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Javier E

Beyond Billboards - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...beyond-billboards.html

Christianity Christmas myth sin

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Sunday, December 12, 2010Sunday, December 12, 2010 Go Follow the Atlantic » atlanticPrintlayoutnavigation()Politics Presented ByBack to the Gold Standard? Joshua GreenSenate Dems Lose Vote on 'Don't Ask' RepealMegan Scully & Dan FriedmanA Primary Challenge to Obama? Marc Ambinder Business Presented byif (typeof window.dartOrd == 'undefined') {window.dartOrd = ('000000000' + Math.ceil(Math.random()*1000000000).toString()).slice(-9);}jsProperties = 'TheAtlanticOnline/channel_business;pos=navlogo;sz=88x31,215x64;tile=1';document.write('');if( $(".adNavlogo").html().search("grey.gif") != -1 ){$(".adNavlogo").hide();}Will the Economy Get Jobs for Christmas?Daniel Indiviglio27 Key Facts About US ExportsDerek ThompsonThe Last StimulusDerek Thompson Culture Presented ByThe 10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2010Eleanor Barkhorn and Kevin Fallon al
  • at the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.
dicindioha

cartoon.jpg (482×344) - 0 views

4.bp.blogspot.com/...cartoon.jpg

shared by dicindioha on 06 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • dicindioha on 06 Mar 17
     
    This cartoon sums up much of what we discuss in TOK. It's easier for us to want to accept the lie that doesn't affect our previous thoughts. The truth, if it's convenient, is not something we want to hear. It's scary to think we do this so much in our lives.
Javier E

Charlie Sykes on Where the Right Went Wrong - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...here-the-right-went-wrong.html

right epistemic media conformity polarization tribal conspiracy theory propaganda mainstream disinformation fake news

shared by Javier E on 19 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • t I have to admit that the campaign has made my decision easier. The conservative media is broken and the conservative movement deeply compromised.
  • Before this year, I thought I had a relatively solid grasp on what conservatism stood for and where it was going
  • I was under the impression that conservatives actually believed things about free trade, balanced budgets, character and respect for constitutional rights. Then along came this campaign.
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  • When I wrote in August 2015 that Mr. Trump was a cartoon version of every left-wing media stereotype of the reactionary, nativist, misogynist right, I thought that I was well within the mainstream of conservative thought — only to find conservative Trump critics denounced for apostasy by a right that decided that it was comfortable with embracing Trumpism.
  • relatively few of my listeners bought into the crude nativism Mr. Trump was selling at his rallies.
  • What they did buy into was the argument that this was a “binary choice.” No matter how bad Mr. Trump was, my listeners argued, he could not possibly be as bad as Mrs. Clinton. You simply cannot overstate this as a factor in the final outcome
  • Even among Republicans who had no illusions about Mr. Trump’s character or judgment, the demands of that tribal loyalty took precedence. To resist was an act of betrayal.
  • In this binary tribal world, where everything is at stake, everything is in play, there is no room for quibbles about character, or truth, or principles.
  • If everything — the Supreme Court, the fate of Western civilization, the survival of the planet — depends on tribal victory, then neither individuals nor ideas can be determinative.
  • As our politics have become more polarized, the essential loyalties shift from ideas, to parties, to tribes, to individuals. Nothing else ultimately matters.
  • For many listeners, nothing was worse than Hillary Clinton. Two decades of vilification had taken their toll: Listeners whom I knew to be decent, thoughtful individuals began forwarding stories with conspiracy theories about President Obama and Mrs. Clinton — that he was a secret Muslim, that she ran a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor. When I tried to point out that such stories were demonstrably false, they generally refused to accept evidence that came from outside their bubble. The echo chamber had morphed into a full-blown alternate reality silo of conspiracy theories, fake news and propaganda.
  • In this political universe, voters accept that they must tolerate bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity and cruelty, because the other side is always worse; the stakes are such that no qualms can get in the way of the greater cause.
  • When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show. One prominent G.O.P. activist sent out an email blast calling me a “Judas goat,” and calling for postelection retribution.
  • And then, there was social media. Unless you have experienced it, it’s difficult to describe the virulence of the Twitter storms that were unleashed on Trump skeptics. In my timelines, I found myself called a “cuckservative,” a favorite gibe of white nationalists; and someone Photoshopped my face into a gas chamber. Under the withering fire of the trolls, one conservative commentator and Republican political leader after another fell in line.
  • we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.
  • That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims. Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed or at least ignored
  • We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.
  • This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong.
Javier E

Emmy Noether, the Most Significant Mathematician You've Never Heard Of - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cian-youve-never-heard-of.html

math women conservation symmetry genius

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics
  • At Göttingen, she pursued her passion for mathematical invariance, the study of numbers that can be manipulated in various ways and still remain constant. In the relationship between a star and its planet, for example, the shape and radius of the planetary orbit may change, but the gravitational attraction conjoining one to the other remains the same — and there’s your invariance.
  • Noether’s theorem, an expression of the deep tie between the underlying geometry of the universe and the behavior of the mass and energy that call the universe home. What the revolutionary theorem says, in cartoon essence, is the following: Wherever you find some sort of symmetry in nature, some predictability or homogeneity of parts, you’ll find lurking in the background a corresponding conservation — of momentum, electric charge, energy or the like. If a bicycle wheel is radially symmetric, if you can spin it on its axis and it still looks the same in all directions, well, then, that symmetric translation must yield a corresponding conservation.
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  • Noether’s theorem shows that a symmetry of time — like the fact that whether you throw a ball in the air tomorrow or make the same toss next week will have no effect on the ball’s trajectory — is directly related to the conservation of energy, our old homily that energy can be neither created nor destroyed but merely changes form.
Javier E

