Wednesday, February 26, 2014

George Packer: Is Amazon Bad for Books? : The New Yorker

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Evgeny Morozov: Two Cheers for Boredom : The New Yorker

"mediated boredom - doesn't produce time to think; it just produces a craving for more information in order to suppress it."

Evgeny Morozov: Two Cheers for Boredom : The New Yorker

A Critic at Large

Only Disconnect

Two cheers for boredom.

by Evgeny Morozov

October 28, 2013

extract :

On November 16,
1924, Siegfried Kracauer, a luminary in the literary world of the
Weimar Republic, published a feisty essay in the Frankfurter Zeitung.
Trained as an architect, Kracauer was an acute observer of modernity
and its impact on life in the city. He followed in the footsteps of his
onetime teacher Georg Simmel, the sociologist whose 1903 essay “The
Metropolis and Mental Life” argued that overstimulated urban dwellers
were prone to develop a “blasé attitude,” a coping mechanism that
blunted their ability to react to new sensations. Kracauer’s concerns
went beyond that. “People today who still have time for boredom and yet
are not bored are certainly just as boring as those who never get around
to being bored,” he wrote in the Zeitung. The bourgeoisie “are
pushed deeper and deeper into the hustle and bustle until eventually
they no longer know where their head is.”

Life in the modern city, with its cheap and ubiquitous entertainment,
was partly to blame. The glow of street advertising hijacked people’s
spirits with the promise of cheap liquor and cigarettes, while movie
theatres created the illusion of “a life that belongs to no one and
exhausts everyone.” Radio listeners were in a state of “permanent
receptivity, constantly pregnant with London, the Eiffel Tower, and
Berlin,” their souls “badgered by the news hounds” so that “soon no one
can tell anymore who is the hunter and who is the hunted.” The
disorienting experience, Kracauer complained, is like “one of those
dreams provoked by an empty stomach”: . . .

Thursday, February 20, 2014

'Titanfall' Is The First 'Must-Have' Game For Xbox One - Forbes

Friday, February 14, 2014

Do termites dream of robotic bricklayers?

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Facebook's 10th birthday: from college dorm to 1.23 billion users | Technology | The Guardian

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

eScienceCommons: Psychologists document the age our earliest memories fade

eScienceCommons: Psychologists document the age our earliest memories fade

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09658211.2013.854806

Friday, January 24, 2014

"Do what you love” is the mantra for today’s worker

"Do what you love” is the mantra for today’s worker. Why should we
assert our class interests if, according to DWYL elites like Steve Jobs,
there’s no such thing as work?

In the Name of Love | Jacobin

referenced by observer article

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/20/do-what-you-love-good-or-bad-advice

Full Article :

Many 20 and 30-somethings (if not those older and younger than that)
grew up hearing the advice that all you need to do in life is "find your
passion". The implication is that if you "do what you love" (in
shorthand: DWYL), success – and presumably happiness and money – would
follow.

People like Apple's Steve Jobs and Facebook's Mark
Zuckerberg were held up as examples (if not gurus) of this "DWYL" trend,
alongside people who quit investment banking jobs to become cheese
farmers, plumbers or yoga entrepreneurs.

But writer and art history scholar Miya Tokumitsu
argues that this romanticized notion of the working world is a
dangerous fallacy. It's the modern-day equivalent of the emperor's new
clothes myth.

In a much shared commentary for Jacobin magazine (later re-printed on Slate.com), Tokumitsu writes:

DWYL
is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises
its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking,
labor is not something one does for compensation but is an act of love.
If profit doesn't happen to follow, presumably it is because the
worker's passion and determination were insufficient. Its real
achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and
not the marketplace.

She points out that the vast
majority of jobs have no place in the DWYL world because they are "done
out of motives or needs other than love". Most people don't grow up
wanting to clean up after others or work in low-end retail or fast food
jobs. The idea that everyone gets to choose what they want to do only
applies to the wealthy. She also notes that professions such as
journalism and academia have eroded over time because people are
supposed to accept lower and lower pay in return for being lucky enough
to "follow their passion".