Posts tagged as:

Internet

Our misinformation age

by Bill on August 18, 2010

In our digital age we have buckets of information and much of it is easily accessible. I can go online and with a bit of hunting find out all kinds of things about my neighbours, friends, strangers and you. Many of us have written essays, published books, lectured and made careers out of simply talking [...]

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Breadth, depth and brains

by Bill on June 15, 2010

I’ve always liked Nicholas Carr for his skepticism. Unlike contrarians, who take opposing views for their own sake, Carr as a skeptic asks questions, the kinds that challenge assumptions. Challenging assumptions is good for the brain. I’ve just picked up his latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and I’m [...]

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‘Emotions are contagious’

by Bill on June 8, 2010

I wrote a review of a book I’m currently rereading, Exuberance: The Passion for Life by Kay Redfield Jamison. (You’ll find it over at Thoughtwrestling.) This morning, I was looking over a chapter titled “Throwing up rockets,” a phrase from P.T. Barnum and it started me thinking about a few other things, like school murals [...]

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Authenticity and free speech

by Bill on June 7, 2010

On Saturday, Jonathan Fields had an interesting post titled, “Is social media killing authenticity?” I found the question intriguing partly because I think the answer is likely yes, at least in the sense Fields is talking about it (as in, people reporting words heard taken out of context). I had asked a similar question in [...]

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Joni and Bob; poets and thieves

by Bill on May 2, 2010

“Why am I always the one who must be the thief?” – Bob Dylan – A recent internet dust-up about Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan provided a certain amount of insight into people, the web and art, but the insights aren’t what many people believe. The insights were two and neither terribly remarkable: 1) most [...]

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Metaphors and similes like bling for words

by Bill on April 20, 2010

We use metaphors and similes every day. The web is built on them. The web itself is a metaphor. Well, it began as a metaphor. Given the meanings of web, I suppose it is an actual web. So I guess it isn’t a metaphor. As you can see, thinking about metaphors and similes can muddle [...]

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Quotes are signage

by Bill on April 9, 2010

The internet is full of epigrams, aphorisms and quotes. I used a few in my post yesterday. You see them every day in tweets and status updates. They’re all over the place. Why is that? What are they for? They’re signage. That’s the simple answer. They’re wayfinding information. As with anything, excess turns them into [...]

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