How the Internet Gets Inside Us : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...110214crat_atlarge_gopnik

internet books cultural values effects social technology revolution consciousness cognitive

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • It isn’t just that we’ve lived one technological revolution among many; it’s that our technological revolution is the big social revolution that we live with
  • The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare.
  • Robert K. Logan’s “The Sixth Language,” begins with the claim that cognition is not a little processing program that takes place inside your head, Robby the Robot style. It is a constant flow of information, memory, plans, and physical movements, in which as much thinking goes on out there as in here. If television produced the global village, the Internet produces the global psyche: everyone keyed in like a neuron, so that to the eyes of a watching Martian we are really part of a single planetary brain. Contraptions don’t change consciousness; contraptions are part of consciousness.
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  • In a practical, immediate way, one sees the limits of the so-called “extended mind” clearly in the mob-made Wikipedia, the perfect product of that new vast, supersized cognition: when there’s easy agreement, it’s fine, and when there’s widespread disagreement on values or facts, as with, say, the origins of capitalism, it’s fine, too; you get both sides. The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information. Creationists crowd cyberspace every bit as effectively as evolutionists, and extend their minds just as fully. Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that.
  • “The medium does matter,” Carr has written. “As a technology, a book focuses our attention, isolates us from the myriad distractions that fill our everyday lives. A networked computer does precisely the opposite. It is designed to scatter our attention. . . . Knowing that the depth of our thought is tied directly to the intensity of our attentiveness, it’s hard not to conclude that as we adapt to the intellectual environment of the Net our thinking becomes shallower.”
  • when people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix.
  • The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965.
  • If all you have is a hammer, the saying goes, everything looks like a nail; and, if you think the world is broken, every machine looks like the hammer that broke it.
  • What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own.
  • Anyway, the crucial revolution was not of print but of paper: “During the later Middle Ages a staggering growth in the production of manuscripts, facilitated by the use of paper, accompanied a great expansion of readers outside the monastic and scholastic contexts.” For that matter, our minds were altered less by books than by index slips. Activities that seem quite twenty-first century, she shows, began when people cut and pasted from one manuscript to another; made aggregated news in compendiums; passed around précis. “Early modern finding devices” were forced into existence: lists of authorities, lists of headings.
  • The book index was the search engine of its era, and needed to be explained at length to puzzled researchers—as, for that matter, did the Hermione-like idea of “looking things up.” That uniquely evil and necessary thing the comprehensive review of many different books on a related subject, with the necessary oversimplification of their ideas that it demanded, was already around in 1500, and already being accused of missing all the points.
  • at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.
  • Blair argues that the sense of “information overload” was not the consequence of Gutenberg but already in place before printing began.
  • A social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them.
  • And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.
  • Now television is the harmless little fireplace over in the corner, where the family gathers to watch “Entourage.” TV isn’t just docile; it’s positively benevolent. This makes you think that what made television so evil back when it was evil was not its essence but its omnipresence. Once it is not everything, it can be merely something. The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user.
  • the Internet screen has always been like the palantír in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”—the “seeing stone” that lets the wizards see the entire world. Its gift is great; the wizard can see it all. Its risk is real: evil things will register more vividly than the great mass of dull good. The peril isn’t that users lose their knowledge of the world. It’s that they can lose all sense of proportion. You can come to think that the armies of Mordor are not just vast and scary, which they are, but limitless and undefeatable, which they aren’t.
jlessner

Why Save a Language? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...why-save-a-language.html

language Science knowledge education

shared by jlessner on 06 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • the looming extinction of most of the world’s 6,000 languages, a great many of which are spoken by small groups of indigenous people
  • Certainly, experiments do show that a language can have a fascinating effect on how its speakers think. Russian speakers are on average 124 milliseconds faster than English speakers at identifying when dark blue shades into light blue. A French person is a tad more likely than an Anglophone to imagine a table as having a high voice if it were a cartoon character, because the word is marked as feminine in his language.
  • In Mandarin Chinese, for example, you can express If you had seen my sister, you’d have known she was pregnant with the same sentence you would use to express the more basic If you see my sister, you know she’s pregnant.
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  • But if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?
  • First, a central aspect of any culture’s existence as a coherent entity is the fact of its having its own language, regardless of what the language happens to be like.
  • Yet because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community.
  • Second, languages are scientifically interesting even if they don’t index cultural traits. They offer variety equivalent to the diversity of the world’s fauna and flora.
  • Cultures, to be sure, show how we are different. Languages, however, are variations on a worldwide, cross-cultural perception of this thing called life.
Javier E

The Death of Adulthood in American Culture - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thood-in-american-culture.html

