May 2012
3 posts
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DFW Always Got IT
I came across this great quote from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (which I own, but, alas, have yet to crack open. Now I’m really regretting not having done so sooner). This is a pretty tight distillation of the essence of The Invisibles.
The accountant in The Pale King who tells his students,
“Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to...
March 2012
1 post
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January 2012
2 posts
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iPood: Why You Shouldn't Use Your Child As A...
My recent piece on the GoodMenProject.com has been getting some nice traction on fashion blogs and parenting blogs - strange bedfellows!. Here’s the intro:
Kid’s clothing shouldn’t make a statement, David Zweig writes, especially if it’s the parent who’re making it.
I recently learned of a company in Brooklyn, where I live and am raising a two-and-a-half-year-old...
December 2011
3 posts
1 tag
So long Hitch
Very saddened by the news that Christopher Hitchens died yesterday. 1949-2011
I’m glad, even toward the end, he made it clear to all the religious people who were hoping for a last minute conversion that he still did not believe in God.
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Another reason to love Louis C.K.
At the start of genius comedian Louis C.K.’s new standup concert - available for $5 - he tells the crowd
Don’t text or twitter during the show. Just live your life. Don’t keep telling people what you’re doing … Also - it lights up your big, dumb face.
Another interesting note: during the opening credits as the camera glides down one of the aisles in the crowd we...
Where you been?
In a word: working.
A note about my short hiatus from the blog: I’ve been devoting nearly all of my energy to working on my book about FDS, which has left little time for the blog or other activities. I expect to get back to regular posts shortly.
Be back soon!
October 2011
3 posts
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Public Intellectuals and Big Idea Books
Nathan Jurgenson, over at Cyborgology, has an interesting post where he laments what he fears may be a lack of public intellectuals doing rigorous work and/or a lack of academics having the ability to publish Big Idea books about technology that compete in the commercial marketplace (of ideas). My response is here:
What the Public Wants
1) Commercial publishers attempt to publish what they...
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WatchMy latest video - it further explains Fiction Depersonalization Syndrome, and details its impact in the academic community and among the general public.
September 2011
1 post
5 tags
New Errol Morris Book on Photography →
I’m very excited to read the new Errol Morris book Believing is Seeing. It’s based on a series of posts Morris did for a New York Times blog. I have read a number of the posts, which were fascinating and exhaustive, and as a Times book reviewer noted, lie “just to the pleasurable side of tedium.” Morris is interested in quite simply (and broadly)
… the relationship...
August 2011
2 posts
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performance art in the age of YouTube
There’s a great article/discussion in the Times inspired by the recent Ocularpation: Wall Street, a street “protest” featuring naked people as a metaphor for the lack of transparency in our financial institutions. The act itself wasn’t particularly interesting, but it is a great launching point for broaching the broader context of performance art in the digital age. And for...
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How Technology Fosters Instant Nostalgia Through...
Life As Document
Nathan Jurgenson at the Cyborgology blog has a wonderfully comprehensive and fascinating post on the rise in popularity of faux vintage photograph apps like Hipstamatic which instantly turn a regular iPhone photo into a retro-looking pic by altering their color, light and other elements. With this effect the photos can achieve a convincing style of a photo taken thirty or more...
July 2011
3 posts
The Claude Glass and Facebook
There’s a great post by Nathan Jurgenson and discussion over at Cyborgology on the Claude Glass - a small tinted mirror, popular a few hundred years ago with painters as a framing and coloring tool - documentation of experience, and Facebook.
Check it out
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Jane's Addiction - who is the real performer?
I recently learned that Jane’s Addiction are playing a free show at NYC’s Terminal 5 on July 25th. Why is the show free? 1) Because there is a corporate sponsor: electronics company LG. But also 2) because the fans will actually being working during the show. From the LG press release:
The technological force of LG is uniting with YouTube, the largest video-sharing site on the web, to...
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June 2011
4 posts
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Quantified Self - Taking Self Awareness to the...
I just got tipped off about a conference that took place last month called the Quantified Self Conference. From the conference materials:
Quantified Self 2011 is a conference for users and tool makers interested in self-tracking systems. It will be a “working meeting” for the QS community
The “QS community”! I should have known that something like this existed. From...
