141–150 of 189 posts
I think buttons for clothing were around centuries before electric push buttons, and the electric buttons were named for the clothing buttons they resembled. Is that not so? So the fact that "button" in French could mean "push" would just be a coincidence, since you don't push clothing buttons. Or at least I don't.
>The mundane interface between human and machine caused social anxiety in the late nineteenth century The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (written in 1909) has a lot of buttons. The novella is an indication that they were more of a symbol than the real source of the anxiety. It was caused by anticipation of things like: - Disconnect of people from nature an each other. - Replacement of real things with simulacra, which…
The article treats skepticism of buttons as some quaint silly thing when it was part of a general criticism of technological society that carried over to the present day and made some valid point. And I don't, by far, embrace the critique of technology but one should indeed take seriously the "criticism of a push-button society".
From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…
Is Ammon not absolutely right? New information technology induces changes with how we interface with information, almost certainly a mixed bag of good and bad. Writing is directly associated with the decline of memory-based oral traditions. You can probably safely argue that writing brings many positives, but that does not preclude the existence of negatives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.”
Any reason you couldn't have made the point explicit the first time? Were you worried that others' reading skills would atrophy if they only needed to read 100 words to get the point, and so you posted 400 words while still missing a critical block of 50?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I'm of 20th C. origin—not 19th—and the first electrical things I played with as a young kid were electric bells, buzzers, batteries, flashlight globes and reels of bell wire—lots and lots of it. (Experimenting with such items wasn't an unfashionable activity when I was a kid.) Bell wire, which usually came in the form of two single-stranded copper wires twisted loosely together and insulated in red and white PV…
I was born in 84. And in the 90s I knew this 1 kid who told me on his 11th birthday his dad would raise his bicycle seat. I was super confused as that an easy thing to do(loosen a bolt, adjust height and tighten the bolt). Turns out lots of parents don't allow their kids to touch their tools or tinker or do anything like that. I was very fortunate that my parents encouraged me to do such things. E.g. take apart thing…
From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god…
Is Ammon not absolutely right? New information technology induces changes with how we interface with information, almost certainly a mixed bag of good and bad. Writing is directly associated with the decline of memory-based oral traditions. You can probably safely argue that writing brings many positives, but that does not preclude the existence of negatives.
And the crux of the matter is not the mode of information transmission, it's the veracity of the content. And if someone has the time, attention, effort to speak to you they usually want something.
How do you know your interests are aligned?
Reciting things from memory doesn't help much with applied epistemology (rationality).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that! Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for sophistry. Right?
Amun-Ra has missed one important part of writing. It is not just for remembering one's own thoughts but also for transmitting them over great distances of time and space. If one is to read Wikipedia and repeat it verbatim without understanding then one is only a single component of a greater transportation medium. But if in contrast, if one was to internalise those words and draw lines of inference between ideas so e…
But perhaps he does not care about the far future as much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Ammon not absolutely right? New information technology induces changes with how we interface with information, almost certainly a mixed bag of good and bad. Writing is directly associated with the decline of memory-based oral traditions. You can probably safely argue that writing brings many positives, but that does not preclude the existence of negatives.
This allegory is a trope at this point, but it is sort of true in some sense. People seem to internalize (yes, memorize) facts less and less nowadays because such facts can be queried immediately from the internet. While being able to look things up is great, without memorization synthesizing information is difficult because it's harder to draw connections between facts without having them in your head at the same ti…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any reason you couldn't have made the point explicit the first time? Were you worried that others' reading skills would atrophy if they only needed to read 100 words to get the point, and so you posted 400 words while still missing a critical block of 50?
I have to say, this post if anything is a meta argument that Plato was actually right. Behold the impatience and inattentiveness to read a short section that literally takes two minutes to parse. The internet has made people far to impatient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was born in 84. And in the 90s I knew this 1 kid who told me on his 11th birthday his dad would raise his bicycle seat. I was super confused as that an easy thing to do(loosen a bolt, adjust height and tighten the bolt). Turns out lots of parents don't allow their kids to touch their tools or tinker or do anything like that. I was very fortunate that my parents encouraged me to do such things. E.g. take apart thing…
Children today cannot even walk around their own neighborhood because they must be chauffeured by car since the urban environment is more and more suburban, and this makes them not even really understand the layout of even their immediate environment[0]. American children in particular are being robbed of a lot of experience with hands-on learning because of the parenting climate today. [0] https://youtu.be/RrsL2n9q6…
That is a contributor, but not the only one. Helicopter parenting by itself also shares some of the blame.