the status of protected peoples, or dhimmis. While this principle obviously runs against the grain of American culture, it is hard to see how it possibly threatens non-Muslim U.S. citizens, or even American Muslims of the Shiite sect who, since they are considered heretics by the Sunnis, have usually suffered worse fates than Christians and Jews in Sunni-majority lands. When Gingrich argues that “radical Islamists want to impose Sharia on all of us,” I can’t imagine how he sees that happening, short of the largest land invasion in human history of foreign Muslim soldiers, administrators, and religious scholars with the connivance of millions of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and pagan American collaborators. And look out, Mitt Romney and the Mormons!

The stealth scenario is slightly less preposterous—jihadis insinuating their way through our legal and political systems to slowly Islamize a credulous U.S. public degree by degree—but many times more repugnant. It is necessarily premised on the idea of a United States that has lost all faith and confidence in its own values and an intellectual and political elite too stupid to tell the difference between our founding principles and Islamic obscurantism. In this scenario, the same nation that came out of its Civil War a more perfect union is now just a few headscarves and beards away from becoming a Taliban backwater.

If to Gingrich sharia stands for everything wrong with Islam, Muslims associate it with all that is best about Islam—justice, accountability, the rule of law, and even democracy. That is to say, it’s a highly idealized version of reality that has little basis in fact. For most Muslims (moderate and non-moderate alike), sharia is a catchall phrase for legal principles that have rarely, if ever, existed in actual Muslim societies, where the law of the land is not God’s but the ruler’s. It is not abstract notions of “sharia” but the actual application of the ahkam al-sultaniyya, or laws of the ruler, that have shaped the reality of most Muslim societies over the last millennium.

The notion that something called “sharia” was widely imposed throughout the lands of Islam is an Orientalist fantasy. If Gingrich’s Orientalism—sharia represents an all-encompassing totalitarian force—is of the negative variety, positive Orientalism asserts that Muslim societies were just and well-administered until Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and the colonial legacy that ensued. The driving force behind this positive Orientalism is none other than the Islamist movement. For instance, the Islamists reasoned that the Arabs lost the 1967 war with Israel because they no longer practiced the true religion. Islam had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and Muslim societies needed to return to the essentials of the faith as practiced by the prophet of Islam and the righteous forebears, al-salaf. Those who adopted such ahistorical beliefs are known as salafists, whose ranks include a broad spectrum of Islamists including the Muslim Brotherhood. In the hands of the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, sharia was another wedge used to divide Muslim populations from the ruling regimes. In time, the regimes adapted so that today the Egyptian constitution names sharia as its principle source of legislation, and the new Iraqi constitution cites it as a fundamental source; but this is essentially window-dressing to placate pious Muslims and ward off the Islamists.

The Islamists are hardly more specific about what sharia means. When Banna spoke of sharia to the Egyptian masses, he meant something similar to the empty Western left-wing mantra of “social justice.” In any case, the Islamist definition of sharia is something very different from the thousand-year-old enterprise that had devoted its scholarly energies to discerning how to understand and implement, if possible, God’s revealed word. Aside from notable exceptions like Youssef al-Qaradawi, almost none of the notables even vaguely affiliated with the Islamist movement are scholars. What they know about sharia is only slightly more than what Newt Gingrich thinks he knows about it.

It is surpassingly strange that a concept revived by Islamists as a political tool may now be serving a similar purpose in the United States, where sharia is no more likely to affect the American way of life than the burial rituals of the ancient Egyptians are likely to influence our funerary rites. When the organizer behind the lower Manhattan Islamic center, Imam Feisal Rauf, says that the U.S. legal system is “sharia-compliant,” he is not preparing the way for a regime of lashings and beheadings; he is engaging in a species of inter-Muslim apologetics—which are also pro-American, even if in a roundabout way.

There is no comparing the Islamic sharia and the U.S. Constitution. The idealized notion of God’s law as derived from the Quran and hadith does not guarantee freedom of religious belief, or freedom of expression, including blasphemy, as the United States does in practice. The same is true for concepts like freedom of association and political rights, including the right to form political parties. Americans have long enjoyed freedoms that many Muslims, including the Islamists, say they have aspired to for more than a thousand years. To claim that Muslim societies—in their idealized form—also promote the freedoms that Americans really enjoy is not a threat to the U.S. Constitution but a relatively shame-free way of engaging a subject that is embarrassing to a society extremely sensitive to shame.

But what’s more embarrassing is that the political leaders of a free country imagine that our freedoms are threatened, not by real men with real weapons who are supported by states that claim to be our allies, but by a scare word whose real-world applications are obscure to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

More in: Cordoba House, Cordoba Initiative, Feisal Abdul Rauf, Ground Zero, Ground Zero mosque, Islam, Newt Gingrich, Park51, Sharia

46 Responses to “Lawless”

asherZ says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 11:18 AM

I think that when Gingrich saw a problem with Islam as it may affect U.S. liberal democracy, he was not using the term sharia in of itself as posing that threat. As Lee Smith points out, there are many interpretations of Islamic law, just as there are different practices in other religions. What those who are pointing to the dangers posed by Islam, are the Muslims who see as their goal the ultimate worldwide domination of Islam in a Caliphate that has as its basis the rule of sharia as they interpret it. An analogy to this could be the actions of the Inquisition by the Catholic Church and its relationship to the New Testament.

With a spiritual vacuum enveloping western civilization, the Islamicists hope to fill that void with their own beliefs. In certain parts of Europe they are beginning to meet with some success. Even in the U.S. there are those who are attempting to push the envelope and replace our constitutional rights with their own credo based on the sharia. We regularly read about such occurrences. Smith would do well not to minimize the threats that radical Islam poses on our way of life.

Michael Nutkiewicz says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 11:30 AM

Sharia and Halacha (Jewish law) share some common traits and similiar challenges. They both must navigate between tradition (the sacred old order) and accomodation (the technological, scientific, social and political changes). Those who adjudicate sharia/halacha feel that tension and both legal systems express the full spectrum of interpretations: extreme conservatives to extreme liberals. The adjudicators of the U.S. Constitution face the same tension: e.g., the debate between “original intent” vs. constructive change. The author is correct that sharia trumps universal human rights. The situation is the same in halacha. This does not mean that these traditions do not have a notion of human rights. They do. But they are circumscribed, and adjudicators in both traditions decide when these values are to be applied in particular cases.

Eve Rowell, MD says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 11:37 AM

This article uses ridicule and hyperbole, as well as obscurantism rather than information to make its point. In other words, the article is a political and ideological polemic.

First the author states that Sharia is not a concrete legal code. I’m sure that would be of interest to all the women who have been stoned to death based upon this un-concrete legal code.

Then the author attempts to denigrate the knowledge of Sharia of anyone who is opposed to efforts that are currently being made in the US to change laws and customs for the express comfort of Muslims. He argues it is an esoteric code that practically nobody except esoteric scholars, apparently like himself, is qualified to understand.

The author by his own admission fails to understand the concern on the part of Americans about Muslim organizations in the US. For example there is the Muslim American Society. It was founded in 1992 for the purpose of promoting “Islam as a total way of life.” Like the Muslim Brotherhood, it wishes to see the United States governed by sharia, or Islamic law. Given that the author does not understand or “can’t imagine” why this is of concern to Americans, what is the point of his article? Why write an article about something you do not understand?

Instead of advancing dialogue between Americans who are intelligent but disagree in their attitudes towards Sharia law, this kind of article creates ever more divisiveness and vindictiveness in our culture. This divisiveness seems to have mushroomed since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on our soil.

If Muslims or non-Muslims who advocate for Sharia law want to make a case for Sharia law to Americans, this kind of article is not the way to do it. The author indicates by his contempt for concerned Americans the derisive attitudes that Islamist individuals have for the West.

sharon gordon says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 12:03 PM

Honor killings are taking place in Europe, Canada and the US. I would like to see more about what is being done to prevent this – as it barely hits the news.

We have a constitution that was created by rational people, based on rational principles. Religion is irrational – based on made up fantasy’s created by men for power and control. Notice that in every religion, women are considered second class citizens – this also has to do with power and control. Unfortunately, this belief has invaded our society and has only recently been slightly mitigated. But with the newly found power of the religious Christian right in this country – we are slowly going backwards.

So yes, as a women, I fear sharia, and I fear religious fundamentalism of all kinds, be it Christian, Jewish or Muslim.

Alan Hoffman says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 12:35 PM

Comparisons of Jewish Halacha to Islamic Sharia are often misused and misunderstood. Halacha itself stipulates the priniciple of “Malchut Dina

Malchut” – that in exile, outside of Israel, the law of the land is law

(at least where it has nothing to do with Jewish Law per see). Sharia has

no such self-correction.

Normative Judaism understands the difference between full “rights” in its own

home nation, Israel, and of those in the “exile” among the nations. Since

Judaism has no proselytizing, forced conversion or imperialistic drives based on religion, it makes these distinctions easy. Sharia includes Dar-al-Islam and

Dar-al-Harab indicating all outside nations from Islam are the “Land of War”

and subject to Jihad, forced conversion, etc. That is an important difference.

Halacha does not even claim Jews are entitled to equal rights in exile nations, though it lauds such political developments. Sharia indicates that Islamic

rights (some of which do affect non-Muslims) have supreme rights if not sole

rights. I would overturn womens rights, minority rights, religious rights and

voting rights.

To imply there is no ideological conflict between Islam and Democracy, or a

similar ideology with Jewish Halacha is to be unlearned and superficial in

making religious comparisons.

rose tripp says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 12:56 PM

when in America obey American laws. If you don’t want to than stay away.

Natan Derwise says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 1:10 PM

The author of this article barely hides his contempt to those who oppose the creeping Islamization of the free society, be they informed or not. No “sophisticated” parsing of the meaning of Sharia can conceal the fundamental premise that Islam is an all encompasing totalitarian ideology of which the religion is a small part only. It is an existential threat to all freedom loving people, including the author residing in Dar el Harb. Newt Gingrich should be commended for raising the awarness to this threat.

Joshua says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 1:55 PM

You guys are funny. You were ready to run through a brick wall for Lee Smith a few weeks ago, but now you want to lynch him.

Charles says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 2:25 PM

@Joshua,

Agreed. Just a few weeks ago, ignorant trolls harassed Lee as an Islamophobe, neocon, Arab hater when he rightly called out bastions of anti-Semitism. Now, commenters who likely agreed with his position regarding Walt, Greenwald, and the others are slamming him as uninformed and polemical, which once again, is not the case.

Never before had I thought of suggesting that the American Constitution and/or Bill of Rights might be a useful way to present America and its values to the Muslim world. The US does a great job criticizing itself in the international sphere and exporting mindless films and television shows (which, despite their immorality, etc. make more money outside the US than domestically), yet throughout most of the world we don’t have the same determination to export the very things we claim to value the most.

Bo says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 3:26 PM

The problem is that even though Newt is using an overly simplistic and incorrect interpretation of Sharia, the mere fact that he uses a word that is foreign to American ears, and Lee Smith uses a well-thought-out but highly-complex explanation of Sharia that even the responders to his column appear to have trouble understanding means that Newt wins and Lee loses.

Americans like simple explanations.

hiramo says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 3:32 PM

I love it when the readers are smarter than the writer.

Marian says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 3:39 PM

I am more afraid of the American version of Sharia than anything Newt can dream

up. Every year, Louisiana law becomes more and more restrictive on

women’s rights in this state. I don’t see where replacing ultra-conservative

Christians with ultra-conservative Muslims would be any different.

Carl says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 5:29 PM

This article is very misleading at best, while it resounds with philosophical explanation of Sharia it doesnt address the issue of Americam Muslim calls for a Muslim “Sharia” Court to decide Muslim issues such as divorce property settlement complaints against other Muslims … … these calls have been repeated across the US advocated by Imams and oppesed by Muslim women. These Islamic courts often use the principals set forth in the Koran that prohibit women from objecting to settlement that are unfavorable to them and are often viewed as discriminatory towards women. If American law is “Sharia Compliant” then why are there calls for a seperate justice system that would be applied to Muslims only that does not meet American standards of justice?

Barbara says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 5:55 PM

Alan Hoffman: Thank you for your intelligent and knowledgable comments.

TallDave says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 6:10 PM

But what’s more embarrassing is that the political leaders of a free country imagine that our freedoms are threatened, not by real men with real weapons who are supported by states that claim to be our allies, but by a scare word whose real-world applications are obscure to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Right, our rights aren’t threatened by sharia… except, you know, where sharia law has actually been used to take away people’s rights, such as in Canadian divorce proceedings. And it’s not like there are honor killings in Britain, or some nuts flew planes into the WTC or something.

These stupid insinuations that only weaklings need to defend their country’s principles aren’t convincing anyone. The cowards here are the ones who want to pretend the threat doesn’t exist in pursuit of some unattainable multi-culti utopia.

Bob G. says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 6:10 PM

Oh, BS.

How do you separate the theory of Sharia from the stoning of women, death penalty for homosexuals, and honor killings?

We, who are not blessed with great intellects, nor with degrees from elite schools, have to evaluate issues and situations on the evidence. There is plenty of evidence as to where Sharia law takes a society. You don’t have to focus on Iran, or other full-blown Theocracies, to find the evidence.

CK MacLeod says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 6:19 PM

The author of this article barely hides his contempt to those who oppose the creeping Islamization of the free society,

It’s very difficult to avoid the appearance of contempt when discussing the contemptible. The idea that 3% of the US population (half of them prison converts) are going to impose some version of “totalitarian Sharia” on the remaining 97% is pretty darn contemptibly dumb. The fact that significant sectors of the rightwing, and countless enraged talkradio types and e-mail list recipients are shaking in their boots and wetting their pants over Sharia (or what they think they know about it) in the U.S. is exactly what Smith says it is: embarrassing.

As is most of the rest of the “anti-mosque” movement.

Leonard Fein says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 7:01 PM

Carl:

I may be mistaken, but my impression is that the calls for “Sharia Compliant” adjustments all stipulate that the separate justice system would be available only with the consent of the litigants. In that sense, it is not all that different from the more adventuresome Batei Din around the country. Here in Boston, for example, the Beth Din intervened in a very public way in a slum landlord case — the landlord was an Orthodox Jew and agreed to the proceedings, which took a full year to unfold. It dealt as well with selective conscientious objection and with the kashrut of food additives, and came up with rulings that people were free to accept or reject.

More important: Have we any data at all on the proportion of Muslim Americans who would favor the establishment of Sharia courts?

Robert says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 7:11 PM

I agree with Newt…..”When in Rome do as the Romans”…..”When in America do……..”……a free people are free when they act consistant with their nature and that nature is defined by their laws. We are a Judeo Christian country (wheather you like it or not)who wrote a constitution that unpacked that faith and its idea for community life. Live here and live in that system or find a place that will fit your desire….there are plenty of countries that will have you….

John says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 7:12 PM

Nice try Lee. Your lecture is just as patronizing as everyone elses. Too bad. For your education, check out http://www.goforesight.wordpress.com.

MomofFour says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 7:15 PM

If you do not believe that Sharia law is a threat to this country I urge you to visit those communities in Europe who are now having huge problems because of Sharia law. Our Declaration of Independence and constitution clearly refute anything resembling Sharia law. We are a country UNITED, not DIVIDED. The progressives seek to divide this country into voting blocks for their political advantage and educated Americans recognize the danger of this. Anyone who respects and understands what our founding fathers fought for would not ignorantly defend this bigoted law. It is oppressive, sexist, and has no place in this country of freedom. Educate yourself.

Cara C says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 7:37 PM

In which countries ruled by Sharia law of any sort are the people free, and non-Muslims and women treated as equals? Um, none. Some are more horrific than others, but all are oppressive. Islam demands submission, not liberty.