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60 Minutes and False Equivalency
So I watched a DVRd episode of 60 Minutes last night. In a segment where Steve Kroft interviewed J. Craig Venter, the biologist who sequenced the human genome (among other accomplishments), Kroft discussed some of Venter’s current work. While talking with Venter about his project on developing alternative fuels, Kroft said this:
…So you’re trying to cut down on CO2 in the...
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Huxley vs Orwell via Postman
I just got turned on to this excellent cartoon by Stuart McMillen. It’s a comic strip retelling of/homage to Neil Postman’s work in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html
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May 2011
3 posts
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Franzen = one of the best writers out there today
I don’t think I’ve ever done this before on the blog, but rather than write up commentary and reactions, I’m simply going to link to Jonathan Franzen’s NYTimes piece on how technology is the opposite of/enemy of/destroyer of love. It’s atom bomb level power and, at this time, I feel comfortable saying the piece speaks for itself.
God, I love Franzen. Just a couple...
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The loss of the physical
There was a recent piece in the Times on the demise of cursive (or as I called it growing up - script) handwriting. Among various laments for a society now dominated by print handwriting, such as the higher likelihood of forgeries and the inability to be able to read old documents, one section of the article was noteworthy to me:
Sandy Schefkind, a pediatric occupational therapist in Bethesda,...
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April 2011
1 post
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Theorizing the Web
A little over a week ago I lectured at the Theorizing the Web conference hosted by the Sociology Department at the University of Maryland. In addition to a number of edifying lectures, the conference also had the unusual twist of breaking from the academy with an opening night artistic component. Held at the Irvine Contemporary Gallery in D.C., we were treated to an extended clip of “We Live...
March 2011
2 posts
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high tech = low typography = less expression
There was a great piece in Slate by Farhad Manjoo a short while ago on the grammatical incorrectness of two spaces after a period. Apparently it used to be customary to add two spaces when typewriters used monospaced type - where each letter is the same width - because typewriters’ mechanisms were only able to advance a fixed increment after each letter was typed. Two spaces made the break...
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Children are the living messages we send to a time...
This brilliant quote is from the 1982 book The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman. As media ecology expert, and Fordham professor Lance Strate eloquently explains on his blog, “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see”, encapsulates Marshall McLuhan’s famous “medium is the message” adage, in that (rather than TV or newspapers, for...
January 2011
1 post
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December 2010
2 posts
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Excessive light at night contributes to...
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) excess light at night can contribute to air pollution. This data (which I learned about through my association with the International Dark-Sky Association) was recently presented at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
As the IDA described the findings:
Every night, chemicals from vehicle exhaust and other...
November 2010
2 posts
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A wandering mind is an unhappy mind?
A recent study* led by a Harvard researcher published in Science magazine found:
(i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.
The researchers created an iPhone app that contacted several thousand study participants at random moments during waking hours to ask them questions...
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October 2010
2 posts
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July 2010
2 posts
PBS possible censor?
During a concert Paul McCartney gave at the White House last month he said
“After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is”
However, PBS “excised” the comments from the filmed version of the concert, which is set to air on July 28th. There’s a bit of controversy as to when the comments were made and whether they were...
Deutschland!
I’ve just been invited to present FDS at the Junge Philosophie Conference in Darmstadt, Germany next month. Very exciting!
June 2010
3 posts
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Layers of unreality
I came across this gem in the Post the other day:
Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag won’t let anything get in the way of their quest for fame — not even reality. They’ve been pushing their split by trying to sell a made-up story that Heidi may be cheating with Spencer’s close pal, Marine-turned-bodyguard Cougar Zank.
A source told us, “Heidi and Spencer are try ing...
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MEA Convention
I just got back from the Media Ecology Association’s Annual Convention (this year held at the U of Maine), where I presented Fiction DP Syndrome. There were a ton of questions from the audience, which made the presentation especially rewarding bc of the exchange between myself and so many scholars. I learned a lot from their questions.
The presentation went so well, in fact, that more than...
May 2010
3 posts
Dr. Laurence Gould
Several days ago I was given the sad news of the passing of Dr. Laurence Gould, an accomplished psychoanalyst. During his career Dr. Gould held many respected positions, including being the former Director of the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program at the City University of New York.
Larry and I had been in contact several times via email discussing Fiction Depersonalization Syndrome. A month...
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Obama references info overload
You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — (laughter) — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a...