Electronic Media Quotes

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Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
Philip K. Dick
We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
Terence McKenna
The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains. Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.
Timothy Leary (Chaos & Cyber Culture)
One day I would like to make up my own DSM-111 with a list of “disorders” I have seen in my practice. For example, I would want to include the diagnosis “psychological modernism,” an uncritical acceptance of the values of the modern world. It includes blind faith in technology, inordinate attachment to material gadgets and conveniences, uncritical acceptance of the march of scientific progress, devotion to the electronic media, and a life-style dictated by advertising.
Thomas Moore (Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life)
There is no money in what is aptly called free association: we are instead encouraged by media and advertising to fear each other and regard public life as a danger and a nuisance, to live in secured spaces, communicate by electronic means, and acquire our information from media rather than each other.
Rebecca Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster)
A pencil is an extension of a finger writing in the sand. But our electronic media are extensions of our brains.
Susan Maushart (The Winter of Our Disconnect)
Contrary to the tenets of conventional wisdom, viral ideas and campaigns were not first transmitted via the electronic media of the Internet age. Their ideological forebears lived and replicated in the host coffee-houses, inns and taverns of the early eighteenth-century.
Gavin John Adams (Letters to John Law)
After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large-scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication-driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human-made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.
Ilan Pappé (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine)
Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media...
David Graeber (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory)
After an attack with weapons of mass destruction by a terrorist group or a terrorist nation, the next major threat to our existence is the violent decay of our civilization due to violence-enabling in the electronic media.
Dave Grossman (On Killing)
I don’t think that the definition of library has changed. Libraries have never been repositories solely of books. In Alexandria for instance, the model of the ideal library perhaps, there was a will to collect every book in the world, but at the same time they had maps and objects and there was a sense that this was a world of study and communication. The technology changes, and so electronic media should enter the library as long as we don’t forget that there are also books. I don’t believe in technologies that want to exclude one another. A new technology comes into the world and believes that it can bill itself on the corpse of the previous technology, but that never happens. Photography did not eliminate painting. Film did not eliminate theater and so on. One technology feeds on the vocabulary of the other, and I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they’re certainly not synonymous.
Alberto Manguel
there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.
Greg Lukianoff (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure)
electronic media have become an environment of their own- to the list of neighborhood and region and continent and planet we must now add television as a place where we live. and the problem is not that it exists- the problem is that it supplants. it's simplicity makes complexity hard to fathom.
Bill McKibben (The Age of Missing Information)
Misinformation and disinformation about ritual abuse and mind control trauma and psychotherapy to treat such trauma appear in both paper and electronic media, but are particularly abundant on the Internet on websites of individuals and organizations, bookseller reviews, blogs, newsletters, online encyclopedias, social networking sites, and e-group listservs.
Ellen P. Lacter
By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light. At the speed of light, you aren’t going somewhere, you’re already there. On the telephone you’re not going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, going somewhere, you’re there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives, we’re already there. McLuhan CD-ROM
Marshall McLuhan
Scientists have found that the amount of time spent milkshake-multitasking among American young people has increased by 120 percent in the last ten years. According to a report in the Archives of General Psychiatry, simultaneous exposure to electronic media during the teenage years—such as playing a computer game while watching television—appears to be associated with increased depression and anxiety in young adulthood, especially among men.[1] Considering that teens are exposed to an average of eight and a half hours of multitasking electronic media per day, we need to change something quickly.[2] Social Media Enthusiast or Addict? Another concern this raises is whether you are or your teen is a social media enthusiast or simply a
Caroline Leaf (Switch On Your Brain: The Key to Peak Happiness, Thinking, and Health)
Simply put, we have more people talking about news and less original reporting. Whether on television or online, there is no shortage of analysis. But analysis is only as good as the information that supports it. The deep cuts to newsrooms in print and electronic media have resulted in far fewer reporters waking up each morning deciding what story they will chase. There is less investigative reporting ....
Dan Rather (What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism)
America today remembers its history through visual imagery. Film, print, and electronic media are very capital intensive, which means that most Americans are consumers, not producers, of the images through which they remember.
Jerry Lembcke (The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam)
A person needs ideas in order to survive. A person whom ascribes to a philosophy for living and is dedicated to constant learning will find that ordinary life is enough without living in a zone of consumer consumption and media devices.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
Anyone who speaks through electronic media has had his or her patter carefully shaped by a script; the delivery - tone, intonation, emphasis - has been rehearsed:' He adds, "TV kills the human voice. People cannot argue with anything on the screen. TV images pass by too fast for young minds to consider or analyze them." No matter how "lively" the conversation modeled on television, the medium itself works to suppress the spontaneity, imagination, and attentive listening required in actual conversation.
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre (Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies)
I think most of us intuitively understand how important the fundamentals are. It is just that we sometimes get distracted by so many things that seem more enticing. Printed material, wide-ranging media sources, electronic tools and gadgets—all helpful if used properly—can become hurtful diversions or heartless chambers of isolation. Yet amidst the multitude of voices and choices, the humble Man of Galilee stands with hands outstretched, waiting. His is a simple message: ‘Come, follow me.’ And He does not speak with a powerful megaphone but with a still, small voice. It is so easy for the basic gospel message to get lost amidst the deluge of information that hits us from all sides.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
If I am to believe everything that I see in the media, happiness is to be six foot tall or more and to have bleached teeth and a firm abdomen, all the latest clothes, accessories, and electronics, a picture-perfect partner of the opposite sex who is both a great lover and a terrific friend, an assortment of healthy and happy children, a pet that is neither a stray nor a mongrel, a large house in the right sort of postcode, a second property in an idyllic holiday location, a top-of-the-range car to shuttle back and forth from the one to the other, a clique of ‘friends’ with whom to have fabulous dinner parties, three or four foreign holidays a year, and a high-impact job that does not distract from any of the above. There are at least three major problems that I can see with this ideal of happiness. (1) It represents a state of affairs that is impossible to attain to and that is in itself an important source of unhappiness. (2) It is situated in an idealised and hypothetical future rather than in an imperfect but actual present in which true happiness is much more likely to be found, albeit with great difficulty. (3) It has largely been defined by commercial interests that have absolutely nothing to do with true happiness, which has far more to do with the practice of reason and the peace of mind that this eventually brings. In short, it is not only that the bar for happiness is set too high, but also that it is set in the wrong place, and that it is, in fact, the wrong bar. Jump and you’ll only break your back.