Sharia law IS being imposed here through stealth means. There is a strong Shariah banking movement. Christianity is under constant attack. And anyone following the case of Rifqa Bary saw a 17-year-old girl almost returned to her Islamic parents who had threatened to kill her for apostasy.

Ron says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 7:50 PM

Islam owes us an insurmountable debt. They need to gain our good graces. This is the only time I can recall the defenders of this mosque fiasco coming to defend a religion. I really think a lot of the defenders should look at a beheading video and then get back to us. I don’t care about being fair to Islam. They seem to create a world of trouble.When they root out their scum , repent and denounce violence and work to redeem the horrible things done in the name of their religion, they might be on the way to better relations. A lot of people are still very angry about the attacks on our soil.

Lynn says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 8:31 PM

Leonard Fein:

“I may be mistaken, but my impression is that the calls for “Sharia Compliant” adjustments all stipulate that the separate justice system would be available only with the consent of the litigants. In that sense, it is not all that different from the more adventuresome Batei Din around the country.”

Personally, I think access to voluntary courts shoud be limited to voluntary religions.

Steve S says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 9:19 PM

Blasphemy is punishable by death under Sharia. Apostasy is punishable by death under Sharia. Homosexuality is punishable by death under Sharia. Theo Van Gogh was murdered for having the temerity as an infidel to attempt to explain Sharia. Salman Rushdie continues to live under the threat of assassination for having made a bit of sport of Sharia. Comedy Central refused to run an episode of South Park because it included Mohammed. People were killed as Muslims world-wide rioted over the Danish cartoons, even though the cartoons were already six months old by then. 3,000 people died on 9/11.

But us dumb hicks don’t understand the finer points of Sharia, he states. Yet if confronted with the above, which he so studiously ignored in his diatribe, he will claim that these incidents are not Sharia. No? But their proponents claimed it was, and they were raised to it. Who then is the fool, Mr. Lee? You don’t get to cherry-pick your data.

Lynn says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 9:26 PM

The author may have difficulty understanding this, but what’s even more difficult for me is seeing other women stripped of their most basic rights over and over and over again by advocates for Shariah – and in countries and areas that were ONCE relatively free, like Iran, Iraq, Aceh prov., Pakistan, Afghanistan (at least in parts thereof where women were once surgeons and teachers – and in RECENT memory) & now parts of the CAUCUSES. Can anyone think of any other category of persons who have seen such violent erosions of their rights in so many places by an identifiable doctrine? And then to have guys like this author minimize and even ridicule those concerns is really frustrating. . . . Now, if I saw ANY recognition by our elites of the degree of intimidation and violence that must often be brought to bear in these communities to maintain those “islamic” standards, it wouldn’t be so troubling. What I see instead is an increasing willingness to accommodate “group” rights and the rights of “religions” – really “A” religion (though that religion just happens to operate like a state in a number of countries, completely with fascistic morality police whose primary charge is arresting and harassing WOMEN). In light of all this it’s truly frightening when someone like the Bishop of Canterbury talks about how accommodation is “inevitable” to preserve “community cohesion”. The only thing that’s inevitable is that any such accommodation will come at the expense of women and girls who apparently no longer merit the equal protection of the law.

Joseph Smith says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 9:57 PM

I can honestly say I’ve never read anything so pretentious in my life. You can call it whatever you want, and you can argue till your mother calls you to dinner, but the fact is when Muslims reach a certain percentage of the population of the country they are currently invading, be it Norway, Germany, France or America, they begin to demand the right to make and enforce the laws that effect their subpopulation. It is a reality. Stoning to death, cutting off limbs – not exactly enlightened.

mike shapiro says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 9:58 PM

I will disagree with Alan Hoffman on one thing. One only has to look at the havoc that the Haredi are wreaking in Israel to see the damage that Halacha, as practiced by a small minority (and yes, in Israel the Haredi are a small, if verbal, minority) can do to a democracy. So, on that basis, there is a valid comparison.

OTOH, Halacha has never been applied to non-Jews and would not be used to determine the “lifestyle” of non-Jews living in Israel. That is decidedly not the case in countries ruled by Moslems, particularly if their religious leaders (Suni, Shia, or any other) are providing a major influence in the justice system. Try to buy alcohol in Saudi Arabia. Non Kosher McDonalds are readily available in Israel (not commenting on whether I’d eat one, just on availability.)

As for creeping Islamism, one only needs to look at England, where a number of jurisdictions are now “advising” police not to dress or do anything that might violate the sensibility of the Islamic population. Forget English common law and rules.

I’m afraid that Mr. Smith is living in a dream world. By the way, while I’m normally not a fan of Newt Gingrich (somehow the level of ethics and morality that exists in a man who would have divorce papers served on a wife who was in the hospital is minimal, at best), he seems to have a much better grasp of conditions in Cordoba in the “Golden Age of Tolerance” than does Mr. Smith.

Joseph Smith says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 10:19 PM

Two other points: First, we are not a “liberal democracy” as the author claims, but a representative republic. There is a huge difference between the two. The author’s apparent wishful thinking on this point makes the rest of his piece suspect. Second, yes, we are a free people and free to practice religion as we see fit. However, that freedom is not unlimited. When any group, including a religious one, has as a purpose the overthrow of our way of life or nation, we have every right to oppose it and the government to sanction it. The so-called right wing understands that.

Rod Dowden says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 11:32 PM

Ah, yes one more diversion tactic. This not the real issue. would we even be having

this discussion if the media and our elected officials we upholding their sworn oath to uphold “THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

And By the way, This COUNTRY WAS founded by intelligent and GOD fearing Americans.

Any one who thinks different can not read or have not read any of our founding documents.

Shariah Law just like the Spanish inquisition are the doings of men, not GOD

or religion.

When government take over religion, disaster occurs.

Our real issue is the lack “COURAGE TO BE FREE.”

Jonathan Usher says:

Aug 18, 2010 at 11:39 PM

This is nonsense. Sharia law is the law applied in Muslim countries. In theory, from an ivory tower, it might be hard to categorize it but in practice it is easy. It is the law applied in Muslim countries. English common law is similarly different in many countries but it is the law of England and former British colonies including the United States. It is obvious that Muslims can dominate countries by having more babies than the native population and by immigration. It is being successfully done in many European countries now. Islamism, jihad adn sharia law are a serious threat to the U.S. Congratualtions to Gingrich for recognizing it before we all become dimmnis

Contemplationist says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 12:00 AM

This is such a fantastic piece of high-brow propaganda to beat the proles over the head with that I’m really impressed. Ah the sleights of hand were fun to spot!

For example : When Gingrich argues that “radical Islamists want to impose Sharia on all of us,” I can’t imagine how he sees that happening, short of the largest land invasion in human history of foreign Muslim soldiers, administrators, and religious scholars with the connivance of millions of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and pagan American collaborators

So Mr Smith quotes what Mr Gingrich has claimed but does not refute it, but merely argues logistics! Oh, sir, do they want to impose Sharia or not?

And among all your self-congratulatory masturbation over “sophistication” is it or is it not a fact that whatever the nuances among variant theological schools of Islamic law (both Shia and Sunni) that blasphemy is to be punished with death, that adultery carries extremely stringent penalties, that rape victims need 4 witnesses to clear themselves?

What kind of faux-intellectual wankery are you engaging by not even mentioning these things or even TRYING to refute them?

The fortunate part, Mr. Smith, is that Americans are not stupid. They see the state of Islamic societies around the world, hear and read the words of Muslim spokesmen, and see videos of Prime time Arab television (thank you Internet!) discussing the nuanced notions of holocaust denial.

You, sir are either a huge fraud, or an ignoramus far far worse than Newt Gingrich whose simplistic language on this issue has far more accuracy than your undeserved snobbery.

Contemplationist says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 12:16 AM

hopelessly abstract concept

Apparently Mr Smith is so block-headed that the wide uniformity of the legal code in Islamic societies (which they themselves profess to base on Sharia law) does not negate his point about abstraction!

Oh and such hopelessly abstract concepts as specified by (as Mr. Smith himself notes) 4 schools of Sunni sharia and 2 schools for Shias! So abstract, my my.

“Reliance of the Traveler” or Umdat al-Salik also does not exist! And don’t worry Americans, Al-Azhar university, respected as the foremost center for learning for Sunni Islam endorses Umdat Al-salik means nothing either! Its all just such hopelessly abstract stuff. Like what? Like this:

“A manual of Islamic law certified by Al-Azhar as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy says that ‘retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.’ However, ‘not subject to retaliation’ is ‘a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.’ (‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2).”

Is Mr Lee Smith an ignoramus or a deceptive deconstructionist?

irumat says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 3:56 AM

Lee Smith, you’ve done well this time. The comments on this article are exactly what you describe. Bravo!

The hopeless simpleton Islamists and their Tea Party/GOP brethren deserve each other.

Halbstarke says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 5:41 AM

I think that since actions speak louder than words, maybe Newt Gingrich’s thought is about responsibility in a free society. After all It was several Sharia law abiding citizens from some middle-eastern religious communities who hi-jacked and flew planes filled with innocent hostages into buildings in a country not their own. Hmm, I have not seen too many US Supreme court wannabe’s do anything like that yet in my lifetime. From where I stand Sharia law sucks and does not appeal to me. But what do I know? I have yet to be brainwashed to the point of blowing myself up in my culture and laws. (sarcasm) For all of the seldom often thinkers.

Jon Garfunkel says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 7:34 AM

Do all of you critics have the depth of experience in reporting about the Islamic world as Lee Smith? Any of you understand Arabic?

Are any of you familiar with his work?

To think that he is some apologist for Islam would be a surprise to any of this regular readers.

I have one acute criticism of the article, this throwaway line here: “the empty Western left-wing mantra of ’social justice.’” — what is wrong with the notion of social justice that it is branded an empty mantra?

BillH says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 10:37 AM

Wow, of all the opinion pieces, and articles concerning the Ground Zero Mosque, and the dialog that the issue stimulated, this article is the worse. Tell the poor woman in Iran who is sentenced to death by stoning that her death is only theoretical. Also it might be good to mention it to the nine women & two men who were executed that way a year or two ago in that country. They only think they are dead. They must be lousy theologians.

Oh while you’re at it reassure Israel that all that “obliterate” talk is just talk.

caboose says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 11:18 AM

Can you believe we have people here who want to pontificate about the horrible torture of water boarding.

can you imagine any torture more hideous than being stoned to death? can you imagine the unendurable pain of being pummeled with sharp rocks over a period of time? I don’t know how long it takes to kill a person by stoning, but i imagine that those who really enjoy seeing a person suffer could stretch it out over several hours.

i once read of a person being burned to death by the spanish inquisition who lived for 18 hours while in the fire.

why is it that so many self-righteous people who profess to be religious can support and apparently enjoy torturing other people?

one important thing was said in these posts–America is a representative republic, not a democracy. in a Republic, the majority rules, but the rights of minorities are protected.

the people of America, through elected representatives, have granted protection for more rights, and for more groups and minorities, than any country in the history of the world.

now, we have an active movement trying to take those rights away.

LONG LIVE AMERICA

Lynn says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 11:49 AM

Here’s my working understanding of the “nebulous concept” – kind of non-muslim’s guide to “Reliance of the Traveler.”

At a minimum:

1. If I proseytise openly for my non-muslim religion, I’ll be arrested/deported.

2. If I’m too open and flagrant in my non-muslim religious practice I’ll be arrested/deported – at least in most M.E. countries (I suspect they’re a bit easier going in Indonesia).

3. If I want to build a non-muslim house of worship, the permits will take decades to approve and it probably won’t happen.

4. If I stand on a street corner and say Mohammad was a jackass and it’s stupid to construct a society around the words of 7th century war lord, I’ll be arrested.

5. If I convince a muslim of #4 and he says so out loud, we’ll both be arrested.

6. If I kiss a boyfriend we’ll both be arrested.

7. If I marry a muslim my husband may have up to three other wives (In Indonesia he apparently needs my permission to do this but muslim clerics are working REALLY HARD to change that in accordance with SHARIAH). If I don’t like this, he will probably divorce me through some extremely simple procedure and the kids will automatically go to him – at least after a certain age, but he’ll probably just keep them, refuse to give me access, and I probably won’t have much recourse.

*While I have framed this understanding in terms of offical responses, the primary method of enforcing shariah seems to be through community and inter-familial violence, so if the gov. doesn’t get me someone else probably will.

This is my impression of what things are like in a shariah “lite” areas with moderating features. In a country actually GOVERNED by shariah, I’m also looking at forced veiling, strict gender aparteid, no access to high public office, death for apostates/open gays, triple talaq divorce, virtually no redress through the courts against ANY muslim and some form of male guardianship that will severely limit my freedom – including my ability to simply LEAVE THE HOUSE.

Joseph Smith says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 12:36 PM

Call it sharia, pretend it doesn’t actually exist, but…

8/19/10: Saudi Judge Considers Paralysis Punishment

CAIRO (AP) – A Saudi judge has asked several hospitals in the country whether they could damage a man’s spinal cord as punishment after he was convicted of attacking another man with a cleaver and paralyzing him, local newspapers reported on Thursday.

Saudi Arabia enforces strict Islamic law and occasionally metes out punishments based on the ancient legal code of an eye-for-an-eye.

The reports said Abdul-Aziz al-Mutairi, 22, was left paralyzed after a fight more than two years ago and asked a judge to impose an equivalent punishment on his attacker under Islamic law.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100819/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_saudi_justice

Hank says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 4:59 PM

Ronnie: your aricle is well reasoned and quite comprehensive. May I add some

things:

–Since there is no clergy, or more acccurately no hierarchy in Islam, anyone–

as you have contended– may aregue for what he or she thinks is Sh’aria. It’s

one of the reasons there are such a multiplicity of fatwas.

– It is most unfortunate that a sunni muslim, Ismail Farrooqi, who spent his

life trying to present the humane and–dare I say, rational–aspects of Islam

was killed ( along with his family), in the early 1970’s. His voice is sorely

missed.

–The position you’ve expressed, argued by the Salafists, that all went wrong

after the Napoleonic invasions (by what some Muslims call ‘the Farangi’ or

Franks) can be found in Bernard Lewis’ ” What Went Wrong–whom despite his with the

the Neo Cons–has a profound knowledge of Islam in its world wide culture.

–As you’ve suggested,0ne of the problems with Sh’aria is not simply its content,

but that after the 10th century A.D. ” the door of itjadad” (pardon my spelling)

, or the door of interpretation has been closed. And so only the traditional

law interpretations are considered valid. This is Irjad Manjii’s argument

with islam.

yahudie says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 5:04 PM

A fine bit of academic hair-splitting and equivocation. It’s like saying Stalinism isn’t so bad – after all it didn’t implement the vision of Karl Marx completely but only “aspired” to it.

Gingrich and other critics of Islam,as idealized in Sharia, are precisely concerned – as we all should be – by the “concept revived by Islamists as a political tool”. If the author had versed himself in current Muslim rhetoric in the US and elsewhere, by various “clerics” of all Islamic sects, he would see the “Sharia Plan” in action: Burrow from within and use the West’s misapplied “principles” to ensure that “Islam is the solution”.

NB says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 5:56 PM

Your line of argumentation is basically similar to those who said that Jihad in Islam can mean a religious war just as well as internal struggle. The Jihad of Islamists is real and does not leave much space for misinterpretation. It’s the academic discourse on the subject that’s vague and abstract and has no practical value.

