Live data from Hacker News

Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

google.com

61–70 of 73 posts

Re: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

#61

This makes me sad. Despite my political opposition to Obama, I thought that he understood the culture of the "IPod, XBox era." In fact, he leveraged these tools of 'diversion' in his campaign (and did so very effectively). This seems to be the knee-jerk technophobic speech that politicians would have given in the latter half of the 20th Century. Instead of being afraid and resistant to technology (which, as we have s…

I'm unsurprised that the readers here latched right on to the tools mentioned in the article, and entirely missed the point of his statements: > ...politicians should be encouraging the public to put these technological advances to good use. This is exactly his point. He used a few devices to hi-lite the difference between information-as-entertainment, and information-as-a-tool. This in no way makes him hypocritical…

[deleted]

Re: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

#62
This speech should not be taken seriously - not because Obama (a) has no idea how to play X Box, or (b) spends all day on his Blackberry, but because his administration has thrown its full weight behind the most toxic aspects of ACTA. Even the name of the treaty is a fraud. So why is he supporting it so aggressively?

In this speech, Obama says the world is experiencing a moment of "breathtaking change", and goes on to say "we can't stop these changes... but we can adapt to them."

How? By exporting laws that call for $1.92 million fines in response to 24 privately downloaded .mp3s? By allowing the USTA to bully Canada over 'laxity' when the IP laws in question are stricter than our own? (http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4997/125/). By threatening Indonesia with the same kind of psychotic economic violence in 'retaliation' for their government's formal support of Open Source? (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/23/openso...).

If this is "adaptation", what was the Opium War? A humanitarian relief mission?

I promise you, iPads and X-Boxes are not the problem.

Re: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

#63

Here is the text of his speech: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/05/ob... Let's read that before spending a bunch of effort debating only a single sentence of it. (It didn't take me long to find. It is the speech he planned to give, not a transcript, so there may be some minor differences in the actual address.)

I'm especially surprised at where the discussion of this speech is focused. It seems that people aren't focusing on the context or the core message.

He's speaking at a HBCU to a largely if not all black graduating class. This isn't Stanford or MIT. I know theres a blind spot to the inequality African American students face and that this is a sensitive issue, but I don't think telling African American students who are graduating college to be wary of a lot of the distractions these days such as xbox and twitter is a bad thing.

I could go on for a bit about why, but Obama lays out the statistics for you...

American students are ranked about 10th overall compared to top-performing countries. African Americans, however, are ranked behind more than twenty nations, lower than nearly every other developed country.

I would say that Obama is inspiring a generation of African Americans to work harder and strive for more because inequality is still pervasive throughout American society and education is the key to overcoming this. Why is it so hard to miss this message?

Re: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

#64

Here is the text of his speech: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/05/ob... Let's read that before spending a bunch of effort debating only a single sentence of it. (It didn't take me long to find. It is the speech he planned to give, not a transcript, so there may be some minor differences in the actual address.)

The President's speech is the educational industrial complex's standard paen to itself. It is uttered at appropriate "levelling-up" ceremonies by certified members of the cabal to customers seeking justification of their expenditures and validation of the status they have obtained. It's the appropriate boilerplate to deliver to customers at this point in their buying experience, but it doesn't say too much about the President's views.

If I read his speech on my iPad, does that make it a distraction, a diversion, or entertainment in the President's rubric? Am I being entertained or emancipated? It depends on who's doing the consumption and to what end.

Am I being overwhelmed with an unmanageable deluge of information? That's the argument the church made against the Luther Bible and the printing press. Information wise, we've always been capable of overwhelming ourselves by scanning a landscape, listening at the shore, or staring into the night's sky. Is reading a novel educational or entertaining? Does it depend on the nature of the novel? Is there a quantitative basis for that classification, like the number of neurons rewired by ingesting the novel? or the improved efficacy or performance of the system after ingestion?