adult adolescence literature

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups.
  • , the journalist and critic Ruth Graham published a polemical essay in Slate lamenting the popularity of young-adult fiction among fully adult readers. Noting that nearly a third of Y.A. books were purchased by readers ages 30 to 44 (most of them presumably without teenage children of their own), Graham insisted that such grown-ups “should feel embarrassed about reading literature for children.”
  • In my main line of work as a film critic, I have watched over the past 15 years as the studios committed their vast financial and imaginative resources to the cultivation of franchises (some of them based on those same Y.A. novels) that advance an essentially juvenile vision of the world. Comic-book movies, family-friendly animated adventures, tales of adolescent heroism and comedies of arrested development do not only make up the commercial center of 21st-century Hollywood. They are its artistic heart.
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  • At sea or in the wilderness, these friends managed to escape both from the institutions of patriarchy and from the intimate authority of women, the mothers and wives who represent a check on male freedom.
  • What all of these shows grasp at, in one way or another, is that nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable.
  • From the start, American culture was notably resistant to the claims of parental authority and the imperatives of adulthood. Surveying the canon of American literature in his magisterial “Love and Death in the American Novel,” Leslie A. Fiedler suggested, more than half a century before Ruth Graham, that “the great works of American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s section of the library.”
  • “The typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat — anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and responsibility. One of the factors that determine theme and form in our great books is this strategy of evasion, this retreat to nature and childhood which makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly and infuriatingly ‘boyish.’ ”
  • What Fiedler notes, and what most readers of “Huckleberry Finn” will recognize, is Twain’s continual juxtaposition of Huck’s innocence and instinctual decency with the corruption and hypocrisy of the adult world.
  • we’ve also witnessed the erosion of traditional adulthood in any form, at least as it used to be portrayed in the formerly tried-and-true genres of the urban cop show, the living-room or workplace sitcom and the prime-time soap opera. Instead, we are now in the age of “Girls,” “Broad City,” “Masters of Sex” (a prehistory of the end of patriarchy), “Bob’s Burgers” (a loopy post-"Simpsons” family cartoon) and a flood of goofy, sweet, self-indulgent and obnoxious improv-based web videos.
  • we have a literature of boys’ adventures and female sentimentality. Or, to put it another way, all American fiction is young-adult fiction.
  • The bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll and the pouting screen rebels played by James Dean and Marlon Brando proved Fiedler’s point even as he was making it. So did Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty, Augie March and Rabbit Angstrom — a new crop of semi-antiheroes
  • We devolve from Lenny Bruce to Adam Sandler, from “Catch-22” to “The Hangover,” from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.”
  • Unlike the antiheroes of eras past, whose rebellion still accepted the fact of adulthood as its premise, the man-boys simply refused to grow up, and did so proudly. Their importation of adolescent and preadolescent attitudes into the fields of adult endeavor (see “Billy Madison,” “Knocked Up,” “Step Brothers,” “Dodgeball”) delivered a bracing jolt of subversion, at least on first viewing. Why should they listen to uptight bosses, stuck-up rich guys and other readily available symbols of settled male authority?
  • That was only half the story, though. As before, the rebellious animus of the disaffected man-child was directed not just against male authority but also against women. I
  • their refusal of maturity also invites some critical reflection about just what adulthood is supposed to mean. In the old, classic comedies of the studio era — the screwbally roller coasters of marriage and remarriage, with their dizzying verbiage and sly innuendo — adulthood was a fact. It was inconvertible and burdensome but also full of opportunity. You could drink, smoke, flirt and spend money.
  • The desire of the modern comic protagonist, meanwhile, is to wallow in his own immaturity, plumbing its depths and reveling in its pleasures.
Javier E

Why Silicon Valley can't fix itself | News | The Guardian - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...-cant-fix-itself-tech-humanism