Basically what makes Sharia a sharia are Islamic courts and in this sense Sharia is a direct challenge to democracy. While it’s true that every Muslim has its own version of Sharia, it’s not hard to see that where it’s practiced, Sharia tends to be applied in a rather conservative manner. And there is some inconsistency in how you first argue that Sharia does not actually exist and then mention Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Finally, while it’s true that some people go completely overboard with their alarmism against Islamic encroachment, people should not be that naive to confuse a lip service paid by a Muslim cleric to the “Sharia compliant” US legal system with the reality. Usually when Muslim communities in the West ask for recognition of Sharia courts, they are not asking for making the legal system Sharia compliant. They are demanding a parallel system, a state within a state, and they are not doing this with expectations that their Sharia courts would then start vigorously imitating the workings of Western legal system

jay says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 6:09 PM

“Abstract” in Smith’s case seems to indicate “Shariah” can mean anything to anybody.

Unfortunately, as other posters have pointed out, that’s not really true . Plenty of Middle Eastern countries have decided they can encode Shariah into their legal systems, and where it’s done, it’s a far cry from the jurisprudence practiced in our Western, Judeo-Christian based societies.

I dare say the “social justice” practiced in the West, while religion-based, is far more amenable and fair to most people (except maybe violent, sex-crazed, lunatic misogynists) than would be Shariah.

I really don’t know what Smith’s point is. Islam, practiced in some reformed mode, might be a beautiful religious experience, given it’s call to the one God, and submissiveness to Him.

That is not the Islam we see in too much of the world, as plenty of other posters have pointed out. I appreciate Mr. Smith’s efforts, but until the governments and religious leaders in majority Islamic countries decide the time has come for a reformation, we’re faced with the twin evils of the creeping of Shariah into our Western legal systems, as well as the violent jihad practiced by the terror wings of the Islamists.

We either face it now, or we face it later.

Yehudit says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 6:12 PM

“….I have one acute criticism of the article, this throwaway line here: “the empty Western left-wing mantra of ’social justice.’” — what is wrong with the notion of social justice that it is branded an empty mantra?….”

What does “social justice” MEAN? How is it different from “justice”? Tell me that and I’ll believe it’s not an empty mantra. To you, anyway. But from the “progressives” I’ve observed up close, it’s just a verbal fist-bump to identify other members of the clique, or a label to stick on anything they want to do so they feel righteous and superior about it.

Evan says:

Aug 19, 2010 at 11:16 PM

Did you all even read this article? Do you not get that there is no such thing as Capital-S “Sharia” law? Sharia is a concept not that different from our concept of “jurisprudence.” Sure, it’s often jurisprudence qua the Quran and other Islamic texts, but there’s no agreement in the Islamic world as to what texts are even canonical or even whether or not any given ruling to stone or lash someone fulfills lower-case-s sharia.

Think of any court case in American history that you find the rulings in detestable. Dred Scott? Roe v. Wade? Take your pick. You’re going to condemn our entire American legal system based on some miscarriages of justice? Because that’s essentially the philosophy you’re taking to lowercase-s “sharia” law.

HOW SOME PEOPLE IN SOUTH HADLEY ARE REACTING TO THE PHOEBE PRINCE CASE WITH THEIR OWN ONLINE CYBERBULLYING AND HATE......

2010-08-19T20:06:00.000-07:00

dEAR sIR,

My pleas for a "Zero Tolerance" approach has fallen on deaf ears many times. I've contacted various "Hate Page" admins to convince them to disband their hate pages hoping I could open their eyes to what they are doing. Making a point to list the ways these pages could wind up backfiring on them in court. Not to mention the glaringly, obvious, hypocritical bullying behavior by people who sit around protesting it...very sad.

After reviewing the indictments and seeing that FACEBOOK is cited, I feared the defense would use these various pages "targeting" the bullies to their advantage and to defend their clients in open court (a live login). It just proves how rampant bullying is all over the internet by all walks of life and people of all ages. Some of the horrendous things I've seen and read just make me disappointed and dumbfounded,...profoundly sad.

Clearly, SOME these HATEFUL people can't see the forest for the trees...the bigger picture. I've been very outspoken about it and in turn have been the target of some shameful comments as being a "bully supporter" or "from South Hadley", etc....which couldn't be farther from the truth since i LIVE FAR AWAY.....ACROSS THE COUNTRY...

I've come to the conclusion that these people are like a band of idiots (or a gang) just running through town (FACEBOOK) spraying their hateful, verbal graffiti on any "Wall" that mentions something that isn't in alignment with their beliefs. Throwing verbal punches and even wishing the most horrible of acts on the children of those not in agreement! Makes. me. sick.!!!! They've prowled their way around all the Phoebe Prince pages waving their red flags and having the audacity to blast those opinions all in the name of Phoebe Prince, who by all accounts didn't handle herself in that manner...ever.

***** I do NOT agree with Bazelon's approach...AT ALL. I question her ethics and her motives. She made a few good points, but I just can't get past the way she violated the Prince family and manipulated (what seemed like) much of what was said to her.

buT.....I disagree with making Bazelon a target, however (or any other reporter writing a story on this case). I was appalled that a link to her FB page wound up on the Phoebe Prince Memorial Page since David Gray has done a phenomenal job of monitoring that forum with a delicate hand. He's been fair to opinions with respect being paramount. He's moderated a number of discussions, all while bearing in mind that he is dealing with young people (teens) who are still working through their frontal lobe development and all those raging hormones, as well as the written word.

People have different filters and are reading through the eyes of their own experience so not everything translates...especially if you aren't a gifted writer or, even worse, just don't read for understanding or take a moment to process things from several sides. We are at the mercy of the reader when we comment. It comes with the territory.

You can't change people no matter how "gently and politely" you've posed a question or stated your argument. They have to come to it on their own...their own paradigm shift. It must hit too close to home for many of them, too. They all seem to have a 'bully experience' and are taking this case personally. I am too, but I am going to be the change I wish to see...to find a solution and not be part of the problem.

...and then again, some people are just miserable or stupid...or both.

Sending positive energy and patience to you

Larry Hoffner in New York on the pros and cons of reading on screens compared to reading on paper surfaces

2010-08-19T19:50:00.000-07:00

[In a recent email interview, we asked high school teacher Larry Hoffner -- an oft-published letter to the editor writer in the New York Times -- about his views on the digital age we are in and what it might all mean.]

DANNY BLOOM: Larry , in your opinion, and in your reading and research, do you think the brain processes reading from a screen differently than reading from a page? And how might this difference, if there is one, be measured or studied?

LARRY HOFFNER: I'm sure that there's a difference, however, there are so many variables that it is difficult to have a sensible cauase-affect analysis.

2. In your opionion, are html pages so overwrought with information that readers lose focus? What kind of research bears this out?

LARRY HOFFNER: I believe that Huxley had it right in BraveNew World. We are amusing ourselves to death! We are distracted! We Multi-task!

3. In your opionion, how close do you think the visual experience of an e-reader can be made to resemble that of a book, that is, how pleasing to the eye an e-reader page can be made?

LARRY HOFFNER: I'm old fashioned and will always want paper. However, a young generation is coming along that will adjust and the new reality will become the norm.

4. If the emulation is close enough, we may not find a difference in brain activity, certainly not in the early stages of visual information processing. But, The interesting part would be, if we found a difference in activation in association cortex where language is processed. is there any research on this yet, and if so, do you think the makers of ereaders are concerned about this or do not care at all?

LARRY HOFFNER: Do the makers of E-readers care? They care about profits!

5. If, in fact, we find out that there is more to electronic screen reading than meets the eye -- That is, whether the computer information age changes the way we process language and whether the effect may be detrimental to the processing of our thoughts -- will these findings have any impact on makers of Kindles and nooks and other ereaders and on the entire ebook industry?

LARRY HOFFNER: Profits will rule! We can choose.

6. As interesting as such brain activation studies may be, ultimately we shall look at outcome, that is, whether gathering information read from screens degrades our cognitive abilities. We do not need expensive fMRI or PET scans to answer this question. School psychologists use ability tests routinely. They would have to compare children who mainly use computers to children who do not. If performance was degraded, we would have to tease apart whether the cause is the screen or the ubiquitous distractors that web2 presents. Agree or disagree?

LARRY HOFFNER: I'm not sure if its 'degrading' our cognitive ability as much as its transforming it.

7. Have you read any of the research papers by Anne Mangen in Norway on these issues and what do you think of her work?

LARRY HOFFNER: No.

8. If we later find out that reading on paper is very different from reading on screens, either in terms of neuroscience or just in terms of distractability and materiality, do you think the culture at large might benefit from a new word for "screen-reading" -- whatever that word might be -- in order to help better understand the two reading modes by giving them different and maybe competing names? If so, what might YOu nominate for this word or term for reading on screens. marvin Mirsky at MIT AI lab told he likes "screen-reading" as a new term for this. What do you think or can you suggest a better word?

LARRY HOFFNER: Smilling? Preening? Weening? Sreading?

9. Gary Small at UCLA has said "the tech train has already left the station and cannot be stopped" and that whatever findings reserachers find out later about the differences between paper reading and screen reading WILL NOT MATTER MUCH to the ereader industry or computer industry, because there is so much money to be made by selling SCREENS? do you agree or disagree?

LARRY HOFFNER: Agree! Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so. The markets rule.

10. What is your main interest in all this, in terms of research or personal insights of your own?

LARRY HOFFNER: How this over reliance on technology affects our lives is of paramount importance. The unabomber was insane, but he had a point about how this technology dehumanizes us and limits our freedom. However, we are not helpless. We do not have to be reactive to the technology or to anything else.

DANNY BLOOM: Thank you for your time with these answers, Larry.

LARRY HOFFNER: Thank you for interviewing me.

If women in some Asian countries like Taiwan and Japan and China are portrayed in newspaper and magazines articles with their "measurements" prominently printed as if to say these stats define a woman, and for many people, sadly, they do, then shouldn't media in those countires also print the "measurements" of the male movie stars, like this?

2010-08-06T04:44:00.000-07:00

Lin Chin-ling, age 34,
34-23-34

Jay Chou, 32
Non-erect penis [NEP]: 5 cm, Erect Penis [EP]: 13 cm

Jackie Chan
NE, 6 cm; E, 16cm

like this right? it's only fair. if Asian newspapers and magazines and websites in Japan and China and Taiwan are going to only portray women movie stars and singers and TV stars in terms of their breast size, then should these papers, to be fair, also print the penis size of their male stars, for all the world to see, as well?

----------
http://www.hotcute.cn/idol/hong-kong-famous-female-movie-star-anita-yuen.html?pid=3336

Chinese Name:袁咏仪
English name: Anita Yuen
Year of birth: September 4, 1971
Place of birth: Hong Kong
Height: 168
Blood type: O
Weight: 46
Waist: 22-23
Measurements: 32.5 24 35
Shoes size: 39 semi -
Shirt size: European size 40
Pants size: European size 38 – 40 No.

Aki Kawamura Measurements:
B:86 W:58 H:83
Height: 5'2" (157cm)
Eye color: Brown
Hair color: Brown
Natural breasts: YES

Blood Group: A
Orientation: Heterosexual ...

INTERNET internet INTERNET internet - lowercase or CAPS?

2010-08-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

JOHN BROCKMAN
Publisher & Editor, Edge; Author, By The Late John Brockman, The Third Culture

THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUS

"Love Intermedia Kinetic Environments." John Brockman speaking —
partly kidding, but conveying the notion that Intermedia Kinetic
Environments are In in the places where the action is — an Experience,
an Event, an Environment, a humming electric world.

— The New York Times

On a Sunday in September 1966, I was sitting on a park bench reading
about myself on the front page of the New York Times Arts & Leisure
section. I was wondering whether the article would get me fired from
my job at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where I was
producing "expanded cinema" and "intermedia" events. I was twenty-five
years old.

New and exciting ideas and forms of expression were in the air. They
came out of happenings, the dance world, underground movies,
avant-garde theater. They came from artists engaged in experiment.
Intermedia consisted more often than not of unscripted, sometimes
spontaneous theatrical events in which the audience was also a
participant. I was lucky enough to have some small part in this
upheaval, having been hired a year earlier by the underground
filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas to manage the Filmmakers'
Cinémathèque and organize and run the Expanded Cinema Festival.

During that wildly interesting period, many of the leading artists
were reading science and bringing scientific ideas to their work. John
Cage gave me a copy of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics; Bob Rauschenberg
turned me on to James Jeans' The Mysterious Universe. Claes Oldenburg
suggested I read George Gamow's 1,2,3...Infinity. USCO, a group of
artists, engineers, and poets who created intermedia environments; La
Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music; Andy Warhol's Factory; Nam
June Paik's video performances; Terry Riley's minimalist music — these
were master classes in the radical epistemology of a set of ideas
involving feedback and information.

Another stroke of good luck was my inclusion in a small group of young
artists invited by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to attend a series of
dinners with John Cage — an ongoing seminar about media,
communications, art, music, and philosophy that focused on the ideas
of Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Marshall McLuhan. Cage was
aware of research conducted in the late 1930s and 1940s by Wiener,
Shannon, Vannevar Bush, Warren McCulloch, and John von Neumann, who
were all present at the creation of cybernetic theory. And he had
picked up on McLuhan's idea that by inventing electric technology we
had externalized our central nervous systems — that is, our minds —
and that we now had to presume that "There's only one mind, the one we
all share." We had to go beyond personal mind-sets: "Mind" had become
socialized. "We can't change our minds without changing the world,"
Cage said. Mind as a man-made extension had become our environment,
which he characterized as a "collective consciousness" that we could
tap into by creating "a global utilities network."

Back then, of course, the Internet didn't exist, but the idea was
alive. In 1962, J.C.R Licklider, who had published "Man-Computer
Symbiosis" in 1960 and described the idea of an "Intergalactic
Computer Network" in 1961, was hired as the first director of the new
Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the Pentagon's
Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency created as a response to
Sputnik. Licklider designed the foundation for a global computer
network. He and his successors at IPTO, including Robert Taylor and
Larry Roberts, provided the ideas that led to the development of the
ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet, which itself emerged as an
ARPA-funded research project in the mid-1980s.

Inspired also by architect-designer Buckminster Fuller, futurist John
McHale, and cultural anthropologists Edward T. ("Ned") Hall and Edmund
Carpenter, I began to read avidly in the field of information theory,
cybernetics, and systems theory. McLuhan himself introduced me to The
Mathematical Theory of Communication by Shannon and Weaver, which
began: "The word communication will be used here in a very broad sense
to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another.
This, of course, involves not only written and oral speech, but also
music, the pictorial arts, the theater, the ballet, and in fact all
human behavior."

Inherent in these ideas is a radical new epistemology. It tears apart
the fabric of our habitual thinking. Subject and object fuse. The
individual self decreates. I wrote a synthesis of these ideas in my
first book, By the Late John Brockman (1969), taking information
theory — the mathematical theory of communications — as a model for
regarding all human experience. I began to develop a theme that has
informed my endeavors ever since: New technologies beget new
perceptions. Reality is a man-made process. Our images of our world
and of ourselves are, in part, models resulting from our perceptions
of the technologies we generate.

We create tools and then we mold ourselves in their image.
Seventeenth-century clockworks inspired mechanistic metaphors ("The
heart is a pump"), just as the self-regulating engineering devices of
the mid-twentieth century inspired the cybernetic image ("The brain is
a computer"). The anthropologist Gregory Bateson has characterized the
post-Newtonian worldview as one of pattern, of order, of resonances in
which the individual mind is a subsystem of a larger order. Mind is
intrinsic to the messages carried by the pathways within the larger
system and intrinsic also in the pathways themselves.

