Rick Reuben wrote:

that damned fly wrote:doesn't seem too unabomberish.

Yes, it does. Ted K was down on high tech.

Rick Reuben wrote:This dude is going to be pissed:

Rick Reuben wrote:

that damned fly wrote:no, he wasn't.

the uni wrote:4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the
industrial system.

TECHNOLOGY IS A MORE POWERFUL SOCIAL FORCE THAN THE
ASPIRATION FOR FREEDOOM

125. It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise
between technology and freedom, because technology is by
far the more powerful social force and continually
encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises.

Fly, you have a gift for dragging every thread you touch down to your rigid level of mediocrity. Half of your posts are ignorant, half of your posts are arrogant, and half of your posts are boring. ( Yeah, I know that's three halves. Fly makes a lot of posts. )

Rick Reuben wrote:Fly, you have a gift for dragging every thread you touch down to your rigid level of mediocrity. Half of your posts are ignorant, half of your posts are arrogant, and half of your posts are boring. ( Yeah, I know that's three halves. Fly makes a lot of posts. )

Mark Lansing wrote:So why is it that we're supposedly blaming the iPod for folks not reading? It's nothing more than a fancier Walkman, and no one blamed them for the decline of our culture (so far as I can remember).

Rick Reuben wrote:

Mark Lansing wrote:So why is it that we're supposedly blaming the iPod for folks not reading?

They're part of a lineage that begins with the television, I think.

Cassette walkmans are much less destructive to human attention spans than .mp3 boxes, because the cassette plays you the songs just like vinyl does, in the order that the artist intended, at the proper pace. iPods give you the option to jump all over the place, 10 secs of one song, a minute of another, the iPod wheel much like the comfortable TV remote. the iPod wheel encourages you to make snap judgements on music just like the TV remote lets you scan from channel to channel like a zombie. It trains you to have a shorter attention span.

For every person I observe who seems to be listening to the music on their iPod at a normal pace ( one song ends, another song begins ), I see another person clicking the wheel of theirs like a cracked-out monkey. When such people are confronted with an orderly presentation of information that must be consumed one page at a time, like a book, their brains make them all fidgety, because they're conditioned to click from one web page to the next, click from one song to the next, click from one channel to the next. They're scraping the tops off information, not consuming it whole.

That's why you can give a person a TV remote and come back three hours later and ask them what they watched, and they won't be able to tell you 75% of what they viewed. Nobody forgets the vinyl record they listened to three minutes after the needle hits the last groove.

that damned fly wrote:

Rick Reuben wrote:Fly, you have a gift for dragging every thread you touch down to your rigid level of mediocrity. Half of your posts are ignorant, half of your posts are arrogant, and half of your posts are boring. ( Yeah, I know that's three halves. Fly makes a lot of posts. )

Mr. Pot? Mr. Kettle's not in right now. You'll have to call him black later.