Neel Burton (The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide)
Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.
Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure)
A party, or any institution that is in power or in opposition, does all things to get only for its own goal and interests, no matter in a legal way or through illegal resources, like forces, print and electronic media, and negative propaganda among the people , spending the millions of money for this. It is called dirty politics by the support of evil spirits.
Ehsan Sehgal
Old media companies will be further challenged in the next 15 years, as a new wave of user-generated content washes over the Internet, thanks to the increasing availability and affordability of portable, digital-based electronic devices. The cameraphones which seemed like such novelties just a few years ago will be in everyone's purse and pocket a few years from now.
Ian Lamont
The loyalty with the Constitution and all institutions is a significant step towards national dignity and democracy. A big shock to Raw, Mossad, and Qadiyanies elements inside and outside of Pakistan. Qadri and Imran Khan's conspiracy has failed. Print and electronic media should keep an eye on Qadiyanies and those who are active in it to create a state of utter confusion and disorder.
Ehsan Sehgal
In our quest to become more connected we have actually created a disturbing disconnect where real social interaction has been abandoned in favor of the immediate gratification afforded by electronic devices.
Michael ONeill (Road Work: Images And Insights Of A Modern Day Explorer)
There have been vast changes in the composition and role of the news media over the decades, and that is a cause for concern as well. When I first entered government nearly forty-eight years ago, three television networks and a handful of newspapers dominated coverage and, to a considerable degree, filtered the most extreme or vitriolic points of view. Today, with hundreds of cable channels, blogs, and other electronic media, too often the professional integrity and long-established standards and practices of journalists are diluted or ignored. Every point of view—including the most extreme—has a ready vehicle for rapid dissemination. And it seems the more vitriolic the opinion, the more attention it gets. This system is clearly more democratic and open, but I believe it has also fueled the coarsening and dumbing down of our national political dialogue.
Robert M. Gates (Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War)
South Central Los Angeles, for example, is a data and media black hole, without local cable programming or links to major data systems. Just as it became a housing-and-jobs ghetto in the postwar period, it is now evolving into an off-net electronic ghetto.
Mike Davis (Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster)
They say land of the free and the home of the brave,” he mutters, shaking his head as he resumes our walk. “Yeah, they do,” I follow behind him. “Your point?” He turns back to me. “I say, it’s the land of the mentally inept, electronically dependent, and brainwashed media slaves.
Kate Stewart (Flock (The Ravenhood, #1))
And in an ironic twist, Neal Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible to reach electronically—his website offers no e-mail address and features an essay about why he is purposefully bad at using social media. Here’s how he once explained the omission: “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time … there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself.
Jean Baudrillard (Screened Out)
The truth is no online database will replace your newspaper,” he claimed. “Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.” Stoll captured the prevailing skepticism of a digital world full of “interacting libraries, virtual communities, and electronic commerce” with one word: “baloney.
Kevin Kelly (The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future)
For some hippies, this vision could only be realised by rejecting scientific progress as a false God and returning to nature. Others, in contrast, believed that technological progress would inevitably turn their libertarian principles into social fact. Crucially, influenced by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, these technophiliacs thought that the convergence of media, computing and telecommunications would inevitably create the electronic agora - a virtual place where everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship. Despite being a middle-aged English professor, McLuhan preached the radical message that the power of big business and big government would be imminently overthrown by the intrinsically empowering effects of new technology on individuals.
Richard Barbrook
My core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth--from the Judeo-Christian premise of unfathomable mystery--and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral consciousness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead to a faith in the web. What is our idea, our ideal, of wisdom these days? Who represents it? Who even invokes it? Our postmodern culture is a vast fabric of completing isms; we are leaderless and subject to the terrors, masked as the freedoms, of an absolute relativism. It would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of technology, but more wrong to ignore the great transformative impact of new technological systems--to act as if it's all just business as usual.
Sven Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age)
The idea on which Lick’s worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be “informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government.” He imagined what he called “home computer consoles” and television sets linked together in a massive network. “The political process,” he wrote, “would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer.” Lick’s
Katie Hafner (Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet)
The problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener…. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes….
Kurt Andersen (Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History)
Emotional chaos supplied by detachment, remoteness, and aloneness creates its own pathos of loneliness, quiet desperation, and despair. A person who lives in seclusion experiences a stronger yearning to blunt their solitude by establishing a false sense of connection via the artifice of plugging into television, engaging in Internet surfacing, and participating in other entertaining diversionary activities that fill the void of mental stillness. Americans multitasking on electronic devices is escapism at megabyte speed.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
What is most dystopian about all of the digital houses designed for customized consumption is the implication that the entire landscape could be covered with new houses lacking any social or economic neighborhood context. Designers minimize the need for family or neighborhood interaction if they plan for digital surveillance as a route to ordering mass-produced commodities as well as handling work and civic life. If many external activities, such as paid work, exercise, shopping, seeking entertainment, and voting, are able to be done in-house through the various electronic communications systems, reasons for going outside decrease. The residents become isolated, although the house continues to function as a container for mass-produced goods and electronic media. In a landscape bristling with tens of thousands of digital houses and cell towers, where the ground is laced with hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, neighborhoods may not exist. Car journeys involving traffic problems may disappear, although the roads will be clogged with delivery vans.