Ned Hall once pointed out to me that the most critical inventions are
not those that resemble inventions but those that appear innate and
natural. Once you become aware of this kind of invention, it is as
though you had always known about it. ("The medium is the message." Of
course, I always knew that).

Hall's candidate for the most important invention was not the capture
of fire, the printing press, the discovery of electricity, or the
discovery of the structure of DNA. The most important invention was
... talking. To illustrate the point, he told a story about a group of
prehistoric cavemen having a conversation.

"Guess what?" the first man said. "We're talking." Silence. The others
looked at him with suspicion.

"What's 'talking'?" a second man asked.

"It's what we're all doing, right now. We're talking!"

"You're crazy," the third man said. "I never heard of such a thing!"

"I'm not crazy," the first man said. "You're crazy. We're talking."

Talking, undoubtedly, was considered innate and natural until the
first man rendered it visible by exclaiming, "We're talking."

A new invention has emerged, a code for the collective conscious,
which requires a new way of thinking. The collective externalized mind
is the mind we all share. The Internet is the infinite oscillation of
our collective conscious interacting with itself. It's not about
computers. It's not about what it means to be human — in fact it
challenges, renders trite, our cherished assumptions on that score.
It's about thinking. "We're talking."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

W. DANIEL HILLIS
Physicist, Computer Scientist; Chairman, Applied Minds, Inc.; Author,
The Pattern on the Stone

THE DAWN OF THE ENTANGLEMENT

It seems that most people, even intelligent and well-informed people,
are confused about the difference between the Internet and the Web. No
one has expressed this misunderstanding more clearly than Tom Wolfe in
Hooking Up:

I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic
Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does
one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of
information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to
the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to
get hold of your stock broker or some buddies to shoot the breeze
with. That one thing the Internet does and only that. The rest is
Digibabble.

This confusion between the network and the services that it first
enabled is a natural mistake. Most early customers of electricity
believed that they were buying electric lighting. That first
application was so compelling that it blinded them to the bigger
picture of what was possible. A few dreamers speculated that
electricity would change the world, but one can imagine a
nineteenth-century curmudgeon attempting to dampen their enthusiasm:
"Electricity is a convenient means to light a room. That one thing the
electricity does and only that. The rest is Electrobabble."

The Web is a wonderful resource for speeding up the retrieval and
dissemination of information and that, despite Wolfe's trivialization,
is no small change. Yet, the Internet is much more than just the Web.
I would like to discuss some of the less apparent ways that it will
change us. By the Internet, I mean the global network of
interconnected computers that enables, among other things, the Web. I
would like to focus on applications that go beyond human-to-human
communication. In the long run, these are applications of the Internet
that will have the greatest impact on who we are and how we think.

Today, most people only recognize that they are using the Internet
when they are interacting with a computer screen. They are less likely
to appreciate when they are using the Internet while talking on the
telephone, watching television, or flying on an airplane. Some
travelers may have recently gotten a glimpse of the truth, for
example, upon learning that their flights were grounded due to an
Internet router failure in Salt Lake City, but for most this was just
another inscrutable annoyance. Most people have long ago given up on
trying to understand how technical systems work. This is a part of how
the Internet is changing the way we think.

I want to be clear that I am not complaining about technical
ignorance. In an Internet-connected world, it is almost impossible to
keep track of how systems actually function. Your telephone
conversation may be delivered over analog lines one day and by the
Internet the next. Your airplane route may be chosen by a computer or
a human being, or (most likely) some combination of both. Don't bother
asking, because any answer you get is likely to be wrong.

Soon, no human will know the answer. More and more decisions are made
by the emergent interaction of multiple communicating systems, and
these component systems themselves are constantly adapting, changing
the way they work. This is the real impact of the Internet: by
allowing adaptive complex systems to interoperate, the Internet has
changed the way we make decisions. More and more, it is not individual
humans who decide, but an entangled, adaptive network of humans and
machines.

To understand how the Internet encourages this interweaving of complex
systems, you need to appreciate how it has changed the nature of
computer programming. Back in the twentieth century, a programmer had
the opportunity to exercise absolute control within a bounded world
with precisely defined rules. They were able to tell their computers
exactly what to do. Today, programming usually involves linking
together complex systems developed by others, without understanding
exactly how they work. In fact, depending upon the methods of other
systems is considered poor programming practice, because it is
expected that they will change.

Consider as a simple example, a program that needs to know the time of
day. In the unconnected world, computers often asked the operator to
type in the time when they were powered on. They then kept track of
passing time by counting ticks of an internal clock. Programmers often
had to write their own program to do this, but in any case, they
understood exactly how it worked. Once computers became connected
through the Internet, it made more sense for computers to find out the
time by asking one another, so something called Network Time Protocol
was invented. Most programmers are aware that it exists but few
understand it in detail. Instead, they call a library routine, which
asks the operating system, which automatically invokes the Network
Time Protocol when it is required.

It would take a long time to explain Network Time Protocol, how it
corrects for variable network delays and how it takes advantage of a
partially-layered hierarchy of network-connected clocks to find the
time. Suffice it to say that it is complicated. Besides, I would be
describing version 3 of the protocol, and your operating system is
probably already using version 4. It really does not make sense for
you, even if you are a programmer, to bother to understand how it
works.

Now consider a program that is directing delivery trucks to restock
stores. It needs to know not just the time of day, but also the
locations of the trucks in the fleet, the maps of the streets, the
coordinates of its warehouses, the current traffic patterns, and the
inventories of its stores. Fortunately it can keep track of all of
this changing information by connecting to other computers through the
Internet. It can also offer services to other systems that need to
track the location of packages, pay drivers, and schedule maintenance
of the trucks. All of these systems will depend upon one another to
provide information, without depending on exactly how the information
is computed. All of these communicating systems are being constantly
improved and extended, evolving in time.

Now multiply this picture by a million fold, to include not just the
one fleet of trucks, but all the airplanes, gas pipelines, hospitals,
factories, oil refineries, mines and power plants not to mention the
salesmen, advertisers, media distributors, insurance companies,
regulators, financiers and stock traders. You will begin to perceive
the entangled system that makes so many of our day-to-day decisions.
Although we created it, we did not exactly design it. It evolved. Our
relationship to it is similar to our relationship to our biological
ecosystem. We are co-dependent, and not entirely in control.

We have embodied our rationality within our machines and delegated to
them many of our choices, and in this process we have created a world
that is beyond our own understanding. Our century began on a note of
uncertainty, as we worried how our machines would handle the
transition to the new millennium. Now we are attending to a financial
crisis caused by the banking system miscomputing risks, and a debate
on global warming in which experts argue not so much about the data,
but about what the computers predict from the data. We have linked our
destinies, not only among ourselves across the globe, but with our
technology. If the theme of the Enlightenment was independence, our
own theme is interdependence. We are now all connected, humans and
machines. Welcome to the dawn of the Entanglement.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

STEWART BRAND
Founder, Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder; The Well; cofounder, Global
Business Network; Author, Whole Earth Discipline

ONE'S GUILD

I couldn't function without them, and I suspect the same is true for
nearly all effective people. By "them" I mean my closest intellectual
collaborators. They are the major players in my social extended mind.
How I think is shaped to a large degree by how they think.

Our association is looser than a team but closer than a cohort, and
it's not a club or a workgroup or an elite. I'll call it a guild.
Everyone in my guild runs their own operation, and none of us report
to each other. All we do is keep close track of what each other is
thinking and doing. Often we collaborate directly, but most of the
time we don't. Everyone in my guild has their own guild---each of
theirs largely different from mine. I'm probably not considered a
member of some of them.

(My guild these years consists of Danny Hillis, Brian Eno, Peter
Schwartz, Kevin Kelly, John Brockman, Alexander Rose, and Ryan Phelan.
Occasionally we intersect institutionally via The Long Now Foundation,
Global Business Network, or Edge.org.)

One's guild is a conversation extending over years and decades. I
hearken to my gang because we have overlapping interests, and they
keep surprising me. Familiar as I am with them, I can't finish their
sentences. Their constant creativity feeds my creativity, and I try to
do the same for them. Often the way I ponder something is to channel
my guild members: "Would Danny consider this a waste of time?" "How
would Brian find something exciting here?" "Is this idea something
Kevin or Brockman might run with, and where would they run with it?"

I seldom see my guild members in person (except the one I'm married
to). We seldom talk on the phone. Yet we interact weekly through the
crude old Internet tools of email and links. (That no doubt reflects
our age---younger guilds presumably use Facebook or Twitter or
whatever's next in that lineage.)

Thanks to my guild's Internet-mediated conversation, my neuronal
thinking is enhanced immeasurably by our digital thinking.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; Editor: A Brief History of
Curating; Formulas for Now

EDGE A TO Z (PARS PRO TOTO)

A is for And And
The Internet made me think more BOTH AND instead of EITHER OR instead
of NOR NOR.

B is for Beginnings
In terms of my curatorial thinking, my 'Eureka moments' occurred
pre-Internet, when I met visionary Swiss artists Fischli/Weiss in
1985. These conversations freed me up — freed my thoughts as to what
curating could be and how curating can produce reality. The arrival of
the Internet was a trigger for me to think more in the form of
Oulipian lists — practical-poetical, evolutive and often nonlinear,
lists. This A to Z is an incomplete list ….Umberto Eco calls the World
Wide Web the 'mother of all lists': infinite by definition and in
constant evolution.

C is for Curating the World
The Internet made me think towards a more expanded notion of curating.
Stemming from the Latin word 'curare', the word 'curating' originally
meant 'to take care of objects in museums'. Curation has long since
evolved. Just as art is no longer limited to traditional genres,
curating is no longer confined to the gallery or museum but has
expanded across all boundaries. The rather obscure and very
specialized notion of curating has become much more publicly used
since one talks about curating of Websites and and this marks a very
good moment to rediscover the pioneering history of art curating as a
toolbox for 21st century society at large.

D is for Delinking
In the years before being online, I remember that there were many
interruptions by phone and fax day and night. The reality of being
permanently linked to the triggered my increasing awareness of the
importance of moments of concentration — moments without interruption
that require me to be completely unreachable. I no longer answer the
phone at home and I only answer my mobile phone in the case of fixed
telephone appointments. To link is beautiful. To delink is sublime.
(Paul Chan)

D is for Disrupted narrative continuity
Forms of film montage , as the disruption of narrative and the
disruption of spatial and temporal continuity, have been a staple
tactic of the avant-garde from Cubism and Eisenstein, through Brecht
to Kluge or Godard. For avant-gardism as a whole, it was essential
that these tactics were recognized (experienced) as a disruption. The
Internet has made disruption and montage the operative bases of
everyday experience. Today, these forms of disruption can be harnessed
and poeticized. They can foster new connections, new relationships,
new productions of reality: reality as life-montage / life as
reality-disruption? Not one story but many stories………

D is for Doubt
A certain unreliability of technical and material information on the
Internet brings us to the notion of doubt. I feel that doubt has
become more pervasive. The artist Carsten Höller has invented the
Laboratory of Doubt, which is opposed to mere representation. As he
has told me, 'Doubt and perplexity ... are unsightly states of mind
we'd rather keep under lock and key because we associate them with
uneasiness, with a failure of values'. Höller's credo is not to do;
not to intervene. To exist is to do and not to do is a way of doing.
'Doubt is alive; it paralyzes certainty.' (Carsten Höller)

E is for Evolutive exhibitions
The Internet makes me think more about non-final exhibitions and
exhibitions in a state of becoming. When conceiving exhibitions, I
sometimes like to think of randomized algorithms, access,
transmission, mutation, infiltration and circulation (the list goes
on). The Internet makes me think less of exhibitions as top down
masterplans but bottom up processes of self organisation like do it or
Cities on the Move

F is for Forgetting
The ever growing ever pervasive records that the Internet produces
make me think sometimes about the virtues of forgetting. Is a limited
life space of certain information and data becoming more urgent?

H is for Handwriting (and Drawing ever Drawing)
The Internet has made me aware of the importance of handwriting and
drawing. Personally, I typed all my early texts, but the more the
Internet has become all-encompassing , the more I have felt that
something went missing. Hence the idea to reintroduce handwriting.I do
more and more of my correspondence as handwritten letters scanned and
sent by email. On a professional note, I observe, as a curator, the
importance of drawing in current art production. One can also see it
in art schools: a moment when drawing is an incredibly fertile zone.

I is for Identity
"Identity is shifty, identity is a choice". (Etel Adnan)

I is for Inactual considerations
The future is always built out of fragments of the past. The Internet
has brought thinking more into the present tense, raising questions of
what it means to be contemporary.

Recently, Giorgio Agamben revisited Nietzsche's 'Inactual
Considerations', arguing that the one who belongs to his or her own
time is the one who does not coincide perfectly with it. It is because
of this shift, this anachronism, that he or she is more apt than
others to perceive and to catch his or her time. Agamben follows this
observation with his second definition of contemporaneity: the
contemporary is the one who is able to perceive obscurity, who is not
blinded by the lights of his or her time or century.

This leads us, interestingly enough, to the importance of astrophysics
in explaining the relevance of obscurity for contemporaneity. The
seeming obscurity in the sky is the light that travels to us at full
speed but which can't reach us because the galaxies from which it
originates are ceaselessly moving away from us at a speed superior to
that of light. The Internet and a certain resistance to its present
tense have made me increasingly aware that there is an urgent call to
be contemporary. To be contemporary means to perpetually come back to
a present where we have never yet been. To be contemporary means to
resist the homogenization of time, through ruptures and
discontinuities.

M is for Maps
The Internet increased the presence of maps in my thinking. It's
become easier to make maps, to change them, and also to work on them
collaboratively and collectively and share them (e.g. Google Maps and
Google Earth). After the focus on social networks of the last couple
of years, I have come to see the focus on location as a key dimension.

N is for New geographies
The Internet has fuelled (and been fuelled by) a relentless economic
and cultural globalization, with all its positive and negative
aspects. On the one hand, there is the danger of homogenizing forces,
which is also at stake in the world of the arts. On the other hand,
there are unprecedented possibilities for difference enhancing global
dialogues. In the long duration there have been seismic shifts, like
that in the 16th century when the paradigm shifted from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic. We are living through a period in which
the center of gravity is transferring to new centres. . The early 21st
century is seeing the growth of a polyphony of art centers in the East
and West in the North and South.

N is for Non-mediated experiences N is for the New Live
I feel an increased desire for non-mediated experiences Depending on
one's point of view, the virtual may be a new and liberating
prosthesis of the body or it may threaten the body. Many visual
artists today negotiate and mediate between these two staging
encounters of non mediated intersubjectivity. In the music fields the
crisis of the record industry goes hand in hand with an increased
importance of live concerts.

P is for Parallel realities
The Internet creates and fosters new constituencies; new
micro-communities. As a system that infinitely breeds new realities,
it is predisposed to reproduce itself in a proliferating series of
ever more functionally differentiated subsystems. As such, it makes my
thinking go towards the production of parallel realities, bearing
witness to the multiverse, as the physicist David Deutsch might say
and for better or worse, the Internet allows that which is already
latent in the fabric of reality to unravel itself and expand in all
directions.

P is for Protest against forgetting
Over the last years I feel an increasing urgency to more and more
interviews, to make an effort to preserve traces of intelligence from
the last decades. One particularly urgent part of this are the
testimonies of the 20th century pioneers who are in their 80s or 90s
or older and whom I regularly interview, testimonies of a century from
those who are not online and who very often fall into oblivion. This
protest might, as Rem Koolhaas has told me, act as 'a hedge against
the systematic forgetting that hides at the core of the information
age and which may in fact be its secret agenda'?

