My Words by Others

Words I stumble upon that make me (think).

[chindemith]

“Wir unsererseits, die wir unsere Erfahrungen mit totalitären Massenorganisationen haben, deren hauptsächliches Anliegen es ist, jegliche Möglichkeit des Alleinseins abzuschaffen (von der unmenschlichen Form der Einzelhaft abgesehen), können dafür einstehen, dass in dem Augenblick, da ein Minimum des Mit-sich-selbst-Alleinseins nicht mehr garantiert ist, nicht nur das säkulare Gewissen, sondern jegliche Gewissensform verschwinden wird.” - Hannah Arendt

[chindemith]

Let’s preserve the web as the hypertext medium it is, the only thing of its kind in the world, and not turn it into another medium for consumption, like we have so many examples of already. Let’s commit to the idea that as computers get faster, and as networks get faster, the web should also get faster. Let’s not allow the panicked dinosaurs of online publishing to trample us as they stampede away from the meteor. Instead, let's hide in our holes and watch nature take its beautiful course. Most importantly, let’s break the back of the online surveillance establishment that threatens not just our livelihood, but our liberty.

The Website Obesity Crisis

[nathanjurgenson]

windows and screens

Every new technology is both creative and destructive, anything new it offers essentially comes standard with some kind of loss. For example, the emergence of trains in the 19th Century meant humans were routinely traveling faster than they had ever experienced before. While riding, they gained a new type of perception of the world, a “panoramic vision”, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes in his great history of railway travel, where riders see landscape passing quickly framed by the train car window. The blur of a foreground that would have previously been of constant attention and the newly hurried stream of background elements is for us normal but for those first riding trains it was exciting, unsettling, shocking, and new. One rider’s description:

The descriptions of the impure falseness of the railway window –too fast and too removed from ‘the real’– are an interesting parallel with how digital screens are sometimes discussed today, for example, by writers like Sherry Turkle. Like Ruskin above, Turkle understands screens as less than real, which makes it fun to notice in her new book she quotes as evidence for a reconnection with real the very same window view,

Concerns about technology destroying ‘the real’ and the human when seen from a longer view of history are usually declarations that what came before me was too slow, what is coming is too fast, but what I became used to was just right. The car window one is nostalgic for today was yesterday the site of removal from reality. Or, while Turkle champions printed books, nearly every critique digital technologies get today were made about print books before, as a remove from reality, as silly stimulation, as inhuman and upsetting traditional norms (many were offended by women reading novels as it brought them out of the domestic space). 

[chindemith]

[…] a story has lately become a glossier, less thrilling thing: a burst of pathos, a revelation without a veil to pull away. “Storytelling,” in this parlance, is best employed in the service of illuminating business principles, or selling tickets to non-profit galas, or winning contests. […] the truest thing about a person, that person’s real story, is just as often the thing withheld—the silent thing—as the thing offered.

Humans of New York and the Cavalier Consumption of Others, by Vinson Cunningham. The New Yorker, Nov. 3, 2015

[chindemith]

I have also heard the term ‘secondary orality’ lately applied by some to other sorts of electronic verbalization which are really not oral at all—to the Internet and similar computerized creations for text. There is a reason for this usage of the term. In nontechnologized oral interchange, as we have noted earlier, there is no perceptible interval between the utterance of the speaker and the hearer’s reception of what is uttered. Oral communication is all immediate, in the present. Writing, chirographic or typed, on the other hand, comes out of the past. Even if you write a memo to yourself, when you refer to it, it’s a memo which you wrote a few minutes ago, or maybe two weeks ago. But on a computer network, the recipient can receive what is communicated with no such interval. Although it is not exactly the same as oral communication, the network message from one person to another or others is very rapid and can in effect be in the present. Computerized communication can thus suggest the immediate experience of direct sound. I believe that is why computerized verbalization has been assimilated to secondary ‘orality,’ even when it comes not in oral-aural format but through the eye, and thus is not directly oral at all. Here textualized verbal exchange registers psychologically as having the temporal immediacy of oral exchange. To handle [page break] such technologizing of the textualized word, I have tried occasionally to introduce the term ‘secondary literacy.’ We are not considering here the production of sounded words on the computer, which of course are even more readily assimilated to ‘secondary orality’

Walter Jackson Ong in an interview

[chindemith]

[...] the activity conducted in both church and marketplace is a kind of search, which is of course central to what this technology is for: not just Google, but GPS, dating apps, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon—all guide us toward what they think we want. The shift from cathedral to bazaar represents a shift from search as contemplation to search as a way for capitalism to extract value, exploiting information as an energy company might an oil well. The purpose of the tools is a kind of hyper-capitalism in which freedom is freedom of commerce whenever and wherever, and, thanks to the increasing connectivity of mundane objects, often without deliberate participation.

Jenny Hendrix: Ghost in the Machine. (Review of Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Digital Age by Sven Birkerts.) Boston Review, October 26, 2015.

[chindemith]

Delegating tasks and formalizing them to the point where they could be trained and carried out by rote (what we call `process management') is essentially the art of making humans subordinate themselves to a process and act like machines. [...] bringing intelligence into the discussion of automation is at odds with the goal, because intelligence and variation are precisely what we are trying to suppress in commodity replication.

http://markburgess.org/blog_work.html

[chindemith]

The classic example is that almost everybody cites this apparent juxtaposition of Instagram—thirteen programmers taking out a giant corporation, Kodak, with 140,000 workers. In fact, that's not what happened at all. For one thing, Kodak wasn't killed by Instagram. Kodak was a company that put a gun to its head and pulled the trigger multiple times until it was dead. It just made all kinds of strategic blunders. The simplest evidence of that is its competitor, Fuji, which did very well across this chasm of the Internet. The deeper thought is that Instagram, as a new‑age photo sharing system, couldn't exist until the modern Internet was built, and that probably created somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million jobs, and made them good jobs. The notion that Instagram killed both Kodak and the jobs is just fundamentally wrong.

