Louis Black does a funny bit about the elderly and "senior moments." The elderly don't talk, he says, they engage in verbal charades. Something like:

"Hey, you remember that guy, you know, in that movie?"

"What guy?"

"You know he was in a movie with that other guy."

"What other guy?"

"The… Read full post »

Following Nicholas Carr, who argues that the net is changing the way we think, I argued that the net may prove the death of reading, qua reading, or as a particular kind of experience.

Certainly one reads on the web, but one reads for information. In one sense, this is very active… Read full post »

Reflecting on Nicholas Carr's claim that the net has altered the way he thinks, I offered a contrast between the net as largely information passage and the experience of reading, qua that.

I tried to offer an example of what I meant. A rather poor one I think, and then I remembered,… Read full post »

That's the title to an article by Nicholas Carr that appeared in the July/August, 2009, Atlantic.

A student in my research paper writing class turned it up, and I read it.

Carr doesn't conclude that Google makes us stupid. But in the course of making his argument, Carr recounts how his own… Read full post »

I hate Daylight Savings Time.  That’s what causes me to change my clock twice a year back and forth.  I don’t know what they had before DST but let’s just call it Regular Time.  Debates about DST go clear back to Ben Franklin, but RT was favored by farmers who needed… Read full post »

I had my students meet in a computer lab so they could start poking around on the web for a possible research topic. I looked over one young woman's shoulder, and she was reading about something called "the quarterlife crisis." She was wondering if this quarterlife crisis thing might have something… Read full post »

One persistent criticism of consumer society is that it makes individuals passive and dependent. Christopher Lasch says we have become overly reliant on "externally produced goods," and, on top of that, when it comes especially to our electronic gadgets, most of the time we don't have the faintest id… Read full post »

Trying to get my head around the affect of the digital age upon young people, I picked up The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future by Mark Bauerlein, a Professor of English at Emory. Based on my calculations the students I am teaching at… Read full post »

I was born in 1945 and spent my first decade in the rural south. We did not have an indoor toilet much less a TV set. I now teach and have taught writing at a California Research University for 30 years. The young people I teach right now were born in… Read full post »

In his The Big Picture, David Suzuki starts his chapter on the effects of consumer society on the environment, "The True Cost of Gadgets," with:

Imagine if you decided to throw away your cell phone, close down your Facebook account, disconnect your high speed internet modem, unplug your satellite te

… Read full post »

While the remodeling of our little condo--construction-wise-- is nearly complete, the effects of it are not.

In my readings on the consumer society, I came across more than once reference to the "Diderot effect."

Apparently Diderot acquired a fancy new housecoat (given to him I believe) and abruptly a… Read full post »