January 20, 2010

Our technologies have brought us into realities in which there is no time to reflect




Esquire Magazine, February 2010
3,650 Days by Charles P. Pierce

"And the truly ironic thing about it, and the Mayans would have found it more hilarious than anyone else, is that the only true function of these speculative apocalypses is that they serve best as a distraction from - and therefore as protection against - actual catastrophes, which really do come..."

"In a fragmented, accelerated world, there was no way to see these things coming. Our technologies have brought us into realities in which there is no time to reflect, to make the connections between what we knew once and what is happening to us now.

"But the language of the vicarious reality within which we conduct so much of our daily lives - the one in which we can invest ourselves without really involving ourselves - had no vocabulary for what had happened because it had happened in the actual reality."

Interesting essay. Similar to the New York Times "If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online". It seems our generation is gaining a lot, but losing more.

January 19, 2010

More excerpts coming soon!

Life has been a little crazy. I spent an amazing semester in Florence, Italy. (I did read a great Italian novel while I was there: Io Non Ho Paura by Niccolo Ammaniti, but I didn't find the time to blog about it and not sure it would've been useful to anyone who reads this). I came back and had a relaxing break in NYC and I began reading two books! So my point of this is that there should be more excerpts coming soon from:

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
and
Bridget Jones' Diary, Helen Fielding (required reading for an anthropology course, should be interesting).

And I have my hands on a few magazines, so will be quoting from articles I read too, I'm sure.

Till then.