The Reader

I love the way this chap was able to block out the chaos and bustle of a busy railway station.

Quote of the Day

”Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ludovico Einaudi | Maria Callas

Link

Long Read of the Day

Attention is All You Need

As someone who wishes that Neal Postman were still around and writing about what social media is doing to society, I was thrilled to see that Kevin Munger has taken a Postman-like approach to analysing the significance of the decline in reading in younger generations. What I like about the essay is the way it tries to break away from the ‘sociology of the last five minutes’ that characterises much of the public discourse of this question.

Sample:

We need to appreciate that we don’t have any ground to stand on when it comes to understanding humanity and our relationship to media technology. This is Flusser’s idea of groundlessness, the fact that we are no longer grounded as a civilization because of our changing media technology. We have no stable point from which to evaluate how we experience the world and how other humans in different societies with different mixtures of media technologies appreciate the world.

This means that it’s impossible to make evaluations of whether a change in media technology (or, if you like, progress in media technology) is going to have good or bad effects on us. What we can say is that it will change us. It will change who and what we are. Lacking a stable point to evaluate this from either a positivist descriptive angle or through a normative angle of how humans should be, we don’t have any ability to evaluate whether a given change is good or bad. It is simply a change. It re-writes the rules of good and bad…

Worth your time.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Archaeologists Just Pulled Pieces Of The Lighthouse Of Alexandria Out Of The Mediterranean Sea Link

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was built during the third century B.C.E. in the early years of the reign of Ptolemy I of Egypt, after he declared himself pharaoh.

Sitting on the island of Pharos near Alexandria’s harbor on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, the lighthouse was one of the tallest man-made structures on Earth, standing at over 300 feet tall. Considered a technological marvel at the time of its construction, the lighthouse proceeded to stand tall for the next 1,600 years.

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