31) "Frisbee forever" videogame is self-leveling; not too easy or too hard
When things settle down in reality, the Frisbee game is too exciting
It does nothing to teach the all-important patience and tolerance for boredom that are central to learning: how to stand in line, how to wait at Baggage Claim, how to concentrate on a draggy passage of text
Self-leveling games suggest you never have to be bored; helps to calm my mind
I wonder what real challenges and stretches of fertile boredom, undesigned landscapes, and surprises I'm denying myself
(45) Mobile apps = orderly suburb that lets inhabitants sample the Web's opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff (of the regular internet)
Smartphone flight = white flight
(73) It's impossible to overlook neuroscience's flawed methodology and transparent belief systems
"May I never use my reason against truth"
False empiricism in the service of ideology will always show itself
(76) Texts and tweets are still being dismissed as too short to be important
Never mind that the majority of the world's great epigrams, aphorisms, and pensees are handily expressed in 140 characters, often with many to spare
(82) [On planes] The altitude offers a welcome brake on connectivity. It's a stolen peace.
If the airlines knew how precious that icy aloofness was to some passengers, they'd find a way to make us pay for it. The JetBlue ColdSpot.
Technology in productive tension with other technology has a special pleasure to it
(118) "The turn away from the BlackBerry toward the iPhone is a reckoning with our essential nature and how we currently process, deploy, and enjoy symbolic communication
Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Dave Marash designated online video history's first "universal language"
Is the truth of human nature coming out, or is this an odd contingency of mobile technology?
Possibly both
(128) Where farmers bred to produce field hands, industrial workers bred because they couldn't help it, and Kennedy-era couples bred to goose the GNP by buying sailor suits and skis, in the internet age we form families so we can produce, distribute and display digital photos of ourselves
(143) YouTube videos derive huge appeal by seeming louche…should I really be watching this?
If you feel a little remiss while watching a short moving picture online, chances are good you're watching a YouTube video -- and it's having the desired effect
(144) Just as YouTube was revving up, traditional sources of entertainment and art…were becoming nearly moribund (record labels, Hollywood blockbusters)
Was it any surprise, given the despair latent in the legacy cultural businesses, that people turned to YouTube for signs of actual life?
(175) The truth is, virtual reality just creates a deep hunger for real-world experiences
(185) The iPod is still the Adam of handheld smart technology
In the beginning was the desire to listen to music
(193) Proust on music: "We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable."
(225) By 1990, when I found them , the deconstructionist literary critics, including especially Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, took for granted the noncorrespondence of language to reality.
Instead of panicking they seemed to enjoy when the metaphorical content of sentences undermined their empirical, upright meaning
Now when the atheists I knew spoke of, say, "the girlish hope for a protective God to buffer death for us in what is in fact a bleak unprotected universe," I heard them not describing the essential cold facts of the cosmos with 20/20 vision, as if they were using equations, but talking about gender and family and fear and rivalry and sexuality and paternalism and maybe some other stuff like facticity and the consequences of buffering
I liked hearing language, in its deep and relentless metaphoricity, take on a mind of its own and subvert the best-laid plans of writers and speakers to talk empirically and with authority
I kept Wittgenstein close: "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent"
(227) "Rorty's elegant bifurcation of one's ideological life from one's aesthetic life"
I might find peace and self-identity -- a soul made palpable -- in the touch of a friend's hand rather than in an argument about consciousness made by Daniel Dennett
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
(227) …music, the taste of bourbon, the cheeks of a face I loved did dramatize my identity, give rise to my best ideas, and could readily move me to euphoria. I was learning to pursue thoughts, beliefs, and things that made me productive and happy, not miserable.
That was the newfound American pragmatist in me
I also learned to detach, with something like love, from Western scientistic philosophy
This was a great moment in my growth as a person and, in a minor way, as an ex-philosopher
(230) Much of what I concluded in my long years in the Harvard English Department was that whatever I thought, it was wrong
Fortunately, I also read and read and read
(234) Technology is built stuff that aims to be elegant and engaging
Apps are founded on science in the same sense that a watercolor is founded on science, where the chemistry of pigments and the physics of brushstrokes are the science
But the resulting painting, if successful, hints at transcendence or at least luminous silence, something whereof we cannot speak
(237) Where physicists typically see a void (ex: before the Big Bang), I habitually see God
I didn't believe my brain was adequate to the task of perceiving the world as it is, so I believed what worked for me
That was American pragmatism. That was Rorty coming in, and William James
(241) The Internet suggests immortality -- comes just shy of promising it -- with its magic
With its readability and persistence of data. With its suggestion of universal connectedness. With its disembodied images and sounds
And then, just as suddenly, it stirs grief: the deep feeling that digitization has cost us something very profound. That connectedness is illusory, that we're all more alone than ever. That our shortcomings and our suffering are all the more painful because they're built in the mirror of a fathomless and godlike medium that doesn't suffer, that knows everything, that shows us no mercy or compassion
In those moments death shows through in the regular gaps in Internet service, it's more harrowing than ever
Magic and loss, however, have always coexisted in aesthetic experience. Maybe they are aesthetic experience