111–120 of 351 posts
Times have changed. Students who use podcasts, YouTube, and ChatGPT to complete their academic tasks aren't shallower or less educated than those who have spent years mastering the skill of extracting information from dense books.I have younger relatives who can't sustain their attention to read a book to save their life but still earn excellent grades because they were born into a world of technology. Their way of f…
It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group. The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group. Whether the memes you consume are in print is entirely incidental.
You really think the elites are generally better informed than the rest? They don't fall prey to stuff like celebrities, gossip media and so on? I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly info…
I suspect print magazines are undergoing the same kind of cycle of destruction and resurrection as happened to vinyl records. In the 1990s, vinyls were the clunky old things that your mom gave away in a yard sale. Now they’re produced again as a high-end tactile media experience and sales are increasing every year. Magazines can make a similar comeback for niches like fashion and arts. But they will probably be funde…
This has been attempted in the outdoors world for 20+ years. E.g., Alpinist[0] and The Surfers Journal[1]. It works, kinda. Alpinist now has more ads and is a smaller physical size and lower-quality paper than it was at the start. I think it's also had a couple close calls with bankruptcy. I wasn't reading TSJ over a long enough time span to tell if they had similar issues.
[0] http://www.alpinist.com/ [1] https://www.surfersjournal.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure this is the case. I work with a mix of younger and mature students and there is a distinct inability for the younger students to compose complex abstract processes. When people do well as a cohort they are usually normalised against their peers. It requires a little more academic comparison across age groups.
Isn't it also because of a change in testing methods? It seems to me that multiple choice tests are more and more widespread. These can be gamed more easily, since you can often eliminate some of the choices based on knowledge unrelated to the correct answer. For comparison, during my own education, a couple decades ago, I don't recall having a multiple choice test ever . Maybe 1 to 4 grade in primary school. Maybe.…
Funny typo in the subtitle. > Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies" The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
For me Guttenberg is an actor famous for Police Academy, Short Circuit, and Three Men And A Baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Guttenberg
A couple of references to the Nazis, but no reference to the Nazi book burnings, an incredibly symbolic physical manifestation of knowledge and information destruction, which I'd have thought would be very relevant in this context, i.e. in the praise of physical books? Perhaps it wasn't mentioned because it doesn't quite fit in with the narrative of digital being all bad, given digital knowlege can be more resistant…
Important distinction here, book burnings are an example of knowledge destruction, but not all information is knowledge, and not all knowledge is truth.
That is why this isn't applicable to the internet age, or in fact even the reverse is true. In an environment of digital mass communication there's much more information than knowledge, and the way to destabilize knowledge and truth is not to destroy knowledge but to flood you with information. This is why the most important skill today has shifted from finding knowledge to filtering out noise. The Nazi of today isn't going to hunt a library for a book, he's instead going to create an environment so entropic that truth and fiction become indistinguishable.
And that's also of course why you find people in that camp today as defenders of free flow of information. Because you need to realize that the signal to noise ratio has been turned on its head. When Google deletes 90% of my emails this isn't because they pursue evil plans like someone who burns 90% of a library down, quite the opposite, it's the only way I don't end up being scammed.
https://philosophicalsociety.com/html/BaudrillardsThoughtsOn...
Funny typo in the subtitle. > Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies" The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
Just finished reading Amusing Ourselves to Death on the recommendation of some commenters here. Strange that Neil Postman's work is not once mentioned in the article. His basic argument in 1985 was that the shift from print to TV was already causing epistemological collapse through the transforming of not just education, but also news reporting, political discourse, and the functioning of government into forms of ent…
David Milch kind of touched on this when he talked about John from Cincinnati. He goes to say that TV News is actually TV shows that we watch, like the Iraq War, and the American public basically get bored of television shows and thats when the news changes shows. The show is exciting at first, thats why we watch, but then we get bored. The implication here is that we don't get outraged, we get bored.
Funny typo in the subtitle. > Ed Simon on What Sven Birkerts Got Right in “The Guttenberg Elegies" The book is called "The Gutenberg Elegies". Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. Guttenberg[1] is a german politician who became famous for plagiarizing in his PhD thesis. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Theodor_zu_Guttenberg
There’s also a confusing typo in “the ceding of material books to the ephemeral gauze of the online”. I presume “gauze” was intended be “gaze”.