There was a time when written words were important, valuable, you were compelled to read them. Newspapers. Personal letters. Important announcements. Now, however there’s no barrier to entry for getting your words printed - you don’t need a publisher or even a typewriter. On the Internet and in the workplace, people can let the words flow, because for many it’s an easier option than actually working. But the old habits are still with us - when you see something written down, you want to read it. Which makes the oceans of text very hard to deal with!
The Value of Words
March 23rd, 2009Quotes - Technology
April 15th, 2009Computerworld article on technology hypes:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012345
Remember the breathless articles written about technologies like Iridium and Mini Disc? It’s fun to look for the same marketing verbage in technology reviews today.
Quotes - Religion
April 15th, 2009AFR April 5-9: Faith In Modern Spirits
“…ceremonial Anglicans and cultural Catholics…”
“…mega churches of the Pentecostal faith , that provide rock music, sensate cermonies and success theology…”
“…if modernity was about the death of God, then post-modernity is about the death of the death of God…”
Marc Hauser - Moral Minds
Onfray on God
April 14th, 2009Originally written 20-May-2007
SMH on Michel Onfray, 12-May-2007
Extract from the interview:
What about the fact that people find such comfort in religion, I ask. Whether it’s true or not, how can it be a bad thing to offer people some recourse in times of grief or suffering?
Onfray shakes his head. “When a soul collapes before the cold body of a loved one”, he writes in The Atheist Manifesto, “denial takes over and transforms this ending into a beginning”.
“This is a swindle,” he says now. “We might have the impression that religions are doing us good, but it is by dint of a lie, a fition, an extravagence”.
We would do better, he argues, to combat the root of religion, which is fear of death, by having a happier time in life.
Humour and anxiety
April 14th, 2009Originally written 22-June-2007
Radio National - Ockham’s Razor - June 2007 - Humour as Medicine
… stressful lives produce mental anxiety… people experiencing severe anxiety often have trouble remembering anything spontaneously
…a sure way of relieving anxiety, and therefore improving the memory is to introduce humour…
“Instead of being asked in test situations to remember word lists or repeat a story, it is much more effective to ask them to repeat a limerick, for ‘the limerick packs laughs anatomical, into space that is quite economical.’”
Irony allows Convictions
April 14th, 2009Original written 3-July-2007
How to hold onto some fundamental truths, when anything can be disproved? Irony and humour. I found the following quite enlightening…
From The Philosophers Zone, ABC Radio National, 16-Jun-07, discussion on Richard Rorty:
Alan Saunders: In his later thought, irony becomes very important. What did he mean by irony and why did it matter to him?
Paul Redding: Yes, it’s a tricky one. He was a person with a certain sort of ironic mind I think, but I think he thought it gave him a way of both maintaining convictions, he was a person of strong convictions, quite clearly, maintaining them with the sort of riding thought that they could be false, he could be wrong, he could be shown to be wrong by someone in a day or so, or in a week or so, and the trick of maintaining a type of felt conviction, while not having a type of dogmatist assumption that one could never be refuted, I think he thought of that as summed up in a type of ironic attitude. It tended to get merged I think with a certain attitude, a type of shoulder-shrugging attitude that I think was just a part of his demeanour that often seemed to signal to people that he didn’t take things seriously. I think that’s very far from the truth. I think he was someone who took his own activity seriously. He took philosophy seriously. I think irony he thought of as almost a type of metaphilosophical position, one in which one tries to forego even the hope of having certainty while maintaining a certain sort of conviction in things that he took seriously and views that he took seriously.
Classic Quotes from Commercial Media
April 14th, 2009Fact-finding TV infomerical: “What’s new in - Potato Chips”
Morning call-in topic on B105 (non-threatening FM radio for 20-something females): “Do relationships make you fat?”
B105 advertising sequence: Jewellery / Discount breast enlargements in Phuket / Cervical cancer vaccines / back to Jewellery
Popish Frenzy
April 14th, 2009“but Popish frenzy, which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched”
This line was inscribed on a plaque on the monument to the great fire of London. It was added soon after construction in the 17th century, and was not finally scratched off for another 150 years. I found this out on a walking tour of London - the missing line of course being more memorable than the main text, which describes how the fire started, etc, etc.
I like this for a few reasons
1. It sounds funny - I mean really, “The Pope” and “Frenzy”?
2. Conspiracy theories are always laughable, because the proponents are usually dead serious, and they Hate the idea of someone snickering at them. Somebody at the time of the fire must have thought the Pope to be responsible, via his sinister network of English Catholics.
3. It reminds me how obsessed people get with public statements. You still see this obsession in the wording of corporate slogans and international treaties. Most people just glance through statements to try and find the meaning, but to the authors each word is to be fought over and defended.
4. I like the thought of all the fights it must have generated. You can imagine when it was finally removed, there would have still been some segments of society for whom the statement wasn’t a total embarrassment and they would have argued like hell that its removal was a capitulation.
5. I didn’t grow up in a society with a strong division between Catholic and Protestant, so this sort of statement seems charming and anachronistic to me. I like the power of being able to belittle such feuds.