Category: ideas

“What I will not buy is any one-time conduit of information (book, magazine, newspaper) that is somewhere in the middle. Too expensive to easily throw away, but too cheaply made to want to keep in my collection. Everything else, everything between the very low-end and very high-end product, will be delivered digitally.”

“More than just a celebration of mischief – or a license for the boorish – the practical jokes and humor associated with this annual holiday actually play a role in the formation and maintenance of social bonds in small groups.”

“Even our most creative artistic drives are tangled up in the darkest competitiveness, and by our insatiable, starving egos. Even a yearning for the most beautiful architecture can be said to be materialist.”

“When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph. I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos.”

“We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society. And the result: What we gain is the knowledge — or the illusion of knowledge — of many new, different and variegated aspects of life. What we lose is still being understood.”

“Our knowledge of human vision and of the brain is now sophisticated enough that we can speculate intelligently on the neural basis of art and maybe begin to construct a scientific theory of artistic experience.”

“Maybe the question we should be asking, not of Google but of ourselves, is what types of questions the Net is encouraging us to ask. Should human thought be gauged by its output or by its quality? That question might actually propel one into the musty depths of a library, where “time saved” is not always the primary concern.”

“The good news is that we’re curating all the time, whether we realize it or not. Every time we post a video, like a link or comment on a blog post, we are making editorial decisions and curating. In the coming years, the major change in curation will be in how the skill is packaged and sold. And any of us can sell it.”

“We are not primarily rational creatures. Emotion is the foundation of reason and you have to pay close attention to instant emotional responses: that is what tells us what we value.”

“Over a two-week period, the three “socialbots” were able to integrate themselves into the group, and gained close to 250 followers between them. They received more than 240 responses to the tweets they sent.”