S is for Salon of the 21st century
The Internet has made me think more about whom I would like to
introduce to whom; to cyberintroduce people as a daily practice or to
introduce people in person through actual salons for the 21st century
(see the Brutally Early Club).

Last but not least a the response of David Weiss who answers this
years Edge question with a new question asking if our thinking can
influence the Internet.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLAY SHIRKY
Social & Technology Network Topology Researcher; Adjunct Professor,
NYU Graduate School of Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP);
Author, Here Comes Everybody

THE SHOCK OF INCLUSION

The Internet has been in majority use in the developed world for less
than a decade, but we can already see some characteristic advantages
(dramatically improved access to information, very large scale
collaborations) and disadvantages (interrupt-driven thought, endless
distractions.) It's tempting to try to adjudicate the relative value
of the network on the way we think by deciding whether access to
Wikipedia outweighs access to tentacle porn or the other way around.

Unfortunately for us, though, the intellectual fate of our historical
generation is unlikely to matter much in the long haul. It is our
misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive
capability in the history of the human race, a misfortune because
surplus always breaks more things than scarcity. Scarcity means
valuable things become more valuable, a conceptually easy change to
integrate. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable
things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.

To make a historical analogy with the last major increase in the
written word, you could earn a living in 1500 simply by knowing how to
read and write. The spread of those abilities in the subsequent
century had the curious property of making literacy both more
essential and less professional; literacy became critical at the same
time as the scribes lost their jobs.

The same thing is happening with publishing; in the 20th century, the
mere fact of owning the apparatus to make something public, whether a
printing press or a TV tower, made you a person of considerable
importance. Today, though, publishing, in its sense of making things
public, is becoming similarly de-professionalized; YouTube is now in
the position of having to stop 8 year olds from becoming global
publishers of video. The mere fact of being able to publish to a
global audience is the new literacy, formerly valuable, now so widely
available that you can't make any money with the basic capability any
more.

This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to
participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this
year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when
anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that
happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing
models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the
beginning of another Dark Ages.

So it falls to us to make sure that isn't all that happens.

To the question "How is Internet is changing the way we think?", the
right answer is "Too soon to tell." This isn't because we can't see
some of the obvious effects already, but because the deep changes will
be manifested only when new cultural norms shape what the technology
makes possible.

To return to the press analogy, printing was a necessary but not
sufficient input to the scientific revolution. The Invisible College,
the group of natural philosophers who drove the original revolution in
chemistry in the mid-1600s, were strongly critical of the alchemists,
their intellectual forebears, who for centuries had made only fitful
progress. By contrast, the Invisible College put chemistry on a sound
scientific footing in a matter of a couple of decades, one of the most
important intellectual transitions in the history of science. In the
1600s, though, a chemist and an alchemist used the same tools and had
access to the same background. What did the Invisible College have
that the alchemists didn't?

They had a culture of sharing. The problem with the alchemists had
wasn't that they failed to turn lead into gold; the problem was that
they failed uninformatively. Alchemists were obscurantists, recording
their work by hand and rarely showing it to anyone but disciples. In
contrast, members of the Invisible College shared their work,
describing and disputing their methods and conclusions so that they
all might benefit from both successes and failures, and build on each
other's work.

The chemists were, to use Richard Foreman's phrase, "pancake people".
They abandoned the spiritual depths of alchemy for a continual and
continually incomplete grappling with what was real, a task so
daunting that no one person could take it on alone. Though as
schoolchildren, the history of science we learn is often marked by the
trope of the lone genius, science has always been a networked
operation.

In this we can see a precursor to what's possible for us today. Just
as the Invisible College didn't just use the printing press as raw
capability, but created a culture that used the press to support the
transparency and argumentation science relies on, we have the same
opportunity.

As we know from arXiv.org, the 20th century model of publishing is
inadequate to the kind of sharing possible today. As we know from
Wikipedia, post-hoc peer review can support astonishing creations of
shared value. As we know from the search for Mersenne Primes, whole
branches of mathematical exploration are now best taken on by groups.
As we know from Open Source efforts like Linux, collaboration between
loosely joined parties can work at scales and over timeframes
previously unimagined. As we know from NASA clickworkers, groups of
amateurs can sometimes replace single experts. As we know from
Patients Like Me, patient involvement accelerates medical research.
And so on.

The beneficiaries of the system where making things public was a
privileged activity, whether academics or politicians, reporters or
doctors, will complain about the way the new abundance of public
thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at
a wake; the change they fear is already in the past. The real action
is elsewhere.

The Internet's primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself
when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior
of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live
to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not
live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is
cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of 'comes from everyone'
and 'goes everywhere.') We are, however, the people who are setting
the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won't matter much, but
the norms we set will.

Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible
High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of
narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an
Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and
civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It
will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation,
fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ERIC FISCHL & APRIL GORNIK
Visual Artists

REPLACING EXPERIENCE WITH FACSIMILE

As visual artists, we might rephrase the question as something like:
How has the Internet changed the way we see?

For the visual artist, seeing is essential to thought. It organizes
information and how we develop thoughts and feelings. It's how we
connect.

So how has the Internet changed us visually? The changes are subtle
yet profound. They did not start with the computer. The changes began
with the camera and other film-based media, and the Internet has had
an exponential effect on that change.

The result is a leveling of visual information, whereby it all assumes
the same characteristics. One loss is a sense of scale. Another is a
loss of differentiation between materials, and the process of making.
All visual information "looks" the same, with film/photography being
the common denominator.

Art objects contain a dynamism based on scale and physicality that
produces a somatic response in the viewer. The powerful visual
experience of art locates the viewer very precisely as an integrated
self within the artist's vision. With the flattening of visual
information and the randomness of size inherent in reproduction, the
significance of scale is eroded. Visual information becomes based on
image alone. Experience is replaced with facsimile.

As admittedly useful as the Internet is, easy access to images of
everything and anything creates a false illusion of knowledge and
experience. The world pictured as pictures does not deliver the
experience of art seen and experienced physically. It is possible for
an art-experienced person to "translate" what is seen online, but the
experience is necessarily remote.

As John Berger pointed out, the nature of photography is a memory
device that allows us to forget. Perhaps something similar can be said
about the Internet. In terms of art, the Internet expands the network
of reproduction that replaces the way we "know" something. It replaces
experience with facsimile.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RICHARD DAWKINS
Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding
of Science, Oxford; Author, The Greatest Show on Earth

NET GAIN

If, forty years ago, the Edge Question had been "What do you
anticipate will most radically change the way you think during the
next forty years?" my mind would have flown instantly to a then recent
article in Scientific American (September 1966) about 'Project MAC'.
Nothing to do with the Apple Mac, which it long pre-dated, Project MAC
was an MIT-based cooperative enterprise in pioneering computer
science. It included the circle of AI innovators surrounding Marvin
Minsky but, oddly, that was not the part that captured my imagination.
What really excited me, as a user of the large mainframe computers
that were all you could get in those days, was something that nowadays
would seem utterly commonplace: the then astonishing fact that up to
30 people simultaneously, from all around the MIT campus and even from
their homes, could simultaneously log in to the same computer:
simultaneously communicate with it and with each other. mirabile
dictum, the co-authors of a paper could work on it simultaneously,
drawing upon a shared database in the computer, even though they might
be miles apart. In principle, they could be on opposite sides of the
globe.

Today that sounds absurdly modest. It's hard to recapture how
futuristic it was at the time. The post-Berners-Lee world of 2009, if
we could have imagined it forty years ago, would have seemed
shattering. Anybody with a cheap laptop computer, and an averagely
fast WiFi connection, can enjoy the illusion of bouncing dizzily
around the world in full colour, from a beach Webcam in Portugal to a
chess match in Vladivostok, and Google Earth actually lets you fly the
full length of the intervening landscape as if on a magic carpet. You
can drop in for a chat at a virtual pub, in a virtual town whose
geographical location is so irrelevant as to be literally non-existent
(and the content of whose LOL-punctuated conversation, alas, is likely
to be of a drivelling fatuity that insults the technology that
mediates it).

'Pearls before swine' over-estimates the average chat-room
conversation, but it is the pearls of hardware and software that
inspire me: the Internet itself and the World Wide Web, succinctly
defined by Wikipedia as "a system of interlinked hypertext documents
contained on the Internet." The Web is a work of genius, one of the
highest achievements of the human species, whose most remarkable
quality is that it was not constructed by one individual genius like
Tim Berners-Lee or Steve Wozniak or Alan Kay, nor by a top-down
company like Sony or IBM, but by an anarchistic confederation of
largely anonymous units located (irrelevantly) all over the world. It
is Project MAC writ large. Suprahumanly large. Moreover, there is not
one massive central computer with lots of satellites, as in Project
MAC, but a distributed network of computers of different sizes, speeds
and manufacturers, a network that nobody, literally nobody, ever
designed or put together, but which grew, haphazardly, organically, in
a way that is not just biological but specifically ecological.

Of course there are negative aspects, but they are easily forgiven.
I've already referred to the lamentable content of many chat room
conversations without editorial control. The tendency to flaming
rudeness is fostered by the convention — whose sociological provenance
we might discuss one day — of anonymity. Insults and obscenities, to
which you would not dream of signing your real name, flow gleefully
from the keyboard when you are masquerading online as 'TinkyWinky' or
'FlubPoodle' or 'ArchWeasel'.

And then there is the perennial problem of sorting out true
information from false. Fast search engines tempt us to see the entire
Web as a gigantic encyclopaedia, while forgetting that traditional
encyclopaedias were rigorously edited and their entries authored by
chosen experts. Having said that, I am repeatedly astounded by how
good Wikipedia can be. I calibrate Wikipedia by looking up the few
things I really do know about (and may indeed have written the entry
for in traditional encyclopaedias) say 'Evolution' or 'Natural
Selection'. I am so impressed by these calibratory forays that I go,
with some confidence, to other entries where I lack first-hand
knowledge (which was why I felt able to quote Wikipedia's definition
of the Web, above). No doubt mistakes creep in, or are even
maliciously inserted, but the half-life of a mistake, before the
natural correction mechanism kills it, is encouragingly short.
Nevertheless, the fact that the Wiki concept works, even if only in
some areas such as science, flies so flagrantly in the face of all my
prior pessimism, that I am tempted to see it as a metaphor for all
that deserves optimism about the World Wide Web.

Optimistic we may be, but there is a lot of rubbish on the Web, more
than in printed books, perhaps because they cost more to produce (and,
alas, there's plenty of rubbish there too). But the speed and ubiquity
of the Internet actually helps us to be on our critical guard. If a
report on one site sounds implausible (or too plausible to be true)
you can quickly check it on several more. Urban legends and other
viral memes are helpfully catalogued on various sites. When we receive
one of those panicky warnings (often attributed to Microsoft or
Symantec) about a dangerous computer virus, we do not spam it to our
entire address book but instead Google a key phrase from the warning
itself. It usually turns out to be, say, "Hoax Number 76", its history
and geography meticulously tracked.

Perhaps the main downside of the Internet is that surfing can be
addictive and a prodigious timewaster, encouraging a habit of
butterflying from topic to topic, rather than attending to one thing
at a time. But I want to leave negativity and nay saying and end with
some speculative — perhaps more positive — observations. The unplanned
worldwide unification that the Web is achieving (a science-fiction
enthusiast might discern the embryonic stirrings of a new life form)
mirrors the evolution of the nervous system in multicellular animals.
A certain school of psychologists might see it as mirroring the
development of each individual's personality, as a fusion among split
and distributed beginnings in infancy.

I am reminded of an insight that comes from Fred Hoyle's science
fiction novel, The Black Cloud. The cloud is a superhuman interstellar
traveller, whose 'nervous system' consists of units that communicate
with each other by radio — orders of magnitude faster than our
puttering nerve impulses. But in what sense is the cloud to be seen as
a single individual rather than a society? The answer is that
interconnectedness that is sufficiently fast blurs the distinction. A
human society would effectively become one individual if we could read
each other's thoughts through direct, high speed, brain-to-brain radio
transmission. Something like that may eventually meld the various
units that constitute the Internet.

This futuristic speculation recalls the beginning of my essay. What if
we look forty years into the future? Moore's Law will probably
continue for at least part of that time, enough to wreak some
astonishing magic (as it would seem to our puny imaginations if we
could be granted a sneak preview today). Retrieval from the communal
exosomatic memory will become dramatically faster, and we shall rely
less on the memory in our skulls. At present we still need biological
brains to provide the cross-referencing and association, but more
sophisticated software and faster hardware will increasingly usurp
even that function.

The high-resolution colour rendering of virtual reality will improve
to the point where the distinction from the real world becomes
unnervingly hard to notice. Large-scale communal games such as Second
Life will become disconcertingly addictive to many ordinary people who
understand little of what goes on in the engine room. And let's not be
snobbish about that. For many people around the world, 'first life'
reality has few charms and, even for those more fortunate, active
participation in a virtual world is more intellectually stimulating
than the life of a couch potato slumped in idle thrall to 'Big
Brother'. To intellectuals, Second Life and its souped-up successors
will become laboratories of sociology, experimental psychology and
their successor disciplines, yet to be invented and named. Whole
economies, ecologies, and perhaps personalities will exist nowhere
other than in virtual space.

Finally, there may be political implications. Apartheid South Africa
tried to suppress opposition by banning television, and eventually had
to give up. It will be more difficult to ban the Internet. Theocratic
or otherwise malign regimes, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia today, may
find it increasingly hard to bamboozle their citizens with their evil
nonsense. Whether, on balance, the Internet benefits the oppressed
more than the oppressor is controversial, and at present may vary from
region to region (see, for example, the exchange between Evgeny
Morozov and Clay Shirky in Prospect, Nov-Dec 2009).

It is said that Twitter is playing an important part in the current
unrest in Iran, and latest news from that faith-pit encourages the
view that the trend will be towards a net positive effect of the
Internet on political liberty. We can at least hope that the faster,
more ubiquitous and above all cheaper Internet of the future may
hasten the long-awaited downfall of Ayatollahs, Mullahs, Popes,
Televangelists, and all who wield power through the control (whether
cynical or sincere) of gullible minds. Perhaps Tim Berners-Lee will
one day earn the Nobel Prize for Peace.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DAVE MORIN
Senior Platform Manager; Facebook; Internet Entrepreneur; Co-Inventor,
Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect

CONTEXT IS KING

My generation is the first generation that has lived their entire
lives with the Internet. The Internet is how we think. We have
developed a way of thinking that depends on being connected to an ever
changing graph of all the world’s people and ideas. The Internet helps
to define, evolve, and grow us. The Internet is social. The Internet
is a way of life. The Internet provides context.

Because I have lived most of my life with the Internet, it has been
the increasing the addition of new contexts which has been the thing
which has most changed the way I think. In the beginning, the Internet
was a giant mess of unstructured, unorganized, identity-free data
spread across un-connected computers all over the world.

Then things started to change. Organizations and companies began to
structure and provide context to the documents and data housed in this
expanding network of the world’s computers.

Opening, connecting, and organizing the information on the world’s
computers has enabled us to search for the answers to our most
important questions and to provide more context to the information in
our lives.

Once the world’s information was put into context, we looked beyond
the keyboard, and collectively shifted to people. We focused on social
context by asking questions like: Who are you? How are we connected?
What is on your mind? What matters to you?

Making the Internet more social enabled people to share their real
name, likeness, voice, and the things that they are connected to. Now
we always have an understanding of who is talking, who and what they
are connected to, what they are saying, and to whom; through
understanding identity and social context we have achieved greater
openness as a society.

