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Weiye Loh

Paris Review - Falling Men: On Don DeLillo and Terror, Chris Cumming - 0 views

www.theparisreview.org/...-men-on-don-delillo-and-terror

Terrorism Representation Fiction

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 May 13 - No Cached
  • inexplicable violence committed by a nobody in the context of ubiquitous media coverage. A mountain of evidence, testimony, and theory that hides the event itself. Images of the event endlessly replayed. An imbalance between the significance of the act and the insignificance of the person who committed it. Absurdity, in other words.
  • By introducing conspiracy and chaos into the world, a terrorist hopes to make himself equal to the overwhelming world surrounding him. The idea isn’t to change history but to enact one’s dream life. The person who blows up the Boston marathon instantly becomes the equal of his act. What other mythic ambition can a loser instantly achieve, just by deciding to do it? “In America it is the individual himself, floating on random streams of disaffection, who tends to set the terms of the absurd,” DeLillo wrote. “Set the terms” is right: an individual terrorist creates the absurdity in which the rest of us have to live. Whether or not Oswald or the Tsarnaevs achieved what they hoped they would achieve, their dream lives now overlap with reality. Violence gives weight to the meaningless. “This is what guns are for, to bring balance to the world,” DeLillo wrote, speaking, once again, of Oswald.
  • Weiye Loh on 01 May 13
     
    "Long before it became obvious, DeLillo argued that terrorists and gunmen have rearranged our sense of reality. He has become better appreciated as the world has come to resemble his work, incrementally, with every new telegenic catastrophe, every bombing and mass shooting. Throughout DeLillo's work we encounter young men who plot violence to escape the plotlessness of their own lives. He has done more than any writer since Dostoevsky to explain them."
Gideon Burton

Augmented Reality: An Introduction to Digital Literature - 3 views

realmixed.blogspot.com/...ion-to-digital-literature.html

electronic literature humanities computing augmented reality kinetic poetry hypertext fiction

shared by Gideon Burton on 03 May 11 - No Cached
  • Gideon Burton on 03 May 11
     
    A showcase of various types of electronic or digital literature. A good list of various boundary-breaking genres being experimented with.
Amanda Giles

I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...07awareness-t.html

identity reality social networking parasocial relationships ambient awareness

shared by Amanda Giles on 28 May 10 - Cached
  • Facebook and Twitter may have pushed things into overdrive, but the idea of using communication tools as a form of “co-presence” has been around for a while. The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night — tiny updates like “enjoying a glass of wine now” or “watching TV while lying on the couch.” They were doing it partly because talking for hours on mobile phones isn’t very comfortable (or affordable). But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call.
  • capable
  • A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • ambient awareness
  • very much like being physically near someone
  • paradox of ambient awareness
  • insignificant on its own
  • he little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives
  • Facebook and Twitter may have pushed things into overdrive, but the idea of using communication tools as a form of “co-presence” has been around for a while. The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night — tiny updates like “enjoying a glass of wine now” or “watching TV while lying on the couch.” They were doing it partly because talking for hours on mobile phones isn’t very comfortable (or affordable). But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call.
  • the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation
  • human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?
  • Constant online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn’t actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that.
  • If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships.
  • Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people.
  • hey can observe you, but it’s not the same as knowing you.”
  • people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are.
  • if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.
  • he dynamics of small-town life,
  • If anything, it’s identity-constraining now
  • result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves
  • t’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness.
Neal C

Every Hug, Every Fuss - Scientists Record Families' Daily Lives - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...23family.html

data collection archiving gender roles families

shared by Neal C on 24 May 10 - Cached
  • Mothers still do most of the housework, spending 27 percent of their time on it, on average, compared with 18 percent for fathers and 3 percent for children (giving an allowance made no difference).
    • Neal C
      Neal C on 24 May 10
       
      ungrateful kids
  • One researcher roamed the house with a handheld computer, noting each family member’s location and activities at 10-minute intervals.
  • the U.C.L.A. project was an effort to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug, every tantrum, every soul-draining search for a missing soccer cleat.
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  • puter, noting each family mem
  • Neal C on 24 May 10
     
    This is an interesting article about the way new methods of documentation and archiving allow researchers to collect and code more data than ever before - a "reality TV" paradigm.
Amanda Giles