culture social media technology design power health human nature inequality

shared by Javier E on 20 May 18 - No Cached
  • After decades of rarely apologising for anything, Silicon Valley suddenly seems to be apologising for everything. They are sorry about the trolls. They are sorry about the bots. They are sorry about the fake news and the Russians, and the cartoons that are terrifying your kids on YouTube. But they are especially sorry about our brains.
  • Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook – who was played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network – has publicly lamented the “unintended consequences” of the platform he helped create: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
  • Parker, Rosenstein and the other insiders now talking about the harms of smartphones and social media belong to an informal yet influential current of tech critics emerging within Silicon Valley. You could call them the “tech humanists”. Amid rising public concern about the power of the industry, they argue that the primary problem with its products is that they threaten our health and our humanity.
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  • It is clear that these products are designed to be maximally addictive, in order to harvest as much of our attention as they can. Tech humanists say this business model is both unhealthy and inhumane – that it damages our psychological well-being and conditions us to behave in ways that diminish our humanity
  • The main solution that they propose is better design. By redesigning technology to be less addictive and less manipulative, they believe we can make it healthier – we can realign technology with our humanity and build products that don’t “hijack” our minds.
  • its most prominent spokesman is executive director Tristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google who has been hailed by the Atlantic magazine as “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”. Harris has spent years trying to persuade the industry of the dangers of tech addiction.
  • In February, Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, launched a related initiative: the Tech and Society Solutions Lab, which aims to “maximise the tech industry’s contributions to a healthy society”.
  • the tech humanists are making a bid to become tech’s loyal opposition. They are using their insider credentials to promote a particular diagnosis of where tech went wrong and of how to get it back on track
  • The real reason tech humanism matters is because some of the most powerful people in the industry are starting to speak its idiom. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has warned about social media’s role in encouraging “mindless scrambles for friends or unworthy distractions”,
  • In short, the effort to humanise computing produced the very situation that the tech humanists now consider dehumanising: a wilderness of screens where digital devices chase every last instant of our attention.
  • After years of ignoring their critics, industry leaders are finally acknowledging that problems exist. Tech humanists deserve credit for drawing attention to one of those problems – the manipulative design decisions made by Silicon Valley.
  • these decisions are only symptoms of a larger issue: the fact that the digital infrastructures that increasingly shape our personal, social and civic lives are owned and controlled by a few billionaires
  • Because it ignores the question of power, the tech-humanist diagnosis is incomplete – and could even help the industry evade meaningful reform
  • Taken up by leaders such as Zuckerberg, tech humanism is likely to result in only superficial changes
  • they will not address the origin of that anger. If anything, they will make Silicon Valley even more powerful.
  • To the litany of problems caused by “technology that extracts attention and erodes society”, the text asserts that “humane design is the solution”. Drawing on the rhetoric of the “design thinking” philosophy that has long suffused Silicon Valley, the website explains that humane design “starts by understanding our most vulnerable human instincts so we can design compassionately”
  • this language is not foreign to Silicon Valley. On the contrary, “humanising” technology has long been its central ambition and the source of its power. It was precisely by developing a “humanised” form of computing that entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs brought computing into millions of users’ everyday lives
  • Facebook had a new priority: maximising “time well spent” on the platform, rather than total time spent. By “time well spent”, Zuckerberg means time spent interacting with “friends” rather than businesses, brands or media sources. He said the News Feed algorithm was already prioritising these “more meaningful” activities.
  • They believe we can use better design to make technology serve human nature rather than exploit and corrupt it. But this idea is drawn from the same tradition that created the world that tech humanists believe is distracting and damaging us.
  • Tech humanists say they want to align humanity and technology. But this project is based on a deep misunderstanding of the relationship between humanity and technology: namely, the fantasy that these two entities could ever exist in separation.
  • The story of our species began when we began to make tools
  • All of which is to say: humanity and technology are not only entangled, they constantly change together.
  • This is not just a metaphor. Recent research suggests that the human hand evolved to manipulate the stone tools that our ancestors used
  • The ways our bodies and brains change in conjunction with the tools we make have long inspired anxieties that “we” are losing some essential qualities
  • Yet as we lose certain capacities, we gain new ones.
  • The nature of human nature is that it changes. It can not, therefore, serve as a stable basis for evaluating the impact of technology
  • Yet the assumption that it doesn’t change serves a useful purpose. Treating human nature as something static, pure and essential elevates the speaker into a position of power. Claiming to tell us who we are, they tell us how we should be.
  • Holding humanity and technology separate clears the way for a small group of humans to determine the proper alignment between them
  • Harris and his fellow tech humanists also frequently invoke the language of public health. The Center for Humane Technology’s Roger McNamee has gone so far as to call public health “the root of the whole thing”, and Harris has compared using Snapchat to smoking cigarettes
  • The public-health framing casts the tech humanists in a paternalistic role. Resolving a public health crisis requires public health expertise. It also precludes the possibility of democratic debate. You don’t put the question of how to treat a disease up for a vote – you call a doctor.
  • They also remain confined to the personal level, aiming to redesign how the individual user interacts with technology rather than tackling the industry’s structural failures. Tech humanism fails to address the root cause of the tech backlash: the fact that a small handful of corporations own our digital lives and strip-mine them for profit.
  • This is a fundamentally political and collective issue. But by framing the problem in terms of health and humanity, and the solution in terms of design, the tech humanists personalise and depoliticise it.
  • Far from challenging Silicon Valley, tech humanism offers Silicon Valley a useful way to pacify public concerns without surrendering any of its enormous wealth and power.
  • these principles could make Facebook even more profitable and powerful, by opening up new business opportunities. That seems to be exactly what Facebook has planned.
  • reported that total time spent on the platform had dropped by around 5%, or about 50m hours per day. But, Zuckerberg said, this was by design: in particular, it was in response to tweaks to the News Feed that prioritised “meaningful” interactions with “friends” rather than consuming “public content” like video and news. This would ensure that “Facebook isn’t just fun, but also good for people’s well-being”
  • Zuckerberg said he expected those changes would continue to decrease total time spent – but “the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable”. This may describe what users find valuable – but it also refers to what Facebook finds valuable
  • not all data is created equal. One of the most valuable sources of data to Facebook is used to inform a metric called “coefficient”. This measures the strength of a connection between two users – Zuckerberg once called it “an index for each relationship”
  • Facebook records every interaction you have with another user – from liking a friend’s post or viewing their profile, to sending them a message. These activities provide Facebook with a sense of how close you are to another person, and different activities are weighted differently.
  • Messaging, for instance, is considered the strongest signal. It’s reasonable to assume that you’re closer to somebody you exchange messages with than somebody whose post you once liked.
  • Why is coefficient so valuable? Because Facebook uses it to create a Facebook they think you will like: it guides algorithmic decisions about what content you see and the order in which you see it. It also helps improve ad targeting, by showing you ads for things liked by friends with whom you often interact
  • emphasising time well spent means creating a Facebook that prioritises data-rich personal interactions that Facebook can use to make a more engaging platform.
  • “time well spent” means Facebook can monetise more efficiently. It can prioritise the intensity of data extraction over its extensiveness. This is a wise business move, disguised as a concession to critics
  • industrialists had to find ways to make the time of the worker more valuable – to extract more money from each moment rather than adding more moments. They did this by making industrial production more efficient: developing new technologies and techniques that squeezed more value out of the worker and stretched that value further than ever before.
  • there is another way of thinking about how to live with technology – one that is both truer to the history of our species and useful for building a more democratic future. This tradition does not address “humanity” in the abstract, but as distinct human beings, whose capacities are shaped by the tools they use.
  • It sees us as hybrids of animal and machine – as “cyborgs”, to quote the biologist and philosopher of science Donna Haraway.
  • The cyborg way of thinking, by contrast, tells us that our species is essentially technological. We change as we change our tools, and our tools change us. But even though our continuous co-evolution with our machines is inevitable, the way it unfolds is not. Rather, it is determined by who owns and runs those machines. It is a question of power
  • The various scandals that have stoked the tech backlash all share a single source. Surveillance, fake news and the miserable working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses are profitable. If they were not, they would not exist. They are symptoms of a profound democratic deficit inflicted by a system that prioritises the wealth of the few over the needs and desires of the many.
  • If being technological is a feature of being human, then the power to shape how we live with technology should be a fundamental human right
  • The decisions that most affect our technological lives are far too important to be left to Mark Zuckerberg, rich investors or a handful of “humane designers”. They should be made by everyone, together.
  • Rather than trying to humanise technology, then, we should be trying to democratise it. We should be demanding that society as a whole gets to decide how we live with technology
  • What does this mean in practice? First, it requires limiting and eroding Silicon Valley’s power.
  • Antitrust laws and tax policy offer useful ways to claw back the fortunes Big Tech has built on common resources
  • democratic governments should be making rules about how those firms are allowed to behave – rules that restrict how they can collect and use our personal data, for instance, like the General Data Protection Regulation
  • This means developing publicly and co-operatively owned alternatives that empower workers, users and citizens to determine how they are run.
  • we might demand that tech firms pay for the privilege of extracting our data, so that we can collectively benefit from a resource we collectively create.
Javier E