In the future, the challenge will be continuing to add new contexts
and improve existing ones in order to help people live better,
happier, lives. So that no matter where you are, what you are doing,
who you are with, or what you are thinking, it is always in context.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NASSIM N. TALEB
Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, NYU-Poly; Principal,
Universa Investments; Author, The Black Swan

THE DEGRADATION OF PREDICTABILITY — AND KNOWLEDGE

I used to think that the problem of information is that it turns homo
sapiens into fools — we gain disproportionately in confidence,
particularly in domains where information is wrapped in a high degree
of noise (say, epidemiology, genetics, economics, etc.). So we end up
thinking that we know more than we do, which, in economic life, causes
foolish risk taking. When I started trading, I went on a news diet and
I saw things with more clarity. I also saw how people built too many
theories based on sterile news, the fooled by randomness effect. But
things are a lot worse. Now I think that, in addition, the supply and
spread of information turns the world into Extremistan (a world I
describe as one in which random variables are dominated by extremes,
with Black Swans playing a large role in them). The Internet, by
spreading information, causes an increase in interdependence, the
exacerbation of fads (bestsellers like Harry Potter and runs on the
banks become planetary). Such world is more "complex", more moody,
much less predictable.

So consider the explosive situation: more information (particularly
thanks to the Internet) causes more confidence and illusions of
knowledge while degrading predictability.

Look at this current economic crisis that started in 2008: there are
about a million persons on the planet who identify themselves in the
field of economics. Yet just a handful realized the possibility and
depth of what could have taken place and protected themselves from the
consequences. At no time in the history of mankind have we lived under
so much ignorance (easily measured in terms of forecast errors)
coupled with so much intellectual hubris. At no point have we had
central bankers missing elementary risk metrics, like debt levels,
that even the Babylonians understood well.

I recently talked to a scholar of rare wisdom and erudition, Jon
Elster, who upon exploring themes from social science, integrates
insights from all authors in the corpus of the past 2500 years, from
Cicero and Seneca, to Montaigne and Proust. He showed me how Seneca
had a very sophisticated understanding of loss aversion. I felt guilty
for the time I spent on the Internet. Upon getting home I found in my
mail a volume of posthumous essays by bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet called
Huetiana, put together by his admirers c. 1722. It is so saddening to
realize that, being born close to four centuries after Huet, and
having done most of my reading with material written after his death,
I am not much more advanced in wisdom than he was — moderns at the
upper end are no wiser than their equivalent among the ancients; if
anything, much less refined.

So I am now on an Internet diet, in order to understand the world a
bit better — and make another bet on horrendous mistakes by economic
policy makers. I am not entirely deprived of the Internet; this is
just a severe diet, with strict rationing. True, technologies are the
greatest things in the world, but they have way too monstrous side
effects — and ones rarely seen ahead of time. And since spending time
in the silence of my library, with little informational pollution, I
can feel harmony with my genes; I feel I am growing again.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

JONAS MEKAS
Film-Maker, Critic; Co-founder, Film-Makers' Cooperative, Filmmaker’s
Cinematheque, Anthology Film Archives

I AM NOT EXACTLY A THINKING PERSON — I AM A POET

I am a farmer boy. When I grew up, there was only one radio in our
entire village of twenty families. And, of course, no TV, no telephone
and no electricity. I saw my first movie when I was fourteen.

In New York, in 1949, I fell in love with cinema. In 1989 I switched
to video. In 2003 I embraced computer/Internet technologies.

I am telling you this to indicate that my thinking is now only
entering the Internet Nation. It's still in its infancy, I am not
really thinking yet Internet way — I am only babbling.

But I can tell you that it has already affected the content, form and
the working procedures of everything that I do. It's entering my mind
secretly, indirectly.

In 2007 I did a project, 365 Day Project. I put on Internet one short
film every day. In cinema, when I was making my films, it was very
abstract. I could not think about the audience. I knew the film will
be placed in a film distribution center and eventually someone will
look at it. Now, in my 365 Day Project I knew that later, same day, I
will put it on Internet and within minutes it will be seen by all my
friends, and strangers too, all over the world. So that I felt like I
was conversing with them. It's intimate. It's poetic. I am not
thinking anymore about problems of distribution. I am just exchanging
my work with some friends. Like being part of a family. I like that.
It makes for a different state of mind. If a state of mind has
anything or nothing to do with thinking, that's unimportant to me. I
am not exactly a thinking person. I am a poet.

I would like to add one more note to what the Internet has done to me.
And that is, I began paying more attention to everything that the
Internet seems to be eliminating.Books especially. But also nature. In
short: the more it all expands into the virtual reality the more I
feel a need to love and protect the actual reality. Not because of
sentimental reasons, no. I do that from a very real, practical ,
almost a survival need: from my knowledge that I would lose a very
essential part of myself by losing the actual reality, both cultural
and physical.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KEVIN KELLY
Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, New Rules for the New Economy

AN INTERMEDIA WITH 2 BILLION SCREENS PEERING INTO IT

We already know that our use of technology changes how our brains
work. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that, once acquired,
change the way in which the brain processes information. When
psychologists use neuroimaging technology, like MRI, to compare the
brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many
differences, and not just when the subjects are reading.

Researcher Alexandre Castro-Caldas discovered that processing between
the hemispheres of the brain was different between those who could
read and those who could not. A key part of the corpus callosum was
thicker in literates, and "the occipital lobe processed information
more slowly in individuals who learned to read as adults compared to
those who learned at the usual age." Psychologists Ostrosky-Solis,
Garcia and Perez tested literates and illiterates with a battery of
cognitive tests while measuring their brain waves and concluded that
"the acquisition of reading and writing skills has changed the brain
organization of cognitive activity in general is not only in language
but also in visual perception, logical reasoning, remembering
strategies, and formal operational thinking."

If alphabetic literacy can change how we think, imagine how Internet
literacy and 10 hours per day in front of one kind of screen or
another is changing our brains. The first generation to grow up screen
literate is just reaching adulthood so we don't have any scientific
studies of the full consequence of ubiquitous connectivity, but I have
a few hunches based on my own behavior.

When I do long division or even multiplication I don't try to remember
the intermediate numbers. Long ago I learned to write them down.
Because of paper and pencil I am "smarter" in arithmetic. In a
similar manner I now no longer to try remember facts, or even where I
found the facts. I have learned to summon them on the Internet.
Because the Internet is my new pencil and paper, I am "smarter" in
factuality.

But my knowledge is now more fragile. For every accepted piece of
knowledge I find, there is within easy reach someone who challenges
the fact. Every fact has its anti-fact. The Internet's extreme
hyperlinking highlights those anti-facts as brightly as the facts.
Some anti-facts are silly, some borderline, and some valid. You can't
rely on experts to sort them out because for every expert there is an
equal and countervailing anti-expert. Thus anything I learn is subject
to erosion by these ubiquitous anti-factors.

My certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than importing
authority, I am reduced to creating my own certainty — not just about
things I care about — but about anything I touch, including areas
about which I can't possibly have any direct knowledge . That means
that in general I assume more and more that what I know is wrong. We
might consider this state perfect for science but it also means that I
am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons.
Nonetheless, the embrace of uncertainty is one way my thinking has
changed.

Uncertainty is a kind of liquidity. I think my thinking has become
more liquid. It is less fixed, as text in a book might be, and more
fluid, as say text in Wikipedia might be. My opinions shift more. My
interests rise and fall more quickly. I am less interested in Truth,
with a capital T, and more interested in truths, plural. I feel the
subjective has an important role in assembling the objective from many
data points. The incremental plodding progress of imperfect science
seems the only way to know anything.

While hooked into the network of networks I feel like I am a network
myself, trying to achieve reliability from unreliable parts. And in my
quest to assemble truths from half-truths, non-truths, and some other
truths scattered in the flux (this creation of the known is now our
job and not the job of authorities), I find my mind attracted to fluid
ways of thinking (scenarios, provisional belief) and fluid media like
mashups, twitter, and search. But as I flow through this slippery Web
of ideas, it often feels like a waking dream.

We don't really know what dreams are for, only that they satisfy some
fundamental need. Someone watching me surf the Web, as I jump from one
suggested link to another, would see a day-dream. Today, I was in a
crowd of people who watched a barefoot man eat dirt, then the face of
a boy who was singing began to melt, then Santa burned a Christmas
tree, then I was floating inside mud house on the very tippy top of
the world, then Celtic knots untied themselves, then a guy told me the
formula for making clear glass, then I was watching myself, back in
high school, riding a bicycle. And that was just the first few minutes
of my day on the Web this morning. The trance-like state we fall into
while following the undirected path of links may be a terrible waste
of time, or like dreams, it might be a productive waste of time.
Perhaps we are tapping into our collective unconscious in a way
watching the directed stream of TV, radio and newspapers could not.
Maybe click-dreaming is a way for all of us to have the same dream,
independent of what we click on.

This waking dream we call the Internet also blurs the difference
between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more
simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing
online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms
marks all that is wrong with the Internet: It is the high-priced
waster of time. It breeds trifles. On the contrary, I cherish a good
wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity, but more
importantly I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking
hard and thinking playfully, is one the greatest things the Internet
has done.

In fact the propensity of the Internet to diminish our attention is
overrated. I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can
command the full attention of my over-educated mind. And not just me;
everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny, interruptions
of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the
culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling larger works into
minor snippets for sale. Music albums are chopped up and sold as
songs; movies become trailers, or even smaller video snips. (I find
that many trailers really are better than their movie.) Newspapers
become twitter posts. Scientific papers are served up in snippets on
Google. I happily swim in this rising ocean of fragments.

While I rush into the Net to hunt for these tidbits, or to surf on its
lucid dream, I've noticed a different approach to my thinking. My
thinking is more active, less contemplative. Rather than begin a
question or hunch by ruminating aimlessly in my mind, nourished only
by my ignorance, I start doing things. I immediately, instantly go.

I go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting to data,
leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail, a start of making
something mine. I don't wait. Don't have to wait. I act on ideas first
now instead of thinking on them. For some folks, this is the worst
of the Net — the loss of contemplation. Others feel that all this
frothy activity is simply stupid busy work, or spinning of wheels, or
illusionary action. I think to myself, compared to what?

Compared to the passive consumption of TV or sucking up bully
newspapers, or of merely sitting at home going in circles musing about
stuff in my head without any new inputs, I find myself much more
productive by acting first. The emergence of blogs and Wikipedia are
expressions of this same impulse, to act (write) first and think
(filter) later. I have a picture of the hundreds of millions people
online at this very minute. To my eye they are not wasting time with
silly associative links, but are engaged in a more productive way of
thinking then the equivalent hundred of millions people were 50 years
ago.

This approach does encourage tiny bits, but surprisingly at the very
same time, it also allows us to give more attention to works that are
far more complex, bigger, and more complicated than ever before. These
new creations contain more data, require more attention over longer
periods; and these works are more successful as the Internet expands.
This parallel trend is less visible at first because of a common short
sightedness that equates the Internet with text.

To a first approximation the Internet is words on a screen — Google,
papers, blogs. But this first glance ignores the vastly larger
underbelly of the Internet — moving images on a screen. People (and
not just young kids) no longer go to books and text first. If people
have a question they (myself included) head first for YouTube. For fun
we go to online massive games, or catch streaming movies, including
factual videos (documentaries are in a renaissance). New visual media
are stampeding onto the Nets. This is where the Internet's center of
attention lies, not in text alone. Because of online fans, and
streaming on demand, and rewinding at will, and all the other liquid
abilities of the Internet, directors started creating movies that were
more than 100 hours long.

These vast epics like Lost and The Wire had multiple interweaving plot
lines, multiple protagonists, an incredible depth of characters and
demanded sustained attention that was not only beyond previous TV and
90-minute movies, but would have shocked Dickens and other novelists
of yore. They would marvel: "You mean they could follow all that, and
then want more? Over how many years?" I would never have believed
myself capable of enjoying such complicated stories, or caring about
them to put in the time. My attention has grown. In a similar way the
depth, complexity and demands of games can equal these marathon
movies, or any great book.

But the most important way the Internet has changed the direction of
my attention, and thus my thinking, is that it has become one thing.
It may look like I am spending endless nano-seconds on a series of
tweets, and endless microseconds surfing between Web pages, or
wandering between channels, and hovering only mere minutes on one book
snippet after another; but in reality I am spending 10 hours a day
paying attention to the Internet. I return to it after a few minutes,
day after day, with essentially my full-time attention. As do you.

We are developing an intense, sustained conversation with this large
thing. The fact that it is made up of a million loosely connected
pieces is distracting us. The producers of Websites, and the hordes of
commenters online, and the movie moguls reluctantly letting us stream
their movies, don't believe they are mere pixels in a big global show,
but they are. It is one thing now, an intermedia with 2 billion
screens peering into it. The whole ball of connections — including all
its books, all its pages, all its tweets, all its movies, all its
games, all its posts, all its streams — is like one vast global book
(or movie, etc.), and we are only beginning to learn how to read it.
Knowing that this large thing is there, and that I am in constant
communication with it, has changed how I think.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GEORGE DYSON
Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines

KAYAKS vs CANOES

In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding.
The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren,
treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal
frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their
dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting
entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was
nothing left but a canoe.

The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results — maximum boat /
minimum material — by opposite means. The flood of information
unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We
used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of
information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we
have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary
information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.

I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available
stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don't
will be left paddling logs, not canoes.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BRIAN ENO
Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Cold Play, Talking Heads,
Paul Simon; Recording Artist

THE 'AUTHENTIC' HAS REPLACED THE REPRODUCIBLE

I notice that some radical social experiments which would have seemed
Utopian to even the most idealistic anarchist 50 years ago are now
working smoothly and without much fuss. Among these are open source
development, shareware and freeware, Wikipedia, MoveOn, and UK
Citizens Online Democracy.

I notice that the Net didn't free the world in quite the way we
expected — repressive regimes can shut it down, and liberal ones can
use it as a propaganda tool. On the upside, I notice that the variable
trustworthiness of the Net has made people more sceptical about the
information they get from all other media.

I notice that I now digest my knowledge as a patchwork drawn from a
wider range of sources than I used to. I notice too that I am less
inclined to look for joined-up finished narratives and more inclined
to make my own collage from what I can find. I notice that I read
books more cursorily — scanning them in the same way that I scan the
Net — 'bookmarking' them.

I notice that the turn-of-the-century dream of Professor Darryl Macer
to make a map of all the world's concepts is coming true autonomously
— in the form of the Net.

I notice that I correspond with more people but at less depth. I
notice that it is possible to have intimate relationships that exist
only on the Net — that have little or no physical component. I notice
that it is even possible to engage in complex social projects — such
as making music — without ever meeting your collaborators. I am
unconvinced of the value of these.

I notice that the idea of 'community' has changed — whereas that term
used to connote some sort of physical and geographical connectedness
between people, it can now mean 'the exercise of any shared interest'.
I notice that I now belong to hundreds of communities — the community
of people interested in active democracy, the community of people
interested in synthesizers, in climate change, in Tommy Cooper jokes,
in copyright law, in acapella singing, in loudspeakers, in pragmatist
philosophy, in evolution theory, and so on.

I notice that the desire for community is sufficiently strong for
millions of people to belong to entirely fictional communities such as
Second Life and World of Warcraft. I worry that this may be at the
expense of First Life.

I notice that more of my time is spent in words and language — because
that is the currency of the Net — than it was before. My notebooks
take longer to fill. I notice that I mourn the passing of the fax
machine, a more personal communication tool than email because it
allowed the use of drawing and handwriting. I notice that my mind has
reset to being primarily linguistic rather than, for example, visual.

I notice that the idea of 'expert' has changed. An expert used to be
'somebody with access to special information'. Now, since so much
information is equally available to everyone, the idea of 'expert'
becomes 'somebody with a better way of interpreting'. Judgement has
replaced access.