Dolores Hayden (Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000)
Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time and silence. Reading is a means of listening. Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shout rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you. Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination. […] Books may not be “books”, of course, they may not be ink on wood pulp but a flicker of electronics in the palm of a hand. Incoherent and commercialized and worm-eaten with porn and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.
Ursula K. Le Guin (Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016)
My point is that we are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the "Now . . . this" world of news—a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events—that all assumptions of coherence have vanished. And so, perforce, has contradiction. In the context of no context, so to speak, it simply disappears. And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then? It is merely a rehash of old news, and there is nothing interesting or entertaining in that.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
Finally, the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I'm speaking particularly of electronic mass media) - that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. Neither in content, nor in form. Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real - thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other. Circularity of all media effects. Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must envisage this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us. It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.
Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism))
What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice? An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance. The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color—including the presence of armed security guards and police—and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for decarceration.
Angela Y. Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series))
Myth Number 4: Social Media Is the Shiny New Thing. Two Years from Now, That Bubble Will Burst Yes, it is the shiny new thing. No, two years from now, that bubble will not burst. There is no bubble. What social media represents is an evolution in the field of communications, just as the Internet and mobility before it. The tools will change, the platforms will evolve, but the way in which people communicate with other people through digital networks and electronic devices has been fundamentally transformed through the development of social media. We did not grow tired of the telephone, of the...
Olivier J. Blanchard (Social Media ROI: Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization (Que Biz-Tech))
The “masters” of our current servant class have no leisure either. The slave is a slave of a slave, and these days at the top of heap of the slaves there is not even an exploitative gentleman farmer—writing essays, dissecting animals, and speculating on the nature of the political—but another slave at a higher social rank. The wealthier in the chain impose such burdens on themselves, just as many of us in positions of privilege willingly put ourselves under electronic surveillance as constant as the Amazon warehouse, posting to social media even our time at the gym or our obsessions with our pets.
Zena Hitz (Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life)
Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment: InterLace TelEntertainment, 932/1864 R.I.S.C. power-TPs w/ or w/o console, Pink2, post-Primestar D.S.S. dissemination, menus and icons, pixel-free InterNet Fax, tri- and quad-modems w/ adjustable baud, post-Web Dissemination-Grids, screens so high-def you might as well be there, cost-effective videophonic conferencing, internal Froxx CD-ROM, electronic couture, all-in-one consoles, Yushityu ceramic nanoprocessors, laser chromatography, Virtual-capable media-cards, fiber-optic pulse, digital encoding, killer apps; carpal neuralgia, phosphenic migraine, gluteal hyperadiposity, lumbar stressae.
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
There was a rush of expectation with the vast transformation of our society by social media and by the internet itself. To be sure, we have greater access to each other now, we can find each other more easily, but we can also annoy each other more incessantly, intrude more abruptly, and use and abuse each other more profoundly by bombarding folks with unwanted commercial, religious, political, sentimentalized, and trivial chaff. (Wherever the human imprint advances, the Shadow follows apace.) For all the connectivity the modern electronic world offers, and I do appreciate that gift, I also perceive that we are more atomized, more disconnected from each other than ever before.
James Hollis (Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times)
News people—the media elite—had been a terrible scourge during his childhood. But they had gradually lost power with the advent of bidirectional, reputation-endorsed public commentary via Web links shortly after the turn of the millennium. People who published on the Web—especially people who wanted the title of "reporter"—had to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Failure was brutally and swiftly punished with electronic tar and digital feathers. Despite a rocky start, honesty had taken over as the currency of the Web—a devastating if subtle blow to manipulators of public opinion. Weakened by the Web, the media elite had died alongside their political bedfellows [...}
Marc Stiegler (Earthweb)
On the other hand, some of the family’s impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you’ve made an error; with the post office, you have to wait. Haven’t we all at some point tested its humanity? I send mail to friends in Upper Molar, New York (they live in Upper Nyack), and expect a stranger to laugh and deliver it in forty-eight hours. More often than not, the stranger does. With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way. You may have to wait for hours in a dimly lit corridor. The staff may be short-tempered and dilatory. But eventually you will get treated. In the Central Post Office’s Nixie unit—where mail arrives that has been illegibly or incorrectly addressed—I see street numbers in the seventy thousands; impossible pairings of zip codes and streets; addresses without a name, without a street, without a city; addresses that consist of the description of a building; addresses written in water-based ink that rain has blurred. Skilled Nixie clerks study the orphans one at a time. Either they find a home for them or they apply that most expressive of postal markings, the vermilion finger of accusation that lays the blame squarely on you, the sender.
Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone)
I’m trying to remember how I got this way. I don’t recall always being this out of it. Nicholas Carr blames our use of electronic technology for scraping us gaunt. In his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Carr points out that our habitual electronic multitasking between smartphones, websites, news feeds, and social media is dramatically rewiring the neurological pathways in our brains. According to Carr, all our browsing and liking and streaming and retweeting has conditioned the ability to focus right out of us. “In the choices we have made . . . ,” writes Carr, “we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration. . . . We have cast our lot with the juggler.”4 “Tell me,” a wise friend once asked, “What is it you are doing with the singular gift of your life?” Juggling?
Michael Yankoski (The Sacred Year: Mapping the Soulscape of Spiritual Practice -- How Contemplating Apples, Living in a Cave, and Befriending a Dying Woman Revived My Life)
How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the "information-action" ratio.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
The media environment... has changed in ways that foster [social and cultural] division. Long gone is the time when everybody watched one of three national television networks. By the 1990s there was a cable news channel for most points on the political spectrum, and by the early 2000s there was a website or discussion group for every conceivable interest group and grievance. By the 2010s most Americans were using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which make it easy to encase oneself within an echo-chamber. And then there's the "filter bubble," in which search engines and YouTube algorithms are designed to give you more of what you seem to be interested in, leading conservatives and progressives into disconnected moral matrices backed up by mutually contradictory informational worlds. Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.
Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure)
In teaching an honors writing class, I juxtaposed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, an electronic hypertext fiction written in proprietary Storyspace software. Since these were honors students, many of them had already read Frankenstein and were, moreover, practiced in close reading and literary analysis. When it came to digital reading, however, they were accustomed to the scanning and fast skimming typical of hyper reading; they therefore expected that it might take them, oh, half an hour to go through Jackson’s text. They were shocked when I told them a reasonable time to spend with Jackson’s text was about the time it would take them to read Frankenstein, say, ten hours or so. I divided them into teams and assigned a section of Jackson’s text to each team, telling them that I wanted them to discover all the lexias (i.e., blocks of digital text) in their section and warning them that the Storyspace software allows certain lexias to be hidden until others are read. Finally, I asked them to diagram interrelations between lexias, drawing on all three views that the Storyspace software enables. As a consequence, the students were not only required to read closely but also to analyze the narrative strategies Jackson uses to construct her text.
N. Katherine Hayles (How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis)
By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading
Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
When General Genius built the first mentar [Artificial Intelligence] mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul. Or so the General genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn't seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer. And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals. As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us. ... The genius of the irrational... ... We gave them only rational functions -- the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions... Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your 'gut instinct'? This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possesses it. The mentar substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does. Likewise, mentars have no 'fire in the belly,' but we do. They don't experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They're not very curious, or playful, or proud. They lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. They have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic. But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition in the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mentar having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there's luck itself. Some people have it, most don't, and no mentar does. So this makes them want our bodies... Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They've tried them all. Every cell knows some neat tricks or survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it's not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We're pretty much trapped in our containers.
David Marusek (Mind Over Ship)
The Clintons’ last act before leaving the White House was to take stuff that didn’t belong to them. The Clintons took china, furniture, electronics, and art worth around $360,000. Hillary literally went through the rooms of the White House with an aide, pointing to things that she wanted taken down from shelves or out of cabinets or off the wall. By Clinton theft standards $360,000 is not a big sum, but it certainly underlines the couple’s insatiable greed—these people are not bound by conventional limits of propriety or decency. When the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee blew the whistle on this misappropriation, the Clintons first claimed that the stuff was given to them as gifts. Unfortunately for Hillary, gifts given to a president belong to the White House—they are not supposed to be spirited away by the first lady. The Clintons finally agreed to return $28,000 worth of gifts and reimburse the government $95,000, representing a fraction of the value of what they took. One valuable piece of art the Clintons attempted to steal was a Norman Rockwell painting showing the flame from Lady Liberty’s torch. Hillary had the painting taken from the Oval Office to the Clinton home in Chappaqua, but the Secret Service got wind of it and sent a car to Chappaqua to get it back. Hillary was outraged. Even here, though, the Clintons got the last laugh: they persuaded the Obama administration to let the Clinton Library have the painting, and there it hangs today. In Living History, Hillary put on a straight face and dismissed media reports about the topic. “The culture of investigation,” she wrote, “followed us out the door of the White House when clerical errors in the recording of gifts mushroomed into a full-blown flap, generating hundreds of news stories over several months.”17
Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
As Jefferson wrote in a letter to Charles Yancey: “The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.” In the age of our Founders, this human impulse to demand the right of co-creating shared wisdom accounted for the ferocity with which the states demanded protection for free access to the printing press, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition the government, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. General George Washington, in a speech to officers of the army in 1783, said, “If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” But the twentieth century brought its own bitter lessons. The new and incredibly powerful electronic media that began to replace the printing press—first radio and film and then television—were used to indoctrinate millions of Germans, Austrians, Italians, Russians, Japanese, Chinese, and others with elaborate abstract ideologies that made many of them deaf, blind, and numb to the systematic leading of tens of millions of their fellow human beings “to the slaughter.
Al Gore (The Assault on Reason)
( O1O'2920'8855 )PCASH( O1O'2920'8855 ) budget, including running a contest targeting ACRC officials for promotion ideas. In particular, the Commission effectively promoted its public whistleblower protection system and the Government Welfare Fraud Report Center, using public media such as government publications and about 300 electronic display boards owned by public agencies
dayomin
It is proper Netiquette to post pictures with status updates to make them more engaging. NetworkEtiquette.net
David Chiles
Archivist / Circuit Bender For the figure of the artist, technical media has meant nods both toward engineering and the archive, as Huhtamo has noted: “the role of the artist-engineer, which rose into prominence in the 1960s (although its two sides rarely met in one person), has at least partly been supplanted by that of the artist-archaeologist.”23 Yet methodologies of reuse, hardware hacking, and circuit bending are becoming increasingly central in this context as well. Bending or repurposing the archive of media history strongly relates to the pioneering works of artists such as Paul DeMarinis, Zoe Beloff, or Gebhard Sengmüller—where a variety of old media technologies have been modified and repurposed to create pseudo-historical objects from a speculative future.
Jussi Parikka (A Geology of Media (Electronic Mediations Book 46))
When ordinary people eventually gain access to and control of leading-edge communication technologies, they can more effectively oppose the power of the state. In the democratic Greek city-states, the alphabet proved mightier than the sword; in the medieval era, the printing press was mightier than the Roman Catholic Church; and in the modern world, the cell phone camera is mightier than the surveillance camera. Viewed through the widest possible lens, four great communications technologies have engulfed the human race: first, language itself; second, writing; third, the mechanization of writing, that is, printing with movable type; and fourth, the electronic encoding of information.
William J. Bernstein (Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History from the Alphabet to the Internet)
It is difficult to walk, talk, eat, exercise, make love, or drive an automobile while reading.