Bones discovered in an island cave may be an early human species - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-cave-may-be-new-human-species

human origins island

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Piper, Mijares and their team published a description of the foot bone in 2010. They knew it was the oldest human remain in the Philippines, dated to 67,000 years ago, based on the amount of the radioactive element uranium in the fossil
  • Mijares returned to Callao Cave and uncovered more remains in 2011 and 2015. All told, the scientists pulled a dozen fossilized parts from the cave — teeth, a thigh bone, finger bones and foot bones, representing three individuals. Attempts to extract DNA from the remains were unsuccessful.
  • The body parts are diminutive, suggesting Homo luzonensis grew no more than four feet tall. Its molars have modern shapes. The way its leg muscle attached to its thigh bone is “distinctively human,”
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  • The bones in its hands and feet are curved, “spitting images” of the toes and finger bones that belonged to the ancient Australopithecus, Piper said. These hominids, such as the 3 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis Lucy, had digits well-suited for climbing.
  • This species lived at the same time as humans with modern anatomy, who first appeared in the fossil record 200,000 years ago (or perhaps as long as 350,000 years ago). ″We continue to realize that few thousands of years back in time, H. sapiens was definitely not alone on Earth,”
  • Though these fossils are the oldest in the Philippines, evidence for habitation is even older; 700,000 years ago, ancient butchers on Luzon carved up a rhinoceros with stone tools. Which species did the butchering is unknown.
  • A few “mammal species you find on Luzon appear to have come from the mainland,” Piper said. The Asian continent is 400 or more miles away through the Luzon strait. But in the Middle Pleistocene, when glacial sheets locked up vast amounts of water, sea levels dropped by as much as 400 feet, Piper said.
  • “I would just say that when humans could see land or they could smell it or they knew the signs, that birds were coming from it, they sought it out,” he said. “That’s not a Homo sapiens trait. It’s something our ancestors and extinct relatives had.”
  • The cartoon version of evolution, in which a hunched ape becomes a tall and jaunty biped, suggests a journey with a destination. The reality is messier,
  • An island’s confines can rapidly spark evolutionary change; Charles Darwin saw this in finches’ beaks.
  • “Isolation plays games,” Potts said. Homo floresiensis showed anthropologists that an island could be an “odd little laboratory of human evolution,” he said. These bones reinforce that lesson.
  • “It’s beginning to look like the evolutionary process is really fluid,” Potts said. “And it’s surprising that it is so fluid where each species of Homo may actually be a history or a record.” The result is a fusion of the modern and ancient: molars that could be yours alongside toes with millions-year-old curves.
  • Fifteen years ago, Hawks said, anthropologists chalked up the worldwide success of Homo sapiens to our modern anatomy. These new discoveries, in far-flung corners, suggest exceptionalism is not built into our brains or skeletons.
  • “The archaeological record is now showing us that ancient human forms were much more adaptable, and I would say clever, than we imagined,”
  • “This isn’t ‘Flowers for Algernon,’ where, suddenly, we’re super smart and everyone else in the world is behind us.” Scientists are now plumbing genomes for other clues to Homo sapiens’ survival, looking at our metabolisms or resistance to disease, he said. “I’d say the doors have opened, and we haven’t figured out where they lead.”
sissij

Gaymoji: A New Language for That Search - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...gay-emoji-gaymoji-digital.html

new york times language social media bias

shared by sissij on 16 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • You don’t need a degree in semiotics to read meaning into an eggplant balanced on a ruler or peach with an old-fashioned telephone receiver on top. That the former is the universally recognized internet symbol for a large male member and the latter visual shorthand for a booty call is something most any 16-year-old could all too readily explain.
  • And so, starting this week, Grindr will offer to users a set of trademarked emoji, called Gaymoji — 500 icons that function as visual shorthand for terms and acts and states of being that seem funnier, breezier and less freighted with complication when rendered in cartoon form in place of words.
  • That is, toward a visual language of rainbow unicorns, bears, otters and handcuffs — to cite some of the images available in the first set of 100 free Gaymoji symbols.
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  • “Partly, this project started because the current set of emojis set by some international board were limited and not evolving fast enough for us,” said Mr. Simkhai, who in certain ways fits the stereotype of a gay man in West Hollywood: a lithe, gym-fit, hairless nonsmoker who enjoys dancing at gay circuit parties.
  • Like most every other human in the developed world, they had their heads buried in their screens.
  • “We’re all so attached to our phones that when people talk about the notion of the computer melding with the human and ask when that’s going to happen, I say it already has,” Mr. Simkhai said. He added that the prospect of being deprived of a phone for 20 minutes induced in him “the highest level of anxiety I can possibly have.”
  • Gaymoji, then, serve as both conversational and even existential placeholders, Ms. McCulloch said: “You’re using them to say, ‘I’m still here and I still want to be talking to you.’”
  • As if to emphasized that assertion, a reporter combing through the new set of Gaymoji in search of something that would symbolize a person of Mr. Simkhai’s vintage could find only one.It was an image of a gray-haired daddy holding aloft a credit card.
  • sissij on 16 Mar 17
     