I notice that I have become a slave to connectedness — that I check my
email several times a day, that I worry about the heap of unsolicited
and unanswered mail in my inbox. I notice that I find it hard to get a
whole morning of uninterrupted thinking. I notice that I am expected
to answer emails immediately, and that it is difficult not to. I
notice that as a result I am more impulsive.

I notice that I more often give money in response to appeals made on
the Net. I notice that 'memes' can now spread like virulent infections
through the vector of the Net, and that this isn't always good.

I notice that I sometimes sign petitions about things I don't really
understand because it is easy. I assume that this kind of
irresponsibility is widespread.

I notice that everything the Net displaces reappears somewhere else in
a modified form. For example, musicians used to tour to promote their
records, but, since records stopped making much money due to illegal
downloads, they now make records to promote their tours. Bookstores
with staff who know about books and record stores with staff who know
about music are becoming more common.

I notice that, as the Net provides free or cheap versions of things,
'the authentic experience' — the singular experience enjoyed without
mediation — becomes more valuable. I notice that more attention is
given by creators to the aspects of their work that can't be
duplicated. The 'authentic' has replaced the reproducible.

I notice that almost all of us haven't thought about the chaos that
would ensue if the Net collapsed.

I notice that my daily life has been changed more by my mobile phone
than by the Internet.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MARISSA MAYER
Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, Google

IT'S NOT WHAT YOU KNOW, IT'S WHAT YOU CAN FIND OUT

It's not what you know, it's what you can find out. The Internet has
put at the forefront resourcefulness and critical-thinking and
relegated memorization of rote facts to mental exercise or enjoyment.
Because of the abundance of information and this new emphasis on
resourcefulness, the Internet creates a sense that anything is
knowable or findable — as long as you can construct the right search,
find the right tool, or connect to the right people. The Internet
empowers better decision-making and a more efficient use of time.

Simultaneously, it also leads to a sense of frustration when the
information doesn't exist online. What do you mean that the store
hours aren't anywhere? Why can't I see a particular page of this book?
And, if not verbatim, no one has quoted it even in part? What do you
mean that page isn't available? Page not found?

The Internet can facilitate an incredible persistence and availability
of information, but given the Internet's adolescence, all of the
information simply isn't there yet. I find that in some ways my mind
has evolved to this new way of the thinking, relying on the
information's existence and availability, so much so that it's almost
impossible to conclude that the information isn't findable because it
just isn't online.

The Web has also enabled amazing dynamic visualizations, where an
ideal presentation of information is constructed — a table of
comparisons or a data-enhanced map, for example. These visualizations
— be it news from around the world displayed on a globe or a sortable
table of airfares — can greatly enhance our understanding of the world
or our sense of opportunity. We can understand in an instant what
would have taken months to create just a few short years ago. Yet, the
Internet's lack of structure means that it is not possible to
construct these types of visualizations over any or all data. To
achieve true automated, general understanding and visualization, we
will need much better machine learning, entity extraction, and
semantics capable of operating at vast scale.

On that note — and in terms of future Internet innovation, the
important question may not be how the Internet is changing how we
think but instead how the Internet is teaching itself to think.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MARTIN REES
President, The Royal Society; Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics;
Master, Trinity College, University of Cambridge; Author, Our Final
Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival

A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

In 2002, three Indian mathematicians (Manindra Agrewal, and his two
students Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena) invented a faster algorithm
for factoring large numbers — an advance that could be crucial for
code-breaking. They posted their results on the Web. Such was the
interest that within just a day, 20000 people had downloaded the work,
which became the topic of hastily-convened discussions in many centres
of mathematical research around the world.

This episode — offering instant global recognition to two young Indian
students — offers a stark contrast with the struggles of a young
Indian genius a hundred years ago. Srinivasa Ramanujan, a clerk in
Bombay, mailed long screeds of of mathematical formulae to G H Hardy,
a professor at Trinity College, Cambridge. Fortunately, Hardy had the
percipience to recognise that Ramanujan was not the typical green-ink
scribbler who finds numerical patterns in the bible or the pyramids,
but that his writings betrayed preternatural insight. Hardy arranged
for Ramanujan to come to Cambridge, and did all he could to foster his
genius — sadly, however, culture shock and poor health led him to an
early death.

The Internet enables far wider participation in front-line science; it
levels the playing field between researchers in major centres and
those in relative isolation, hitherto handicapped by inefficient
communication. It has transformed the way science is communicated and
debated. More fundamentally, it changes how research is done, what
might be discovered, and how students learn.

And it allows new styles of research. For example, in the old days,
astronomical information, even if in principle publicly available, was
stored on delicate photographic plates: these were not easily
accessible, and tiresome to analyse. Now, such data (and, likewise,
large datasets in genetics or particle physics) can be accessed and
downloaded anywhere. Experiments, and natural events such as tropical
storms or the impact of a comet on Jupiter, can be followed in real
time by anyone who is interested. And the power of huge computing
networks can be deployed on large data sets.

Indeed, scientific discoveries will increasingly be made by 'brute
force' rather than by insight. IBM's 'Deep Blue' beat Kasparov not by
thinking like him, but by exploiting its speed to explore a huge
variety of options. There are some high-priority scientific quests —
for instance, the recipe for a room-temperature superconductor, or the
identification of key steps in the origin of life — which may yield
most readily neither to insight nor to experiment, but to exhaustive
computational searches.

Paul Ginsparg's arXiv.org archive transformed the literature of
physics, establishing a new model for communication over the whole of
science. Far fewer people today read traditional journals. These have
so far survived as guarantors of quality. But even this role may soon
be trumped by a more informal system of quality control, signaled by
the approbation of discerning readers (by analogy with the grading of
restaurants by gastronomic critics), by blogs, or by Amazon-style
reviews.

Clustering of experts in actual institutions will continue, for the
same reason that high-tech expertise congregates in Silicon Valley
and elsewhere. But the actual progress of science will be driven by
ever more immersive technology where propinquity is irrelevant.
Traditional universities will survive insofar as they offer mentoring
and personal contact to their students. But it's less clear that there
will be a future for the 'mass university' where the students are
offered little more than a passive role in lectures (generally of
mediocre quality) with minimal feedback. Instead, the Internet will
offer access to outstanding lectures — and in return will offer the
star lecturers (and perhaps the best classroom teachers too) a
potentially global reach.

And it's not just students, but those at the end of their career,
whose lives the IInternet can transformatively enhance. We oldies, as
we become less mobile, will be able to immerse ourselves — right up to
until the final switch-off, or until we lose our wits completely — in
an ever more sophisticated cyber-world allowing virtual travel and
continuing engagement with the world.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ANDRIAN KREYE
Editor, The Feuilleton (Arts and Essays), of the German Daily
Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich

THE GREATEST OF ALL TRAITS: THE INTERNET HAS BECOME INHERENTLY BORING

I think faster now. The Internet has somewhat freed me — of some of
20th century's burdens. The burden of commuting. The burden of
coordinating communication. The burden of traditional literacy. I
don't think the Internet would be of much use, if hadn't carried those
burdens to excess all through my life. If speeding up thinking
continually constitutes changing the way I think though, the Internet
has done a marvelous job.

I wasn't an early adaptor, but the process started early. I didn't
quite understand yet what would come upon us, when Marvin Minsky told
me one afternoon in 1989 at MIT's Media Lab the most important trait
of a computer wouldn't be it's power, but what it would be connected
to. A couple of years later I stumbled upon the cyberpunk scene in San
Francisco. People were popping smart drugs (which didn't do anything),
Timothy Leary declared virtual reality the next psychedelics (which
never panned out), Todd Rundgren warned of a coming overabundance of
creative work without a parallel rise in great ideas (which is now
reflected in the laments about the rise of the amateur). It was still
the old underground running the new emerging culture. This new culture
was driven by thought rather than art though. It's also where I met
Cliff Figallo who ran a virtual community called The Well. He
introduced me to John Perry Barlow who had just started a foundation
called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The name said it all. There
was a new frontier.

It would still take me a few more years to grasp. One stifling evening
in a rented apartment in downtown Dakar my photographer and me
disassembled a phone line and a modem to circumvent some incompatible
jacks and to get our laptop to dial up some node in Paris. It probably
saved us a good week of research in the field. Now my thinking started
to take on the speed I had sensed in Boston and San Francisco.
Continually freeing me of the aforementioned burdens, it has allowed
me to focus even more on the tasks expected of me as a journalist —
find context, meaning and a way to communicate complex topics in the
simplest of ways.

One important development that has allowed this to happen is that the
possibly greatest of all traits the Internet has developed over the
past few years is that it has become inherently boring. Gone are the
adventurous days of using a pocket knife to log onto Paris from
Africa. Even in remote place of this planet logging onto the Net means
merely turning on your machine. This paradigm reigns all through the
Web. Twitter is one of the simplest Internet applications ever
developed. Still it has sped up my thinking in ever more ways.
Facebook in itself is dull, but it has created new networks not
possible before. Integrating all media into a blog has become so easy,
grammar school kids can do it, so that freeform forum has become a
great place to test out new possibilities. I don't think about the
Internet anymore. I just use it.

All this might not constitute a change in thinking though. I haven't
changed my mind or my convictions because of the Internet. I haven't
had any epiphanies while sitting in front of a screen. The Internet so
far has not given me no memorable experiences, although it might have
helped to usher some along. It has always been people, places and
experiences that have changed the way I think and provided me with a
wide variety of memorable experiences.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHILIP CAMPBELL
Editor-in Chief, Nature

NIGHT-TIME IDEAS

For better or worse, the Internet is changing when I think —
night-time ideas can be instantly acted on. But much more importantly,
the Internet has immeasurably supported my breadth of consideration
and enhanced my speed of access to relevant stuff. Frustrations arise,
above all, where these are constrained — and there's a rub.

We are in sight of technologies that can truly supersede paper,
retaining the portability, convenience and format variety of that
medium. Instant payment for added-value content will become easier
and, indeed, will be taken for granted in many contexts.

But finding the stuff will remain a challenge. Brands, both
publishers' and others', if deployed in a user-friendly way, will by
their nature assist those seeking particular types of content. But
content within established brands is far from an adequate
representation of what matters, and that's why robust and inclusive
indexing systems are so important.

I remain uneasy that biologists worldwide are so dependent on a
literature-indexing system wholly funded by US tax-payers: PubMed.
Nevertheless, it's extraordinarily valuable, and works in the
interests not only of researchers but also publishers by making their
work accessible without undermining their business models.

I emphasise that last point with good reason. One of the worst (ie
self-defeatingly short-sighted) acts of 'my' industry occurred in the
early 2000s. Congress, lobbied by publishers, and seemingly ignorant
of the proven virtues of PubMed, rejected support for an equivalent
search infrastructure PubSCIENCE, established by the US Department of
Energy as an index for physical sciences and energy research. The
lobbyists argued, wrong-headedly, that it competed with private sector
databases. It was abandoned in 2002. Publishers have lost
opportunities as a result, as has everyone else. Energy research,
after all, has never been more urgent nor more in the US's and world's
public interest.

PubMed imposes overly conservative restrictions on what it will index,
but is a beacon nevertheless. Anyone in the natural sciences who, like
me, has taken an active interest in the social sciences knows how
hopelessly unfindable by comparison is that literature, distributed as
it is amongst books, reports and unindexed journals. Google Scholar is
in some ways valuable, providing access also to some "grey"
literatures, but its algorithms are a law unto themselves and, in my
experience, miss some of the literature. And so often the books and
reports are themselves difficult to obtain.

There are foundations and other funders potentially more enlightened
than Congress when it comes to supporting literature digitization and
indexing. And universities are developing online repositories of their
outputs, though with limited success.

Whatever works! Those wishing to promote the visibility and, dare one
say, usefulness of their own work and of their disciplines should
hotly pursue online availability of all types of substantive texts
and, crucially, inclusive indexing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HOWARD RHEINGOLD
Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs

ATTENTION IS THE FUNDAMENTAL LITERACY

Digital media and networks can only empower the people who learn how
to use them — and pose dangers to those who don't know what they are
doing. Yes, it's easy to drift into distraction, fall for
misinformation, allow attention to fragment rather than focus, but
those mental temptations pose dangers only for the untrained mind.
Learning the mental discipline to use thinking tools without losing
focus is one of the prices I am glad to pay to gain what the Web has
to offer.

Those people who do not gain fundamental literacies of attention, crap
detection, participation, collaboration, and network awareness are in
danger of all the pitfalls critics point out — shallowness, credulity,
distraction, alienation, addiction. I worry about the billions of
people who are gaining access to the Net without the slightest clue
about how to find knowledge and verify it for accuracy, how to
advocate and participate rather than passively consume, how to
discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu, how and why to
use those privacy protections that remain available in an increasingly
intrusive environment.

I have concluded that the realities of my own life as a professional
writer — if the words didn't go out, the money didn't come in — drove
me to evolve a set of methods and disciplines. I know that others have
mastered far beyond my own practice the mental habits that I've
stumbled upon, and I suspect that learning these skills is less
difficult than learning long division. I urge researchers and
educators to look more systematically where I'm pointing.

When I started out as a freelance writer in the 1970s, my most
important tools were a library card, a typewriter, a notebook, and a
telephone. In the early 1980s, I became interested in the people at
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center who were using computers to edit text
without physically cutting, pasting, and retyping pages.

Through PARC I discovered Douglas Engelbart, who had spent the first
decade of his career trying to convince somebody, anybody, that using
computers to augment human intellect was not a crazy idea. Engelbart
set out in the early 1960s to demonstrate that computers could be used
to automate low-level cognitive support tasks like cutting, pasting,
revising text, and also to enable intellectual tools like the
hyperlink that weren't possible with Gutenberg-era technology.

He was convinced that this new way to use computers could lead to
"increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem
situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to
derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is
taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension,
better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of
comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier
solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions
to problems that before seemed insoluble." Important caveats and
unpredicted side-effects notwithstanding, Engelbart's forecasts have
come to pass in ways that surprised him. What did not surprise him was
the importance of both the know-how and how-to-know that unlock the
opportunities afforded by augmentation technology.

From the beginning, Engelbart emphasized that the hardware and
software created at his Stanford Research Institute laboratory, from
the mouse to the hyperlink to the word processor, were part of a
system that included "humans, language, artifacts, methodology and
training." Long before the Web came along, Engelbart was frustrated
that so much progress had been made in the capabilities of the
artifacts, but so little study had been devoted to advancing the
language, methodology and training — the literacies that necessarily
accompany the technical capabilities

Attention is the fundamental literacy. Every second I spend online, I
make decisions about where to spend my attention. Should I devote any
mindshare at all to this comment or that headline? — a question I need
to answer each time an attractive link catches my eye. Simply becoming
aware of the fact that life online requires this kind of
decision-making was my first step in learning to tune a fundamental
filter on what I allow into my head — a filter that is under my
control only if I practice controlling it. The second level of
decision-making is whether I want to open a tab on my browser because
I decided that this item will be worth my time tomorrow. The third
decision: do I bookmark this site because I am interested in the
subject and might want to reference it at some unspecified future
time? Online attention-taming begins with what meditators call
"mindfulness" — the simple, self-influencing awareness of how
attention wanders.

Life online is not solitary. It's social. When I tag and bookmark a
Website, a video, an image, I make my decisions visible to others. I
take advantage of similar knowledge curation undertaken by others when
I start learning a topic by exploring bookmarks, find an image to
communicate an idea by searching for a tag. Knowledge sharing and
collective action involve collaborative literacies.