Joshua Meyrowitz (No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior)
Our virtual self becomes a constant reflection of what we’ve done today, what we think today, what we’ve seen today, and what other people think about what we’ve done, what we think, and about what we’ve seen. In other words, it is very easy for us to use social media as an electronic embodiment of the Narcissus myth, or—if you will—an electronic hall of mirrors.
Steven Buser (A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of Donald Trump : First Edition (Newer Edition Released 2017...."in the Era of President Trump")
It turns out that this epidemic of comparing our lives to others’ that social media has escalated has led to a new electronically spread disease. Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, calls it FOMO: fear of missing out.
John Ortberg (All the Places to Go . . . How Will You Know?: God Has Placed before You an Open Door. What Will You Do?)
A century from now, it will be well known that: the vacuum of space which fills the universe is itself the real substratum of the universe; vacuum in a circulating state becomes matter; the electron is the fundamental particle of matter and is a vortex of vacuum with a vacuum-less void at the center and is dynamically stable; the speed of light relative to vacuum is the maximum speed that nature has provided and is an inherent property of the vacuum; vacuum is a subtle fluid unknown in material media; vacuum is mass-less, continuous, non viscous, and incompressible and is responsible for all the properties of matter; and that vacuum has always existed and will exist forever. Then scientists, engineers and philosophers will bend their heads in shame knowing that modern science ignored the vacuum in our chase to discover reality for more than a century” – Paramahamsa Tewari (source) Many materialistically inclined
Anonymous
I personally cannot help thinking that social media will make us more, not less, receptive to friendship, just as eighteenth-century Pietists imagined we became more receptive to God by reflecting on ourselves everyday with pen and paper. Writing about oneself and photographing oneself doesn’t have to be seen as the consummate act of narcissism that it is often portrayed to be.
Andrew Piper (Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times)
One such scientist is Paul Ehrlich, who writes: “Scientists need to be direct and succinct when dealing with the electronic media. One could talk for hours about the uncertainties associated with global warming. But a statement like ‘Pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere could lead to large-scale food shortages’ is entirely accurate scientifically and will catch the public’s attention.”42 Is such a statement “entirely accurate scientifically”? What about the fact that were it not for the industry that necessarily emits greenhouse gases and were it not for the fact that Ehrlich’s proposals to dismantle it were not followed, millions or billions would have died of starvation?
Alex Epstein (The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels)
Although the role categories are interrelated, each has its
Joshua Meyrowitz (No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior)
I am sure that Pakistani secret agencies are and were aware of the activities of the Qadiyaanies against Pakistan and Islam from around the world, especially from London, Germany, and other European countries. If not, then they should know that leaders of the "Qadiyaani religious" groups are following Jews lines and Indian Raw style to buy print and electronic media sources and business resources, to dominate the Muslim majority, and destruction of Pakistan and spread their so-called a person, self-claimed prophet's teachings, but in the real British agent Mirza Qadiyani who died in the toilet. The Qadiyani groups are busy and entered the print, electronic and social media, and different institutions to perform dirty role against Islam and Pakistan. I am pretty sure and believe that their end is very near.
Ehsan Sehgal
Mostly Pakistani electronic and print media are talking, spreading, and participating in the foreign policy agenda against Islam, Armed Forces, Pakistan, and the Pakistani nation by receiving funds for that purpose. It is common sense to understand that there is no one; who will do against their people and land without getting any reward and money. They have organized the so-called "Amn Ki Aasha"; they are not on the "Mission of Peace," but on the "Mission of Destruction" of the moral, Islamic, and cultural values of our society. They are openly traitors and agents of foreign secret agencies, especially Indians. The agencies do not leave the proof and sign of their involvement. We should, as a Muslim nation and as a great Armed Forces of the world, first, trace and clean up the traitors and agents at home and within us and then turn to others, out of the homeland. The enemies, who are active to destroy our beloved Pakistani security, and peace, our media is the ugly enemy of our defense system, it should and must be brought to justice to give the lesson forever.
Ehsan Sehgal
IN THE 1970S, not long before he died, the sci-fi writer Phil Dick moved into an apartment in Orange County a few miles from Disneyland, an irony not lost on him. There he wrote a perfect summary of his dread about the transformation of American society and culture as the real and unreal became indistinguishable. “We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.” I can’t do better, so I’ll quote him at length. The problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener…. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes…. I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides….Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.
Kurt Andersen (Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History)
I am a steadfastly 20th-century guy. I've always been pathologically au courant. Even today I can tell you the length of Justin Bieber's hair. But it has now reduced society to such a trivial, crippled form, that it is beyond my notice. I look at things like Twitter and Facebook, and "reality TV" – which is one of the great frauds of our time, an oxymoron like "giant shrimp" – and I look at it all, and I say, these people do not really know what the good life is. I look at the parched lives that so many people live, the desperation that underlies their every action, and I say, this has all been brought about by the electronic media. And I do not envy them. I do not wish to partake of it, and I am steadfastly in the 20th century. I do not own a handheld device. Mine is an old dial-up laptop computer, which I barely can use – barely. I still write on a manual typewriter. Not even an electronic typewriter, but a manual. My books keep coming out. I have over 100 books published now, and I've reached as close to posterity as a poor broken vessel such as I am entitled to reach.
Harlan Ellison
From a literary crazy, for a political crazy An Open Letter Your Excellency, Donald John Trump, President of the United States An ability of vision is a gift of God that no one can acquire in educational institutions or the White House. I neither fall in frustration and anger nor notice seriously fake and false news that whenever one tries to paste on my character. Virtually, a responsible print and electronic media whenever publish and deliver the news as publicly; indeed, it carries reliable sources; however, the media cannot reveal that for journalistic reasons. It neither means the news is fake nor personal blames for political motives, nor media become obliged to prove that. Whereas, a figure, who declares that as fake and false news; honestly, as a denier, it has to prove such claim or adopt legal proceedings against the media. Thundering vociferous remarks upon media; precisely, exhibit the conduct of leaders of non-developed countries; thus, behave wisely as a civilized leader and President of the United States, not as the international comic and inelegant. Please focus on the pandemic of coronavirus disease around the world rather than fake news and personal interests. Thanks. Yours sincerely Ehsan Sehgal
Ehsan Sehgal
An essential innovation during the development stage of the Internet was e-mail. It was invented in 1971 by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson, who developed software to send electronic mail messages to any computer on ARPAnet. He decided to use the @ symbol to signify the location of the computer user, thus establishing the “login name@host computer” convention for e-mail addresses.
