flâneur

Beez Africa

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on the atlas — 13

highlights — 24

  • Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything.
    PDF: The Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan
  • “Today we can recognize,” as Pope Francis laments the state of social media, “that we fed ourselves on dreams of splendor and grandeur, and ended up consuming distraction, insularity and solitude.” For, having “gorged ourselves on networking,” we “lost the taste of fraternity,” and having “looked for quick and safe results,” we only found “ourselves overwhelmed by impatience and anxiety.” The “prisoners of a virtual reality, we lost the taste and flavor of the truly real.”[20]
    Transcending Obsolescence
  • Ripatrazone is fundamentally upbeat (as am I) about the contemporary Internet existing as an incarnation of the Global Village. But significant problems can be found in the current implementation, which is reliant on surveillance and leaves the impulses of wayward souls entirely unchecked. The root of this problem is the centralization of the infrastructure, which has led to tight social control by the government in China, and monetized behavioral monitoring by corporations in the United States.
    Transcending Obsolescence
  • What's happened to [Mcluhan]? Why are these people reading Lacan or Foucault who have no awareness at all of mass media? Why would anyone go on about the school of Saussure. In none of that French crap is there any reference to media. Our culture is a pop culture. Americans are the ones who have to be interpreting the pop culture reality. … What we have is total domination by the pop culture matrix, by the mass media matrix. That's the future of the world.[
    Transcending Obsolescence
  • “In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information,” he writes, “moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.”
    Transcending Obsolescence
  • That memes have become an entirely new form of communication, with their own pedigree, rituals, and standards, is a testament to the validity of this synthesis of thought between Joyce and McLuhan
    Transcending Obsolescence
  • So how exactly does one get to this new virtual age? It takes more than just the development of the underlying technology; there is also a need to engineer the medium’s cultural capacity.
    Transcending Obsolescence
  • To McLuhan, an effective electronic medium was a new appendage of humanity’s central nervous system.
    Transcending Obsolescence
  • Rather, it took an innovative thinker like McLuhan to recognize that the rational foundation of contemporary technology could be leveraged in fundamentally irrational ways to advance humanity.
    Transcending Obsolescence
  • the weighty goal of making information networks centers of human creativity—a distinctly human capacity that stems from people being made in God’s image and likeness. Importantly, McLuhan emphasized a social aspect to creativity by linking it to the Global Village, a term for human society as forged by mass media, which became McLuhan’s signature idea when first introduced in the late 1950s.
    Transcending Obsolescence
  • “The electric movement of information abolishes the walls and boundaries between subject matters as much as between night and day and nationalities,” McLuhan writes, and “the tribalism will consist of one tribe in one global village—to wit, the human family.”[6]
    Transcending Obsolescence
  • Figuring out what I’m doing with my “one wild and precious life” …by making things.
    nancyland
  • I’d like to able to say my purity of focus prevents mis-stitchery mistakes, but that is profoundly not so. I’m rather amazed at all the many ways I make them. And although I’m learning as I proceed, inventing tricksy cross checks and multi-stranding, new mistakes creep in despite my diligence. Some are caught soon enough, and I can de-stitch the messups, but some are insidious and aren’t detected until far, far too late. When that happens, I usually just go to bed. And thus a whole realm of stitchery and pattern adjustments opens up, and I ponder and puzzle the most graceful way to move forwar…
    miniature needlepoint – Page 3 – nancyland.com
  • Lasting change is best made with a series of little steps. In the world of ergonomics, these steps are called “behavioral controls.” The great thing about behavioral controls is that there are more variables than constants among them—meaning they offer a bounty of opportunity completely in your control.
    Knitting Comfortably: The Playground – Modern Daily Knitting
  • Self-preoccupation is a prison, as every self-absorbed person finally knows. Commitments to larger purposes can get you out of prison.
    PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE
  • In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent communities and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today you can't count on any such heritage. You have to build meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments -- whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life's work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans. Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any more -- not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you've committed yourself to.
    PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE
  • Everyone wants to be interesting -- but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out.
    PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE
  • Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.
    PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE
  • And there is one other little question: 'Did you collaborate in your own defeat?" A lot of people do. Learn not to.
    PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE
  • You can even be unaffected -- a quality that often takes years to acquire. You can achieve the simplicity that lies beyond sophistication.
    PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE
  • The things you learn in maturity aren't simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You leant not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.
    PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE
  • I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don't be too hard on yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that "Life is the art of drawing without an eraser." And above all don't imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.
    PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE
  • We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work are more stale than they know, more bored than they would care to admit. Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations. Someone said to me the other day "How can I be so bored when I'm so busy?" And I said "Let me count the ways." Logan Pearsall Smith said that boredom can rise to the level of a mystical experience, and if that's true I know some very busy middle level executives who are among the great mystics of all time.
    PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE
  • I once wrote a book called "Self-Renewal" that deals with the decay and renewal of societies, organizations and individuals. I explored the question of why civilizations die and how they sometimes renew themselves, and the puzzle of why some men and women go to seed while others remain vital all of their lives.
    PBS - JOHN GARDNER - EDUCATION AND EXCELLENCE