Crap detection — Hemingway's name for what digital librarians call
credibility assessment — is another essential literacy. If all
schoolchildren could learn one skill before they go online for the
first time, I think it should be the ability to find the answer to any
question and the skills necessary to determine whether the answer is
accurate or not.

Network awareness, from the strength of weak ties and the nature of
small-world networks to the power of publics and the how and why of
changing Facebook privacy settings, would be the next literacy I would
teach, after crap detection. Networks aren't magic, and knowing the
principles by which they operate confers power on the knowledgeable.
How could people NOT use the Internet in muddled, frazzled, fractured
ways when hardly anybody instructs anybody else about how to use the
Net salubriously? It is inevitable that people will use the Net in
ways that influence how they think and what they think.

It is not inevitable that these influences will be destructive. The
health of the online commons will depend on whether more than a tiny
minority of Net users become literate Netizens.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ESTHER DYSON
Catalyst, Information Technology Startups, EDventure Holdings; Former
Chariman,Electronic Frontier Foundation and ICANN; Author: Release 2.1

INFORMATION METABOLISM

I love the Internet. It's a great tool precisely because it is so
content — and value-free. Anyone can use it for his own purposes, good
or bad, big or small, trivial or important. It impartially transmits
all kinds of content, one-way or two-way or broadcast, public or
private, text or video or sound or data.

But it does have one overwhelming feature: immediacy. (And when the
immediacy is ruptured, its users gnash their teeth.) That immediacy is
seductive: You can get instant answers, instant responses. If you're
lonely, you can go online and find someone to chat with. If you want
business, you can send out an e-mail blast and get at least a few
responses — a .002 response rate means 200 messages back (including
some hate mail) for a small list. If you want to do good, there are
thousands of good causes competing for your attention at the click of
your mouse.

But sometimes I think much of what we get on the Internet is empty
calories. It's sugar — short videos, pokes from friends, blog posts,
Twitter posts (even blogs seem longwinded now), pop-ups and
visualizations…Sugar is so much easier to digest, so enticing…and
ultimately, it leaves us hungrier than before.

Worse than that, over a long period, many of us are genetically
disposed to lose our capability to digest sugar if we consume too much
of it. It makes us sick long-term, as well as giving us indigestion
and hypoglycemic fits. Could that be true of information sugar as
well? Will we become allergic to it even as we crave it? And what will
serve as information insulin?

In the spirit of brevity if not immediacy, I leave it to the reader to
ponder these questions.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LARRY SANGER
Co-founder of Wikipedia and Citizendium

THE UN-FOCUSING, DE-LIBERATING EFFECTS OF JOINING THE HIVE MIND

The instant availability of an ocean of information has been an
epoch-making boon to humanity. But has the resulting information
overload also deeply changed how we think? Has it changed the nature
of the self? Has it even — as some have suggested — radically altered
the relationship of the individual and society? These are important
philosophical questions, but vague and slippery, and I hope to clarify
them.

The Internet is changing how we think, it is suggested. But how is it,
precisely? One central feature of the "new mind" is that it is spread
too thin. But what does that mean?

In functional terms, being spread too thin means we have too many
Websites to visit, we get too many messages, and too much is
"happening" online and in other media that we feel compelled take on
board. Many of us lack effective strategies for organizing our time in
the face of this onslaught. This makes us constantly distracted and
unfocused, and less able to perform heavy intellectual tasks. Among
other things, or so some have confessed, we cannot focus long enough
to read whole books. We feel unmoored and we flow along helplessly
wherever the fast-moving digital flood carries us.

We do? Well — some of us do, evidently.

Some observers speak of "where we are going," or of how "our minds"
are being changed by information overload, apparently despite
ourselves. Their discussions make erstwhile free agents mere subjects
of powerful new forces, and the only question is where those forces
are taking us. I don't share the assumption here. When I read the
title of Nick Carr's essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" I
immediately thought, "Speak for yourself." It seems to me that in
discussions like Carr's, it is assumed that intellectual control has
already been ceded — but that strikes me as being a cause, not a
symptom, of the problem Carr bemoans. After all, the exercise of
freedom requires focus and attention, and the ur-event of the will is
precisely focus itself. Carr unwittingly confessed for too many of us
a moral failing, a vice; the old name for it is intemperance. (In the
older, broader sense, contrasted with sophrosyne, moderation or
self-control.) And, as with so much of vice, we want to blame it on
anything but ourselves.

Is it really true that we no longer have any choice but to be
intemperate in how we spend our time, in the face of the temptations
and shrill demands of networked digital media? New media are not that
powerful. We still retain free will, which is the ability to focus,
deliberate, and act on the results of our own deliberations. If we
want to spend hours reading books, we still possess that freedom. Only
philosophical argument could establish that information overload has
deprived us of our agency. The claim at root is philosophical, not
empirical.

My interlocutors might cleverly reply that we now, in the age of
Facebook and Wikipedia, do still deliberate, but collectively. In
other words, for example, we vote stuff up or down on Digg,
del.icio.us, and Slashdot, and then we might feel ourselves obligated
— if we're participating as true believers — to pay special attention
to the top-voted items. Similarly, we attempt to reach "consensus" on
Wikipedia, and — again, if participating as true believers — endorse
the end result as credible. To the extent that our time is thus
directed by social networks, engaged in collective deliberation, then
we are subjugated to a "collective will," something like Rousseau's
notion of a general will. To the extent that we plug in, we become
merely another part of the network. That, anyway, is how I would
reconstruct the collectivist-determinist position that is opposed to
my own individualist-libertarian one.

But we obviously have the freedom not to participate in such networks.
And we have the freedom to consume the output of such networks
selectively, and holding our noses — to participate, we needn't be
true believers. So it is very hard for me to take the "woe is us,
we're growing stupid and collectivized like sheep" narrative
seriously. If you feel yourself growing ovine, bleat for yourself.

I get the sense that many writers on these issues aren't much bothered
by the un-focusing, de-liberating effects of joining the Hive Mind.
Don Tapscott has suggested that the instant availability of
information means we don't have to "memorize" anything anymore — just
consult Google and Wikipedia, the brains of the Hive Mind. Clay Shirky
seems to believe that in the future we will be enculturated not by
reading dusty old books but in something like online fora, plugged
into the ephemera of a group mind, as it were. But surely, if we were
to act as either of these college teachers recommend, we'd become a
bunch of ignoramuses. Indeed, perhaps that's what social networks are
turning too many kids into, as Mark Bauerlein argues cogently in The
Dumbest Generation. (For the record, I've started homeschooling my own
little boy.)

The issues here are much older than the Internet. They echo the debate
between progressivism and traditionalism found in philosophy of
education: should children be educated primarily so as fit in well in
society, or should the focus be on training minds for critical
thinking and filling them with knowledge? For many decades before the
advent of the Internet, educational progressivists have insisted that,
in our rapidly changing world, knowing mere facts is not what is
important, because knowledge quickly becomes outdated; rather, being
able to collaborate and solve problems together is what is important.
Social networks have reinforced this ideology, by seeming to make
knowledge and judgment collective functions. But the progressivist
position on the importance of learning facts and training individual
judgment withers under scrutiny, and, pace Tapscott and Shirky, events
of the last decade have not made it more durable.

In sum, there are two basic issues here. Do we have any choice about
ceding control of the self to an increasingly compelling "Hive Mind"?
Yes. And should we cede such control, or instead strive, temperately,
to develop our own minds very well and direct our own attention
carefully? The answer, I think, is obvious.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GEORGE CHURCH
Professor, Harvard University, Director, Personal Genome Project.

SORRY, JOHN, NO TIME TO THINK ABOUT THE EDGE QUESTION

If time did permit, I'd begin with the "How" of "How is Internet
changing the way that we think?" Not "how much?" or "in what manner?",
but "for what purpose?" "To be, that is the question."

Does the Internet pose an existential risk to all known intelligence
in the universe or a path to survival? Yes; we see sea change from
I-Ching t...

Can zinc oxide in talcum powder spread over the penis help create erections for elderly men with fading sex power or libido?

2010-07-28T05:12:00.000-07:00

YES.

Doctors in Taiwan have established that baby powder containing zinc oxide, available from any general store, when placed on a man's penis stimulates the skin and therefore the nerves and blood beneath the skin and causes a natural and strong erection to occur. Wikipedia also states:
Zinc oxide can be used by elderly men with penile dysfunction to stimulate the skin of the penis and therefore cause an erection to occur. It is also widely used to treat a variety of other skin conditions, in products such as [[baby powder]] and [[barrier cream]]s to treat [[diaper rash]]es, [[calamine]] cream, anti-[[dandruff]] [[shampoo]]s, and [[antiseptic]] ointments.

For references or additional info, contact this blog in comments: this is is proven natural Viagra in powder form and it comes in baby powder containers. Really. Who knew?

Impotence (Erectile Dysfunction) Treatments - However, the cause is more usually lack of adequate penile blood supply as a ... Yohimbe Extract; Niacin; Epimedium; ''Avena sativa''; zinc oxide; maca; ...
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Invigorex Male Enhancement Supplement Overcomes Erectile Dysfunction - [ 翻 ]Erectile Dysfunction increases the risk of penile erection not occurring ... Zinc (as zinc oxide) - 7.5 mg: Oxides used to relax the smooth muscles of the ...

Brand: Johnson's

Located in: Baby and Children, Diapers and Bath, Bathing

Clinically proven mildness. 3 Way action protects, treats & soothes irritated skin. Johnson's baby powder with aloe & Vitamin E, medicated with zinc oxide, helps treat rashes and minor skin irritations.

Larry King on national television, makes anti-gay remarks, in public and gets away with it. Why can he do this?

2010-07-23T21:14:00.000-07:00

KING: He lives by himself?

MEDICO: Yeah.

KING: What is he going to do?

MEDICO: I'm not sure that he has decided yet. He's taking some classes. Some of them he likes and some he doesn't. French is definitely not up his alley.

KING: Do you think you two will ever be brother brothers? Real brothers?

A. KING: You never know what the future holds. I would hope so.

KING: Do you want that?

A. KING: It would be nice to connect with my family, all of them again.

KING: You've connected with your mother?

A. KING: I have. It's going well so far.

KING: You think they'll ever be brother brothers?

MEDICO: I do. I think as they move through their 20s, they'll find more in common. They'll both perhaps marry. They certainly both like girls.

KING: You do, huh?

A. KING: Yes.

KING: You're not going to have a problem in that department.

YOU ARE NOT GOING TO HAVE A PROBLEM IN THAT DEPARTMENT? THAT DEPARTMENT? WHICH DEPARTMENT,LARRY? MEN WHO LIKE MEN? IS THAT WRONG NOW? YOU CAN SAY THAT ON NATIONAL TV, LIKE A JOKE? WEIRD! OF COURSE, WE UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT, BUT STILL, "YOU'RE NOT GOING TO HAVE A PROBLEM IN THAT DEPARTMENT?" YOU REALLY SAID THAT, YET YOU COUNT MANY GAY MEN AND WOMEN AS YOUR FRIENDS, AT LEAST YOU SAY THAT. DO YOU ASK ELTON JOHN IF HE HAS A PROBLEM IN THAT DEPARTMENT? PROBLEM? LARRY, GET WITH THE PROGRAM! IT'S 2010!

A. KING: No.

Go vegetarian!

2010-07-23T04:36:00.000-07:00

Vegetarian Pamela Anderson is proving that all animals have the same parts and encouraging people to ditch meat. In this ad for PETA, she some skin and looks as if she's been tagged by a butcher, making it clear that humans and animals are composed of identical parts.

24/7 Ideas - WE THINK FOR YOU! (so you do not have to think at all)

2010-07-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

New symbol for rupee in India designed by D. Udaya Kumar

India has finally got a symbol for the Rupee and joined a select club of countries whose currencies have an unique identity.

The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved the design, which includes both the Devnagiri 'Ra' and the Roman capital 'R' and has two parallel lines running at the top. The parallel lines symbolise the equal to sign.

RELATED NEWSRupee to get a symbol today!

"With this India will join an elite group of countries which have a distinct currency symbol. It denotes the robustness of Indian economy. I will now hold up the design that was finally selected. This was sent in by Udaya Kumar," said Minister for Information and Broadcasting Ambika Soni in New Delhi.

She said that the Rupee symbol was a nice blend of modernity and Indian culture. The symbol selected has been designed by an Indian Institute of Technology postgraduate D Udaya Kumar and was selected from among five short listed symbols. Kumar, who is with the Department of Design at IIT Guwahati, explained thatthe design is based on the Indian Tricolour.

Click here to tell us your opinion on the rupee symbol

"My design is based on the Tricolour with two lines at the top and white space in between. I wanted the symbol for the Rupee to represent the Indian flag. It is a perfect blend of Indian and Roman letters: a capital 'R', and Devnagari 'Ra', which represent rupiya, to appeal to international and Indian audiences. After working onthe design for few months, I shortlisted eight to 10 designs and then refined them further till I got this one," said Kumar.

All new notes will now bear the symbol.

Dharmalingam Udaya Kumar won a nationwide contest run by the government to design a symbol for the Indian rupee. A symbol he designed, incorporating elements of Devanagari and Roman scripts, had been chosen to represent India’s growing economy and its currency. It would be incorporated in Unicode, computer keyboards will have a dedicated key for the symbol and it will come to be seen and recognised around the world. A designer gets to create a currency symbol just once in a nation’s life.

Born in Chennai on 10 October 1978, Kumar’s family hails from Thanjavur. The magnificent temples there must have had something to do with his decision to study architecture, which he pursued at Anna University in Chennai. Subsequently, he did his masters in architecture from IIT, Mumbai. When the industrial design centre in the campus started offering a PhD, Udaya Kumar enrolled, and started work on the evolution of the Tamil script,which dates back to 2nd century AD.

“I want to continue work on Tamil typography. I find our symbols have a very heavy western influence. I will do more work on Indian scripts,” he told ET. For the design, he took inspiration from the symbols of such currencies as Korea’s won, UK’s pound sterling, euro, lira, peso and others. “Thus it has a harmonious identity as far as international currency symbols are concerned and at the same time it has the Indian uniqueness,” he said about his winning design. Among the international currencies, he likes the Yen symbol as it best reflects the country. The 31-year-old bachelor worked as a senior designer for two years with speciality magazine publisher Infomedia.

Thomas McMahon on Polar Cities in our Future?

2009-09-14T22:28:00.001-07:00

cartoon by martytoons.com

The gulf stream is slowing, the artic is thawing, methane is being released in enormous quantities from the permafrost which is thawing in Siberia and now Alaska and the nothern reaches of Canada. Scientist are alarmed at the rate of change happining around the world and the Republican party is still worried about corporate profits instead of focusing on climate change legislation. Can you say catastrophic, you better because what is happining is we have reached a point of no return we just won't acknowledge it in terms of the earth is undergoing monumental changes that threaten the very existence of mankind. Our failure to act has caught up with us, I feel very sorry for future generations we have let them down in a bigger way than can ever be imagined.

thomas mcmahon
millis ma
tommic856@verizon.net

Model Polar City Living Pods for Summer 2012 Residency Camp on Climate Change and Global Warming

2009-08-10T00:54:00.000-07:00

Model Polar City Living Pod

Model Polar City Living Pods for Summer 2012 Residency Camp on Climate Change and Global Warming

Fundraising has begun. Volunteer interns to serve as residents of the first model polar city in the world are being recruited. This is for real.

ILLUSTRATION ABOVE by Jennifer C. Daniels, commissioned by Reynard Loki, titled "Underground Desert Living Unit"

m

2009-07-23T00:26:00.000-07:00

n

2009-07-21T08:12:00.000-07:00