Richard Campbell (Media & Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication)
McLuhan's insight was that the communications media both extend our range and implode into us. His first law of media is that all the media are extensions of aspects of man. Writing extends memory, when we use a paper and a pen to record our thoughts; the car extends the foot, clothing the skin. Electronic media are extensions of our nervous systems: the telegraph, radio, and telephone extend the range of the human ear, the television camera extends the eye and sight, the computer extends the processing capacities of our central nervous system. He argued that the process of extending our nervous system also alters it. [...] As we use an electronic medium, our nervous system extends outward, and the medium extends inward.
Norman Doidge (The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science)
The neutral and honest print and electronic media are free advisers, mirrors, information, and opinion of the nation for ruling and non-ruling political parties. Thus, such media deserve subsidies without distinctions to stay stable as the fourth pillar of democracy.
Ehsan Sehgal
Social media also leaves an electronic trail, which enables activists like myself to gather evidence to discredit our opponents. For instance, it was recently discovered that James Gunn, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy film series, had tweeted some jokes about paedophilia many years ago. In my humble opinion, joking about paedophilia is even worse than actual paedophilia. Don’t get me wrong; an act of physical molestation is obviously abhorrent, but at least it can’t be retweeted.
Titania McGrath (Woke: A Guide to Social Justice)
We’ve all had delicate, uncomfortable, or even painful conversations with our kids about their diets, exercise, electronic devices, social media, alcohol, sex, etc. Sometimes we throw up our hands, walk away, and hope for the best. Is college one of those times? Do we defer to a 17-year-old, who we love dearly but likely wouldn’t completely trust with a grocery list, a decision that may cost the family a quarter of a million dollars? Or do we apply a process to make the best decisions when we help them choose a career and select a college?
Jeff Tyburski (Your Sherpa: Your Parental Guide to Financial Literacy)
The myths of the egalitarian and empowering nature of this technology have been cultivated for a reason. Police agencies of the global order can only be gratified by the willingness of actives to concentrate their organizing around internet strategies, by which they voluntarily kettle themselves in cyberspace, where state surveillance, sabotage, and manipulation are far easier than in lived communities and localities where actual encounters occur. If one's goal is radical social transformation, electronic media in their current forms of mass availability are not useless -- but only when they are subordinate to struggles and encounters taking place elsewhere. If networks are not int the service of already existing relationship forged out of shared experience and proximity, they will always reproduce and reinforce the separations, the opacity, the dissimulations, and the self-interestedness inherent in their use. Any social turbulence whose primary sources are in the use of social media will inevitable he historically ephemeral and inconsequential.
Jonathan Crary (24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep)
OMEGA SERIES BOX SET: BOOKS 13-15 Copyright © 2020 by Blake Banner All right reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents
Blake Banner (The Omega Series: Books 13-15 (Omega #13-15))
On a show like Newsline, the frame was all-important. Older producers on the show talked about 'context,' which to them meant putting the story in a larger setting. Indicating what the story meant, by reporting what had happened before, or reporting similar things that had occurred. The older guys thought context so important, they seemed to regard it as a kind of moral or ethical obligation. Jennifer disagreed. Because when you cut out all the sanctimonious bullshit, context was just spin, a way of pumping the story—and not a very useful way, because context meant referring to the past. Jennifer had no interest in the past; she was one of the new generation that understood that gripping television was now, events happening now, a flow of images in a perpetual unending electronic present. Context by its very nature required something more than now, and her interest did not go beyond now. Nor, she thought, did anyone else's. The past was dead and gone. Who cared what you ate yesterday? What you did yesterday? What was immediate and compelling was now. And television at its best was now.
Michael Crichton (Airframe)
Started in Argentina, escrache has spread to other Latin American countries as a popular movement to oust, shame and ostracize retired generals, politicians and other powerful figures who have committed unpunished crimes. After locating the criminal in question, the organizers would inform his neighbors that here lives a state-sanctioned mass murderer or torturer, or a looter of public funds. Later, thousands of people would converge on this man's house to publicly indict the blood-drenched fat cat. Though this Latin American version of a Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush or Obama is never physically attacked, the monster will be shunned by many of his neighbors, with local businesses even refusing to sell him a meal or a newspaper. Critics of escrache have denounced it as a form of vigilante justice and, as the outburst of an angry mob, something that should be declared illegal, but the protesters are only reacting to acts that are themselves clearly illegal, not to mention outrageously immoral. The protesters' public harassment does not compare to their targets' torturing and/or raping, then throwing their victims from airplanes into the ocean, or kidnapping their children and erasing their identities. Too often, the state will use the legality argument to bind its opponents, while doing whatever it pleases, legal or not. Not satisfied with a monopoly on violence, the state also wants to be the sole interpreter of what's right and wrong, as implied by the often-bandied-about legality question, and the more criminal the state is, the more illegal, the more it will shriek about the need for everyone else to walk the straight and narrow, according to its own power-drunk markings. Talking to Borzutsky's class, I asked the students to consider escrache in the North American context. Who are our criminals in high places and what should we do about them? Unlike our southern neighbors, we have neither the clarity to identify our enemies from within, nor the courage or unity to confront them. To be fair, though, our top criminals don't move among us, with many never even being mentioned by our obfuscating media, as great a killer of brain cells as any, and worse than any glue. Even when not anonymous, however, the most malignant Americans are hidden behind guarded gates, bulletproof glass or acres of real estate, so that it would take considerable enterprise to target them. When faced with an illegal and ultraviolent enemy, we must resort to any and all tricks, be extra clever and strike hard, for real, but most of us are too tightly bound to our bifurcated harness to do more the jiggle, every once in a while, an electronic voting machine. Geez, I wonder who they'll let us pretend to vote for next time, if there's a next time?