The Next Wave. A Conversation With John Markoff [7.16.15]

[chindemith]

The libertarian spirit and ideology that founded and fostered the Internet is, in many ways, the same one that gave rise to its rapid commercialization. Private, user-friendly platforms are eating the open Internet—they’ve become synonymous with it, and, in some cases, even transcended it. They can be tremendous tools, but, as long as a bulk of our interpersonal communications are mediated by these businesses, our speech won’t be free. Laws protect platforms’ right to host or not to host our speech, whatever our speech may be. Ultimately, we’ve traded connectivity and convenience for the original populist promise of the Internet.

Susie Cagle: Chuck Johnson Is A Massive Baby Who Doesnt Know How To Read Service Agreements

[chindemith]

.@jjn1: “[...] we need to rise above the optimist-pessimist, Utopian-distopyan dichotomies that characterize our current discussions about the Internet. [...] The problem with the optimist-pessimist dichotomy is that the optimists rarely address the reality of destruction while the pessimists rarely acknowledge the creative possibilities of the new. We need to transcend this sterile shouting match. Like electricity, the networked information environment is here to stay; the technology cannot be un-invented, and our societies are already too dependent on it to drop it. It offers us great potential benefits, but the powerful vested interests that are threatened by it want to capture and control it for their own ends. And our dependence on it raises serious and worrying questions not just about security and privacy but also about cultural freedom, creativity and diversity. These are the things we should be talking about [...].”

John Naughton: What You Really Need to Know about the Internet. From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, pp. 294/5

[chindemith]

But with the printed book, another tradition began: the isolated reader and his private eye. Orality became muted and the reader and his response became separated from a social context. The reader retired within his own mind and, from the sixteenth century to the present, what most readers have required of others is their absence or, if not that, their silence. In reading, both the writer and the reader enter into a conspiracy of sorts against social presence and consciousness.

Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (1996), p. 27

[chindemith]

Meanwhile, there’s another kind of loss happening that we’re less in touch with: a cultural erasure, a mass abandonment of intellectual value, which takes place as our data contrails, their monetizable details extracted, vaporize into the ether. The contexts we assemble in our online existences each day never get a chance to enlighten us over time; instead, we throw them away, or hand them over to Facebook or Google, Apple or Amazon.

Scott Rosenberg: “The Failed Promise of Deep Links”

[chindemith]

But we have almost completely neglected to inquire how Shakespeare managed to make his work a place in which we can all meet.

Stephen Greenblatt: Shakespeare in Tehran

[chindemith]

Es scheint also in jüngster Zeit eine deutliche Tendenz zur Kleinschreibung in der Welt des Corporate Design zu geben. Welche Assoziationen soll dieses Gestaltungsprinzip heraufbeschwören? Auffällig ist ja, dass es gerade um Eigennamen geht, um eine Wortgruppe also, der sogar in jenen Sprachen ein großer Anfangsbuchstabe zugestanden wird, die alle anderen Substantive klein schreiben. Der Name ist die letzte Bastion der Majuskel; in der Erhebung am Anfang des Wortes ist die Differenz der bezeichneten Person zu den bloßen Sachen ausgedrückt, so als trügen die Namen eine Art Szepter vor sich her, das ihre Souveränität unterstreicht. Aus den klein geschriebenen Namenszügen ist diese Differenz getilgt; die Eigennamen fügen sich vielmehr ein in das unterschiedslose Gemenge der restlichen Wörter.

Andreas Bernhard: Kleinschreibung (SZ Magazin)

[chindemith]

Man könnte den Bedeutungsverlust des Geldes [...] auf ein einziges Faktum reduzieren, auf das Faktum der nahezu kostenlosen Kopierbarkeit digitaler Produkte [...]. Das ist unbestreitbar wichtig, denn es hat zahlreiche Industrien, deren Geschäftsmodelle auf Kopiersperren, also Exklusionspraktiken dieser oder jener Art beruhen, in größte Schwierigkeiten gebracht und andere Industrien, die eher auf eine Dynamik der Ansteckung setzen, ungeahnte Erfolge beschert. Aber noch wichtiger scheint mir zu sein, dass Geld und Kapital ebenso wie Macht und Politik, ganz zu schweigen von Forschung und Wissenschaft, Gott und Religion, sogar Kunst und Ästhetik, im Handumdrehen ausgehebelt werden können, wenn sich nur die richtige Verbindung [...] einstellt. Man könnte von Killerverbindungen sprechen, deren Logik eine Logik der Ansteckung ist.

Dirk Baecker: Zur Nullzinspolitik der Notenbanken. An der Schwelle zur nächsten Gesellschaft, in: Merkur 788, 69. Jahrgang, Januar 2015, S. 18-29, hier S. 27

[chindemith]

Walter Benjamin schrieb seine Überlegungen zu "Was ist Aura?" auf einen Zettel mit roten Sternen - Werbung für San Pellegrino Mineralwasser und Grundlage des Essays "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" (1936), in dem er die berühmteste Definition für das gegeben hat, was ein Original ist: "Aura ist Erscheinen einer Ferne so nah sie sein mag. Worte selbst haben ihre Aura..." (via Literaturmuseum der Moderne, Marbach)

[chindemith]

This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word, which, as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavour to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called the three Princes of Serendip: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right--now do you understand Serendipity?

Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann, January 28, 1754