Executive Summary | Pew Internet & American Life Project - 0 views

www.pewinternet.org/...lation-and-New-Technology.aspx

identity reality

shared by Amanda Giles on 24 May 10 - Cached
  • Only 6% of the adult population has no one with whom they can discuss important matters or who they consider to be “especially significant” in their life.
  • contrary to the considerable concern that people’s use of the internet and cell phones could be tied to the trend towards smaller networks, we find that ownership of a mobile phone and participation in a variety of internet activities are associated with larger and more diverse core discussion networks. (Discussion networks are a key measure of people’s most important social ties.)
  • Amanda Giles on 24 May 10
     
    Social networking decreases social isolation.
Sarah Eeee

Dissent Magazine - Arguing The World - Are English Departments Killing the Humanities? - - 0 views

www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php

shared by Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • The focus of this post is not the thousand-and-one times told tale of how the corporatization of the university and state divestment from higher education has had a particularly disastrous impact upon humanities departments
  • We can treat these realities as facts to be taken for granted.
  • We might wonder if there are conditions of intellectual deprivation for which the institutional structures governing the humanities are partly to blame.
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  • For Arnoldians, literature would play the cultural role once occupied by religion, with beauty civilizing the modern individual.
  • The avatar of that attitude was Harvard’s Douglas Bush, who speaking in 1944 identified the cultural tradition running from the ancient Greeks through Milton as “that heritage for which the war has been fought.”
  • To put it another way, the English department currently labors under a deep paradox: it devotes much of its intellectual energy to declaring the limits of Anglo-American culture while being structurally wedded to that culture in a way that necessarily privileges it.
  • At the risk of being impolite, I will be pointed about their implications: this is not a progressive program of higher education, but is in fact a perniciously anti-progressive one. It confirms the casual undergraduate presupposition that nothing occurring before 1980 is of real significance, that the free market is the culmination of the human desire for liberty, and that digital fora for blather are now fundamental to meditations on our role in the universe.
  • In its youth it promised an education in literature without the hard work of learning languages, much to the dismay of classicists. In its middle age it offered a stripped-down version of philosophy under the banner of critical theory, an intrusion that philosophers bore with Stoic calm. Now in its senescence, the English department is being beaten by communications at its own game of watering down curriculum and reducing humanist traditions to what today’s adolescent will find—to use the favorite malapropism of the text-messaging generation—“relatable.”
  • In an age more forthright in its bigotries, Irving Babbitt advocated a New Humanism that readily embraced a meritocracy of learning. The humanitarian, in Babbitt’s phrase, “has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” where a humanist “is interested in the perfecting of the individual.” The return to the classics, or to great texts traditionally conceived, never seems in my mind fully to dispense with such patrician sensibilities.
  • The humanities programs of the next century might rather be structured around “world humanisms.” In such programs the phrase “great texts” would evoke the Bhagavad Gita every bit as much as it does The Iliad. The learning of at least one world language would be required, be it Arabic, French, or Mandarin. At its center would be neither the vernacular nor an artificially constructed “Western tradition.”
  • Instead it would explore on their own terms, and in their rich cross-fertilization, millenia of world traditions offering insight on the relationships between individual and society; on our ethical obligations to our fellow beings, human and non-human; and on flourishing and justice.
  • An example of a “world humanisms” approach is suggested by a conference that I recently attended in Istanbul, which brought together philosophers and theologians from North America and Turkey. One of the many rich portraits that emerged was of first-century Alexandria, where the Neoplatonism of the Jewish philosopher Philo directly influenced the early Christians Clement and Origen, as well as laying the foundations of Islamic philosophy through al-Kindi and al-Farabi. We are blinded to the study of this kind of influence by a focus on “Western Civilization” that favors Athens and Rome to Alexandria and treats Origen only as a precursor to Saint Augustine, that supposed inventor of an exclusively Christian syncretism between philosophy and theology.
  • Our task as humanists of the twenty-first century is to make those long and deep traditions visible, and to do so in the teeth of those forces that would strip them away, be those forces technological, commercial, political, or intellectual.
  • Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11
     
    An alternate take on the "future of the humanities" argument. This author proposes a revamped sort of literature study incorporating modern languages and a fervently international approach to literature, thought, and culture.
  • Sarah Eeee on 10 Jan 11
     
    This one skirts the edges of the digital humanities, by proposing a vision of future literature study. Explicitly digital projects could be useful for finding the international connections this author calls for.
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