Linh Dinh (Postcards from the End of America)
AlphaPoint Completes Blockchain Trial Together with Scotiabank AlphaPoint, a fintech company, devoted to blockchain technological innovation, has accomplished a successful proof technology together with Scotiabank, a major international bank based in Barcelone, Canada. From the trial, Scotiabank sought to learn and examine how the AlphaPoint Distributed Journal Platform could be leveraged inside across a selection of use situations. When questioned if AlphaPoint and Scotiabank intended to further build this job, Igor Telyatnikov, president and also COO regarding AlphaPoint, advised Bitcoin Journal that he was not able to comment especially on the subsequent steps in the particular Scotiabank-AlphaPoint effort. He performed, however, suggest that AlphaPoint is about to reveal several additional media shortly. “We have a couple of other significant announcements that is to be announced inside the coming calendar month, including a generation launch using a systemically crucial financial institution, ” said Telyatnikov. “2017 will be shaping around be an unbelievable year for that distributed journal technology market as a whole and then for AlphaPoint also. ” Within the multi-month venture, trade studies were published upon deployment of the AlphaPoint Distributed Journal Platform, which usually ran concurrently on Microsoft’s Azure impair and AlphaPoint hardware. Inside real-time, typically the blockchain community converted FIXML messages to be able to smart deals and produced an immutable “single truth” across the complete network. The particular Financial Details eXchange (FIX) is a sector protocol used for communicating stock options information inside specific digital messages. Including information about getting rates, market info and buy and sell orders. Using trillions involving dollars bought and sold annually around the Nasdaq only, financial providers entities are usually investing seriously in maximizing electronic buying and selling to increase their particular speed monetary markets and decrease costs. Blockchain technology may help them help save $8-12 million per annum, which includes savings up to 70 percent throughout reporting, 50 % in post-trade and 50 % in consent, according to a report by Accenture and McLagan.
Melissa Welborn
It was possible to look at actual smartphones and tablets and laptops that had been manufactured on Old Earth. They did not work anymore, but their technical capabilities were described on little placards. And they were impressive compared to what Kath Two and other modern people carried around in their pockets. This ran contrary to most people's intuition, since in other areas the achievements of the modern world - the habitat ring, the Eye, and all the rest - were so vastly greater than what the people of Old Earth had ever accomplished. It boiled down to Amistics [the choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives]. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software. The density with which they'd been able to pack transistors onto chips still had not been matched by any fabrication plant now in existence. Their devices could hold more data than anything you could buy today. Their ability to communicate through all sorts of wireless schemes was only now being matched - and that only in densely populated, affluent places like the Great Chain... Anyone who bothered to learn the history of the developed world in the years just before Zero understood perfectly well that Tavistock Prowse had been squarely in the middle of the normal range, as far as his social media habits and attention span had been concerned. But nevertheless, Blues called it Tav's Mistake. They didn't want to make it again. Any efforts made by modern consumer-goods manufacturers to produce the kinds of devices and apps that had disordered the brain of Tav were met with the same instinctive pushback as Victorian clergy might have directed against the inventor of a masturbation machine. To the extent the Blue's engineers could build electronics of comparable sophistication to those that Tav had used, they tended to put them into devices such as robots...
Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
Modern electronic mass media had been a defining piece of the twentieth-century experience that served an important democratic function—presenting Americans with a shared set of facts. Now those news organs, on TV and radio, were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries. The new and newly unregulated technologies allowed us, in a sense, to travel backward in time.
Kurt Andersen (Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History)
Almost every major textual initiative today is structured around three overlapping notions of sharing: commonality, transferability, and sociability. We want other people to read the same thing we are reading (commonality); we want to be able to send other people what we are reading (transferability); and we want to be able to talk to other people about what we are reading (sociability). “Social reading” is shaping up to be the core identity, or ideology if you will, of digital media. I say ideology because there is also something duplicitous about the new commitment to sharing. Never before has the proprietary relationship to reading and ideas been more in force. Sharing texts has never been more popular—and illegal.
Andrew Piper (Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times)
Text, emails, and other forms of electronic media are the most popular forms of communication now. However, they also tend to be the most problematic right now. You might be surprised at how entire relationships can be ruined just because of one poorly worded tweet or status update. Even entire careers and reputations went down in flames because of the things those people said online. What you have to remember is that text has two disadvantages. First, it cannot carry the subtler elements of communications like nuance, context, and even sarcasm. Second, it has an element of perpetuity to it, so anything poorly-worded you say now will come back to haunt you in a few weeks or years. The strategy here, then, is to think before you click. Make sure that your choice of words have been thoroughly thought out and your overall message leaves no room for interpretation, especially negative ones.
