“Gilberto Kassab, the mayor of São Paulo, passed a law last year banning all advertising from the Brazilian city. The place is now being held up by activists worldwide as an example to us all: an image of an anti-Orwellian future, where The Man is no longer in control of our day to day choices. But does the planet’s first ‘clean city’ really live up to the hype?”
Category: ideas
Camille Paglia: Save The Arts With Religion
“The position of the fine arts in America has rarely been secure. This is a practical, commercial nation where the arts have often been seen as wasteful, frivolous, or unmanly. In Europe, the arts are heavily subsidized by the government because art literally embodies the history of the people and the nation, whose roots are pre-modern and in some cases ancient. Even in the old Soviet Union, the Communist regime supported classical ballet. America is relatively young, and it has never had an aristocracy–the elite class that typically commissions the fine arts and dictates taste.”
Choking Off All Interest In Cultural Literacy
Is the UK’s populace suffering because of an abandonment of cultural education and enrichment? “Most people, especially when younger, have precious little access to or encouragement in the creative and civilising processes. In schools, music is a Cinderella subject. Teachers who might want to encourage an interest outside the curriculum in books, or poetry, or the past often meet with blind resistance from the parents whose role it would be to assist the enterprise in the long hours and days outside the classroom… It is no wonder there is a lack of cultural ambition among our people, because any squeak of interest is in effect suffocated at birth.”
Often, Your Subconscious Brain Calls The Shots
“New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like ‘dependable’ and ‘support’ — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it. Psychologists say that ‘priming’ people in this way is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, it’s a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have.”
The Device That Will Replace Your TV Remote?
“A new device that allows viewers to operate the on/off switch or change channels by simple hand gestures may make the remote control lost down the back of the sofa a thing of the past. Its inventors, two engineers from Wollongong University in Australia, say the new gadget incorporates a camera that recognises hand signals and translates them into electronic commands for the TV and other audio visual equipment.”
Will Newspaper Websites Change Us?
Marshall McLuhan “once predicted that the advent of colour television would lead to an increased appetite for spicy foods. Call him a nutcase, but we got our colour television and then suddenly we were all eating Szechuan. Who knows what will happen once the fission and fusion settles down and we’re used to this new hybrid medium of the newspaper website? Who knows what unexpected cultural side effects will hit us when we’re finally used to navigating them and dealing with nervous information on the computer screen?”
Looking For A Post-Holywood World
“Doomsayers have been bellowing through the Hollywood hills for years. Clearly, there’s something about this industry, which has held the planet in its twinkly thrall for almost a century, and which has transformed so much, that summons wishful thinking of the deathly variety. Artists would like to see it suffer and die for its philistinism. Small businesses want it dead for its muscular monopolism. Non-American film makers would kill it for killing non-American film industries. Minorities loathe its stereotypes.” But “with the advent of digital distribution, the film industry will fragment, diversify and take root again in national cultures. Logic is not on Hollywood’s side.”
Beware Those Predictive Models
Predictive algorhythms are getting more and more accurate. “No-one can argue with statistically based procedures for making complex decisions under conditions of uncertainty, so long as successes and failures are aggregated across cases and the cost of errors is low. But if one is interested in individual cases or if the cost of decision errors is high, then these techniques are problematic.”
Play With Your Kids? Uh-uh!
“American-style parent-child play is a distinct feature of wealthy developed countries — a recent byproduct of the pressure to get kids ready for the information-age economy.” But maybe that’s a bad idea: “Some of those children are being raised to be spoiled, demanding, requiring constant adult attention, and inclined to argue with their parents.”
Are The Ultrarich Good For The Culture?
As the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else continues to grow, some have speculated that we could be entering a new Gilded Age, and the billionaires making it happen think it could be a very good thing. Of course, they would think that. “The new titans often see themselves as pillars of a similarly prosperous and expansive age, one in which their successes and their philanthropy have made government less important than it once was.”