    Emoji is becoming more and more popular in people's chatting and comments on social medias. People use emoji because they faster, more convenient, and funnier. And now people can even design their own emoji to have it suit for various conditions. But can emoji really replace the letters and language? I sometimes feel that emoji is so fast and cheap. It only take a click to sent an emoji and people usually sent without any further thoughts because it is so quick and easy. Although emoji is sometimes make the comments seem cuter and funnier, it makes people's comments less hearty. I think typing in some letters in the comments does oblige us to think about what we are saying before we sent it out. --Sissi (3/15/2017)
kushnerha

BBC - Future - Will emoji become a new language? - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...ll-emoji-become-a-new-language

bbc language emoji psychology grammar

shared by kushnerha on 19 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Emoji are now used in around half of every sentence on sites like Instagram, and Facebook looks set to introduce them alongside the famous “like” button as a way of expression your reaction to a post.
  • If you were to believe the headlines, this is just the tipping point: some outlets have claimed that emoji are an emerging language that could soon compete with English in global usage. To many, this would be an exciting evolution of the way we communicate; to others, it is linguistic Armageddon.
  • Do emoji show the same characteristics of other communicative systems and actual languages? And what do they help us to express that words alone can’t say?When emoji appear with text, they often supplement or enhance the writing. This is similar to gestures that appear along with speech. Over the past three decades, research has shown that our hands provide important information that often transcends and clarifies the message in speech. Emoji serve this function too – for instance, adding a kissy or winking face can disambiguate whether a statement is flirtatiously teasing or just plain mean.
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  • This is a key point about language use: rarely is natural language ever limited to speech alone. When we are speaking, we constantly use gestures to illustrate what we mean. For this reason, linguists say that language is “multi-modal”. Writing takes away that extra non-verbal information, but emoji may allow us to re-incorporate it into our text.
  • Emoji are not always used as embellishments, however – sometimes, strings of the characters can themselves convey meaning in a longer sequence on their own. But to constitute their own language, they would need a key component: grammar.
  • A grammatical system is a set of constraints that governs how the meaning of an utterance is packaged in a coherent way. Natural language grammars have certain traits that distinguish them. For one, they have individual units that play different roles in the sequence – like nouns and verbs in a sentence. Also, grammar is different from meaning
  • When emoji are isolated, they are primarily governed by simple rules related to meaning alone, without these more complex rules. For instance, according to research by Tyler Schnoebelen, people often create strings of emoji that share a common meaning
  • This sequence has little internal structure; even when it is rearranged, it still conveys the same message. These images are connected solely by their broader meaning. We might consider them to be a visual list: “here are all things related to celebrations and birthdays.” Lists are certainly a conventionalised way of communicating, but they don’t have grammar the way that sentences do.
  • What if the order did matter though? What if they conveyed a temporal sequence of events? Consider this example, which means something like “a woman had a party where they drank, and then opened presents and then had cake”:
  • These rules may seem like the seeds of grammar, but psycholinguist Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues have found this order appears in many other systems that would not be considered a language. For example, this order appears when people arrange pictures to describe events from an animated cartoon, or when speaking adults communicate using only gestures. It also appears in the gesture systems created by deaf children who cannot hear spoken languages and are not exposed to sign languages.
  • In all cases, the doer of the action (the agent) precedes the action. In fact, this pattern is commonly found in both full languages and simple communication systems. For example, the majority of the world’s languages place the subject before the verb of a sentence.
  • describes the children as lacking exposure to a language and thus invent their own manual systems to communicate, called “homesigns”. These systems are limited in the size of their vocabularies and the types of sequences they can create. For this reason, the agent-act order seems not to be due to a grammar, but from basic heuristics – practical workarounds – based on meaning alone. Emoji seem to tap into this same system.
  • Nevertheless, some may argue that despite emoji’s current simplicity, this may be the groundwork for emerging complexity – that although emoji do not constitute a language at the present time, they could develop into one over time.
  • Could an emerging “emoji visual language” be developing in a similar way, with actual grammatical structure? To answer that question, you need to consider the intrinsic constraints on the technology itself.Emoji are created by typing into a computer like text. But, unlike text, most emoji are provided as whole units, except for the limited set of emoticons which convert to emoji, like :) or ;). When writing text, we use the building blocks (letters) to create the units (words), not by searching through a list of every whole word in the language.
  • emoji force us to convey information in a linear unit-unit string, which limits how complex expressions can be made. These constraints may mean that they will never be able to achieve even the most basic complexity that we can create with normal and natural drawings.
  • What’s more, these limits also prevent users from creating novel signs – a requisite for all languages, especially emerging ones. Users have no control over the development of the vocabulary. As the “vocab list” for emoji grows, it will become increasingly unwieldy: using them will require a conscious search process through an external list, not an easy generation from our own mental vocabulary, like the way we naturally speak or draw. This is a key point – it means that emoji lack the flexibility needed to create a new language.
  • we already have very robust visual languages, as can be seen in comics and graphic novels. As I argue in my book, The Visual Language of Comics, the drawings found in comics use a systematic visual vocabulary (such as stink lines to represent smell, or stars to represent dizziness). Importantly, the available vocabulary is not constrained by technology and has developed naturally over time, like spoken and written languages.
  • grammar of sequential images is more of a narrative structure – not of nouns and verbs. Yet, these sequences use principles of combination like any other grammar, including roles played by images, groupings of images, and hierarchic embedding.
  • measured participants’ brainwaves while they viewed sequences one image at a time where a disruption appeared either within the groupings of panels or at the natural break between groupings. The particular brainwave responses that we observed were similar to those that experimenters find when violating the syntax of sentences. That is, the brain responds the same way to violations of “grammar”, whether in sentences or sequential narrative images.
  • I would hypothesise that emoji can use a basic narrative structure to organise short stories (likely made up of agent-action sequences), but I highly doubt that they would be able to create embedded clauses like these. I would also doubt that you would see the same kinds of brain responses that we saw with the comic strip sequences.
anonymous