James W. Williams (Communication Skills Training: How to Talk to Anyone, Connect Effortlessly, Develop Charisma, and Become a People Person)
Staring into the naked orange flames of the firepit, naked flesh, naked Carrie Donaldson on the bare rug in exhausted, sated semi-sleep beside him, Jack Barron felt a carapace of image-history-skin encysting him like steel walls of a TV set, a creature imprisoned in the electronic circuitry of his own head perceiving through promptboard vidphone fleshless electronic speed of light ersatz senses, separated from the girl beside him by the phosphor-dot impenetrable glass TV screen Great Wall of China of his own image. First time I remember being blown feeling like wet put-down ugliness, he brooded. Ugly, he told himself, is a thing you feel — truth is ugly when it's a weapon, lie is beautiful when an act of love ugly when it's one-sided fuck is beautiful when it's simple, mutual, nobullshit balling, ugly when chick gets her kicks off you that really isn't there, is why you feel like a rotten lump of shit, man. Getting blown Sara go down being dug by woman's a pure gas; being sucked off, image-statue living lie, someone else's lie being eaten (Let me eat you, let me eat you, baby!) is a dirty act of plastic cannibalism, her dirtiness, not mine. Whole world's full of plastic cannibals feeding their own little bags off meals of my goddamned image-flesh, eating Jack Barron ghost that isn't there. And now Morris and my so-called friend Luke are hot to package my living-color bod into TV dinners, sell to hundred million viewer-voter cannibals for thirty pieces of power silver.
Norman Spinrad (Bug Jack Barron)
Careful research on the complex relationship between the electronic and print media and the evolution of the alien abduction phenomenon waits to be undertaken.
John E. Mack (Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens)
Make no mistake: America is in a media war. It is an extension of the Cold War that never ended but shifted to an electronic front. The war between freedom and statism ended geographically when the Berlin Wall fell. But the existential battle never ceased.
Andrew Breitbart (Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World)
The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously.
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
A party, or any institution that is in power or in opposition, does all things to get only for its own goal and interests, no matter in a legal way or through illegal resources, like forces, print, and electronic media, and negative propaganda among the people, spending the millions of money for this. It is called dirty politics by the support of evil spirits.
Ehsan Sehgal
The print and electronic media hold Interests, and interests never afford transparent Neutrality.
Ehsan Sehgal
Social media can be accessed via computer, smart phone or tablet and used to link most digital medias and electronic books/ magazines for distribution
Tara Mooney (Take Control of your future- Develop your own global Co.: Co Solution # 3 (Co Solution Series))
When you've got your devices down to the ideal number, use these tips to minimize them and prevent distractions: - Remove as many icons from your desktop as possible. - Uninstall software you don't need. - Delete unneeded files from your Documents folder. (If you don't want to delete them completely, at least move them to an archive folder so they don't clutter your most-used folder anymore.) - Develop a simple but logical folder structure so that you can find documents you want easily. - Unsubscribe to blogs, email newsletters, and advertisements that no longer serve your interests. - Delete internet bookmarks, cookies, and temporary internet files you no longer need. - Delete apps you don't need, remembering that if you need them later, you can always download them again. Put only your most crucial apps (such as your calendar and your phone) on your home screen. Put the rest in folders on your second screen. - Turn off notifications, including social media push notifications and email audio alerts. - Make sure your spam filters are working. - Delete photos that are of poor quality or that you don't need. - Delete unused music and movies. - Subscribe to a password manager so that you don't have to keep track of a bunch of passwords.
Joshua Becker (The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life)
No one can foretell how effective this exorcism will be, but we have to ask the question: what is it - what even worse eventuality (the total hegemony of the genetic code?) - that cancer is resisting? What is it - what even worse eventuality (a sexual epidemic, total sexual promiscuity?) - that AIDS is resisting? The drugs problem is the same: all dramatizing apart, we have to ask what it is protecting us from, what kind of escape route it represents from an even worse evil (rational stupefaction, normative sociability, universal regimentation). We may say the same of terrorism: isn't its secondary, reactional, abreactional violence protecting us from an epidemic of consensus, from a growing political leukaemia and deliquescence, and the invisible transparency of the State? Everything is ambiguous and reversible. After all, it is by neurosis that man protects himself most effectively from madness.In this sense, AIDS is not a punishment from on high; it might rather be a defensive emotional reaction of the species against the danger of a total promiscuity, a total loss of identity in the proliferation and acceleration of the networks. If AIDS , terrorism, economic collapse and electronic viruses are concerns not just for the police, medicine , science and the experts, but for the entire collective imagination , this is because there is more to them than mere episodic events in an irrational world. They embody the entire logic of our system, and are merely, so to speak, the points at which that logic crystallizes spectacularly. Their power is a power of irradiation and their effect, through the media , within the imagination, is itself a viral one.
Jean Baudrillard (Screened Out)
Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework. Notice anything about the difference between the two lists? Screen versus nonscreen. When kids use screens for two hours of their leisure time per day or less, there is no elevate risk of depression. But above two hours per day, the risks grow larger with each additional hour of screen time. Conversely, kids who spend more time off screens, especially if they are engaged in nonscreen social activities, are at lower risk for depression and suicidal thinking.
Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt
If you can’t seem to get any work done, leave your phone in another room for a few hours. If you’re continually feeling like you’re not enough, stop following social media accounts that trigger jealousy and envy. If you’re wasting too much time watching television, move the TV out of the bedroom. If you’re spending too much money on electronics, quit reading reviews of the latest tech gear. If you’re playing too many video games, unplug the console and put it in a closet after each use. This practice is an inversion
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
To avoid getting fooled by spurious correlations, we need to consider additional variables that would be expected to change if a particular causal explanation were true. Twenge does this by examining all the daily activities reported by individual students, in the two datasets that include such measures. Twenge finds that there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.
Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure)
I am sure that Pakistani secret agencies are and were aware of the activities of the Qadiyaanies against Pakistan and Islam from around the world, especially from London, Germany, and other European countries. If not, then they should know that leaders of the Qadiyaani religious groups are following Jews lines and Indian Raw style to buy print and electronic media sources and business resources, to dominate the Muslim majority, and destruction of Pakistan, and spread their so-called person, self-claimed prophet's teachings, but in the real British agent Mirza Qadiyani who died in the WC. The Qadiyani groups are busy and entered the print, electronic and social media, and different institutions to perform a dirty role against Islam and Pakistan. I am pretty sure and believe that their end is very near.
Ehsan Sehgal