A little over a week ago, I was yet again reminded of how poor the literacy skills of most people — even in some of the most “technologically advanced” countries on Earth — are. Indeed, this is perhaps best depicted in the movie “Idiocracy”, which I have often quoted on this blog already. [1] My… Continue reading Waking Up to Basic Literacy Skills
Tag: technology
Stages in the Transformation of Information from Writing Communities to Written Words
I acknowledge that the title I have chosen is rather broad. So I think I’d like to start off by sketching out the landscape, sort of painting a picture using very broad brush strokes … and then perhaps to suggest one case study in order to begin to flesh out more details. The entire Internet… Continue reading Stages in the Transformation of Information from Writing Communities to Written Words
Self-Expression vs. Consumerism
The World is My Medium analogous to expression “The World is My Oyster” Whereas “the world is my oyster” acknowledges the world as a set of conditions which creates a result, “the world is my medium” conceptualizes the world as a canvass upon which the self expresses itself. From this point of view, one way… Continue reading Self-Expression vs. Consumerism
Mob Rules (Blog of the Grotesque)
One of my favorite reading assignments in high school was a short book of extremely short chapters written by Sherwood Anderson, named “Winesburg, Ohio”. The first chapter, as I recall, was about an old man who scribbled down notes about the people in his hometown and then he crumpled up the scraps of paper he… Continue reading Mob Rules (Blog of the Grotesque)
I Want to Say Goo-Goo-Ga-Joob
My persistent followers (stalkers?) may have noticed by now (hopefully?) that I publish many blogs (I don’t actually count them, and sometimes I even forget that I maintain so many of them). Luckily, WordPress has a neato feature — I guess it’s an RSS feed tied to everything a WP user publishes — the feed… Continue reading I Want to Say Goo-Goo-Ga-Joob
Technology (and Audience) Capture
Over the past few decades, the history of information technology has become littered with many examples of what I would like to refer to as “technology capture“. I think of this as essentially analogous to “audience capture”. Yet I feel as though in the technology industry there are a few caveats we should be particularly… Continue reading Technology (and Audience) Capture
Imma Throw the Book at You
I love this contraction! Book people prolly aren’t familiar with many of the popular time-saving contractions in use online, and this one is really oustanding. It’s actually a sort of double-(or triple?)-contraction: both “I’m” and “gonna” are contractions, and then the “-m-” is also a contraction of a bunch of apparently superfluous sounds and the… Continue reading Imma Throw the Book at You
On the Internet …
One thing that irritates me time and again is when someone tells me they saw something “on the Internet”. It’s an insult to humanity to have such a low degree of literacy. In order to begin to understand how absurd such a statement is, consider how you would feel if someone talked to you about… Continue reading On the Internet …
To Go with the Flow OR To Swim against the Stream
Mob mentality is usually viewed with disdain. Gustave Le Bon, who was a pioneer in this field of study, painted the mob to be distinctly uncivilized … even sub-human. Yet we ought to also recognize that the cornerstones of what we consider to be modern civilization are governments that were created out of protest, as… Continue reading To Go with the Flow OR To Swim against the Stream
ASS: Artificially Sentient Slop
Anyone who has successfully graduated grammar school ought to know that the plural form of “Nostradamus” is “Nostradami”. The hyper-inflation in Nostradami today is unprecedented. [1] The current flood of Nostradami is leading to rising levels of Doomsday books, for which we (of course) need ever more investments in artificial intelligence. One leading Nostradamus recently… Continue reading ASS: Artificially Sentient Slop