Your Pandemic Tech Habits - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pandemic-tech-habits.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Your Pandemic Tech Habits
  • Therapy from afar. Books on the iPad. Friends via screens. Here’s the tech that’s sustained us.
  • A rock musician and a chamber orchestra violinist discovered apps that allowed them to play music with others far away. A woman in Toronto says she’s learned how to take courses and order groceries online, but she longs to be with her great-grandsons.
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  • Some of you said you had formed new habits that you think might stick, including meditating online and gathering weekly with pals over Zoom.
  • Some readers said they were grateful for virtual stand-ins but could not wait to get back to the library and hugging their family members.
  • This year, reading together has strengthened our bond at a distance. He calls me all of the time, asking me to please read him another story.
  • During lockdown, we discovered we could use an app called JamKazam to play music together over the internet in real time.
  • reading e-books on my iPad
  • To be honest, I miss holding a physical book in my hand, turning a page and the satisfying feeling of closing the book when you’ve finished.
  • My new tech habit is meditation class by Zoom. I have never before been able to successfully meditate
  • But being at home, in my most comfortable chair in front of the fireplace with a cup of coffee has worked for me. Meditation has been a great tool to help me cope with the stress and anxiety of this terrible, no-good year.
  • I started drawing cartoons that highlight how our lives have changed during the pandemic
  • I’ve been able to maintain my social ties with my musician friends and make some new musical friends as well. Last, but not least, I am encouraged to keep practicing.
  • My new habit is ordering groceries online and no contact pickup
  • My “shoppers” have done an outstanding job! It’s a true improvement that should remain in place
  • I am 86 years old and haven’t hugged anyone in my family for one year. But I’ve learned to use Zoom and to order my groceries online, both of which helped me keep myself fed, independent and sane
  • I’ve attended services at my synagogue without having to put on my snow boots. I’ve gone to art galleries and operas without having to dress up or worry about where to park.
  • My psychologist is now doing telehealth visits, and I love it. It’s my hope that this becomes a permanent option in the future.
  • Not only for me, but for the multitudes of people who need mental health care and aren’t in a position to access it in person.
  • I teach ballet to older women. When we had to stop dancing together in person, I was motivated to find a way to deliver a class in some form. With an iPhone, my teenager’s tripod and the tech advice of my three adult children and my son-in-law, I was able to quickly learn to record a ballet class, edit it on my laptop, make a YouTube channel, upload the video and share it.
  • I purchased Duolingo and brushed up on French and picked up Arabic and German.
  • I go to an annual girls’ weekend trip on Lake Gaston with five other women. That had to be canceled last year. We’ve instituted a weekly Zoom call on Tuesday nights after we put the kids to bed to catch up with each other and talk and laugh, and sometimes cry.
  • It’s brought us even closer together than the usual once per year weekend could
Javier E

Opinion | Why a Digital Diary Will Change Your Life - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...digital-diary.html

diary journal app reflection private

shared by Javier E on 13 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • At first, my plan was to do what I always do when I see something halfway noteworthy, which is to tell a few hundred thousand people on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or, in my lowest moments, even LinkedIn.
  • Smartphones and social networks have turned me into a lonely, needy man who requires constant affirmation. In desperate pursuit of such affirmation, my mind has come to resemble one of those stamping-machine assembly lines you see in cartoons, but for shareable content: The raw, analog world in all its glory enters via conveyor belt on one end, and, after some raucous puffs of smoke, it gets flattened and packaged in my head into insipid quips meant to inspire you to tap a tiny heart on a screen.
  • instead of sharing the silly lampshade joke, I journaled it in Day One, a magnificent digital diary app that has transformed my relationship with my phone, improved my memory, and given me a deeper perspective on my life than the one I was getting through the black mirror of social media.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • In recent years, Twitter and much of the rest of the internet have been getting hotter, more reflexively outraged, less fun. Venturing onto social media these days, I often feel like a cat burglar stepping through a field of upturned rakes. I could imagine my dumb joke getting picked apart for all the ways it was problematic — “New York Times writer casually encourages bestial sexual assault! #deertoo” — bringing me ever closer to cancellation.
  • Think of Day One as a private social network for an audience of one: yourself.
  • You post updates to it just as you might on Instagram or Facebook.
  • The app — which runs on Macs, iPhones and iPads, syncing your entries between your devices — can handle long text journals, short picture-focused status updates, and pretty much anything else that comes across the digital transom.
  • I use it to jot down my deepest thoughts and shallowest jokes; to rant and to vent; to come to terms with new ideas I’m playing with, ideas that need time to marinate in secret before they’re ready for the world; and to collect and reflect upon all the weird and crazy and touching artifacts of life
  • It’s unsocial. Indeed, it’s downright antisocial. Nothing about the app is meant to be shared — it is protected with your Apple security credentials and backs up its data to the cloud using end-to-end encryption, so that the only way someone can get into your diary is by getting hold of your device and your system passcode.
  • Day One creates something so rare it feels almost sacred: A completely private digital space.
  • The best way to describe this feeling is to liken it to friendship. I feel comfortable dishing to Day One the way I would to a close friend I trust completely.
  • one of the few digital spaces that provides you mental space for contemplation and consideration
  • journaling has been shown to be good for mind and body, reducing stress and anxiety, improving interpersonal relationships, and promoting creativity
  • a digital journal offers several benefits over paper. Easy accessibility is a big one
  • you can tap out a journal while you’re in line at the supermarket
  • because so much happens on screens now, Day One offers greater fidelity to daily life. Instead of describing the insane conversation I had with my co-worker, I can just post a screenshot.
  • photography, which adds emotional heft to the rigidity of text.
runlai_jiang