Distractions, amusements and entertainments are the means by which our minds extend themselves to qualitative and quantitative changes in the information landscape: in information space, we evolve through play. Playing with information yields further information, knowledge, and maybe some wisdom. Sometimes play spills to the physical realm as artifacts or shared experience. Differentiating between "education" and "entertainment", "entertainment" and "art", or ranking things in terms of "usefulness" is post hoc analysis geared to reinforce the status quo, its information taxonomy, and its hierarchy of cultural value—an increasingly unmaintainable fiction, the acknowledgement of which would invalidate the blessing being conferred on this cohort of lemmings by the establishment through the President's words.

Re: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

#65

Here is the text of his speech: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/05/ob... Let's read that before spending a bunch of effort debating only a single sentence of it. (It didn't take me long to find. It is the speech he planned to give, not a transcript, so there may be some minor differences in the actual address.)

I'm especially surprised at where the discussion of this speech is focused. It seems that people aren't focusing on the context or the core message. He's speaking at a HBCU to a largely if not all black graduating class. This isn't Stanford or MIT. I know theres a blind spot to the inequality African American students face and that this is a sensitive issue, but I don't think telling African American students who are…

[deleted]

Re: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

#66
The reaction thus far to the President's comments seem to prove his point. Instead of focusing on any of the more challenging assertions many people latch onto the one easily consumable statement about iPads and Xboxs and ignore the bigger points. Imagine if people devoted the mental resources they use on debating minor details of technology, sports, entertainment, etc to real world issues? Imagine if they ran for office? It would change the world.

Re: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

#67
post #18

>"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work..." What the hell? This sounds like Bush. What happened to the guy who was in love with his blackberry?

A blackberry isn't a toy. I have at least three of the items mentioned on the list (which are toys), and I use none of them for actual productive work. Though I do have a telnet terminal app on the iPod. Still all of the devices he mentions were not designed for productive enterprises, but for diversions. And diversions have a way of being big time wasters if you're not balanced. Not today Halo 3!

What's the distinction between productive work and play? between a toy and a tool? Even if you think the distinction isn't purely subjective, you have to consider that every tool starts out as a toy, that a lot of tools are way more fun to play with than (what gets marketed as) toys, that playing can be extremely productive and that being productive can be really entertaining.

Re: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

#68

I'm not sure I agree with the implication that said devices are to blame for this sort of thing. A lot of this problem is just as, or if not even more prevalent in old media. One could argue that more convenient Internet access helps solving the problem by allowing people to do fact-checking for themselves. I know I look up points of contention on wikipedia via my phone in a way that just wasn't possible a couple of…

[deleted]

Re: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

#69
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I kinda think stupid ideas like birtherism are deliberately given air by the Obama operation. I don't mean that in a "conspiracy theory" sense, I just mean that politicians would rather engage loudly with the silliest of their opponents rather than the most sensible. By focusing attention on the few loonies who oppose Obama, Obama attempts to associate opposition to Obama with looniness. If birthers didn't e…

The birthers are only the easiest example. Look at the health care debate. I am sympathetic to a capitalist-based reform, but the fundamental problem is that even the moderately informed had difficulties following the real issues because the media failed to actually tell people what the public option was! I've heard multiple anecdotes (I know, not a representative sample) where someone "came up with" the public optio…

To be fair, however, many things sound like "good ideas" until you try and implement them... It's difficult for people to consider all the long-term implications of such a change in health system, and dangerously easy to gloss over what may seem like small minutiae, but ends up meaning the difference between life and death for people. In the end, "public option" is just a set of words that could be used to describe any number of systems ranging from ideal to unbearable, and so it is not of any positive or negative value in itself. The devil is in the details.

Re: Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

#70
post #18

>"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work..." What the hell? This sounds like Bush. What happened to the guy who was in love with his blackberry?

Dude, sarcasm. Read it again with the word I given a lot of sarcastic emphasis.
Post reply on HN