The craft beer firm with a thirst for global growth - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-43196787

shared by runlai_jiang on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Walking into a bar in India, it is hard to miss the bottles of Bira 91 beer. Featuring a cartoon monkey with a punk hairdo and one eye smaller than the other, the labels read: "Imagined in India".Despite only launching in 2015, Bira 91 is now immensely popular across a country dominated by ubiquitous Kingfisher.Entrepreneur Ankur Jain started the brand when he moved back to his native New Delhi after 10 years living in New York.
  • By the end of last year, annual production had increased 30-fold to 300,000 barrels of five different beers, and the company's annual revenues had reached $30m.At the same time Bira 91 had secured $35m of external investment, including from US venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
  • To do this Mr Jain decided to flatten the organisational structure of the business. His fellow directors saw their senior job titles and assigned seats in offices taken away, and now employees at Bira 91 sit around the same dinner tables, allowing junior and senior employees to freely exchange ideas.
johnsonel7

Expect Trump to fight as if his life depends on it (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump perception reality language

shared by johnsonel7 on 24 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Over the decades, Trump constructed and then inhabited a public persona that is powerful but unnatural. As a businessman and TV personality, Trump was, perhaps, the greatest illusionist of our time. He has repeated, ad nauseum, his unverified claims of wealth, sexual magnetism, and brilliance -- a "very stable genius" -- in an effort to produce the image of a great man.
  • But the theatrical dynamic of the Trump presidency was threatened every time real life collided with Trump's cartoon. His failures have often come at moments when he should be guided by a moral compass. But no one who is so devoted to a false persona could possess this kind of ethical reflex
  • Then, on Monday, Trump seemed to yet again try and regain his power by implying the Ukraine scandal couldn't be significant because it revolved around a "perfect" letter he wrote to Zelensky. It's the sort of distortion of the facts one would expect from a man whose comforting false reality is falling apart. As analysts have pointed out, Trump's contact with Zelensky involved not a letter, but a telephone call which was far from perfect. Indeed it was only "perfect" if one was looking for an example of a president abusing his office.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Russian connection echoes a long-running theme of the Trump presidency, which has cast doubt on his ability to lead the nation -- from Trump's criticism of the NATO alliance to his request for Russia to be admitted to the G7 economic summit countries, to his withdrawal of American troops from Syria. Indeed, last week Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi noted that "all roads lead" to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
  • When we hear the gears of the Trump machine grind and see the decorative pieces of chrome loosen and fall, we are witnessing the results of a confrontation between reality and fantasy. This observation doesn't diminish the power of Trump's marketing method. It does, however, suggest its limits.
manhefnawi

The Fascinating Science Behind Why We See 'Faces' In Objects | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...science-behind-pareidolia

Perception Neurology Brain

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • People can discern faces in meaningless clouds
  • There's a name for this uncanny ability to see faces everywhere: pareidolia (roughly, from the Greek for "wrong shape").
  • Human brains are exquisitely attuned to perceiving faces—in fact, there's an entire region of the brain called the fusiform gyrus that is dedicated to it. Its functions are evident even from early childhood: Studies have shown that shortly after birth, babies display more interest in cartoon faces with properly placed features than in similar images where the features are scrambled.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Others have found that paranormal and religious believers are more prone to pareidolia than skeptics and nonbelievers. Although believers and nonbelievers had equivalent sensitivity to faces, the paranormal and religious believers had lower thresholds for reporting that a face was present than nonbelievers did, possibly due to being more open to the suggestion that the images might contain faces.
  • Pareidolia can be exacerbated in cases of fatigue and in some neurological diseases, such as Lewy body dementia
  • It may not be a strictly human phenomenon either. Research has shown that rhesus monkeys see illusory facial features on inanimate objects such as toasters or sliced vegetables.
  • Pareidolia extends beyond human likenesses: In 2007, a "monkey tree" in Singapore attracted thousands of visitors, who swore that a bizarrely shaped callus growing on a tree was a manifestation of either the Chinese deity Sun Wukong (also known as the Monkey King) or the Hindu monkey god Hanuman.
  • the brain makes much ado about nothing.
Javier E

The Disneyfication of Prince Harry | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...disneyfication-of-prince-harry

infantilization uk royals culture psychology education

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Watching these films appears to be a childhood habit Harry never gave up – and several of the strands of the story he has so publicly told about himself seem to have echoes of these cartoons The original Lion King came out in 1994, shortly after Harry’s tenth birthday, so he was its prime target audience. The film tells the story of a boy prince, Simba, who is haunted by guilt over the death of a parent, detailing his struggles to find a pathway into adulthood – which he accomplishes through a judicious mixture of martial action and emotional sensitivity, becoming heroic in the process. 
  • So much of Harry’s turmoil is foreshadowed in Disney, it seems. Perhaps even in remaining true to his childhood vision of the world and its realities he is the boy who never grew up – Peter Pan.
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