Friday, December 14, 2007

The Empire Strikes Back...

The tiki-god of mind-numbing computer use and the oversimplification of interaction makes a compelling argument for education, literacy, curiosity... pointing out that all the neat stuff in recent memory emerged from science, math, and engineering, and not, say, txting during class.

Click here to read Bill Gates' recent editorial on why and how "reading lots of books" (among other expansionist activities) is important even if you're not some kind of fancy-pants intellectual...

(I am actually wondering if there hasn't been ANY artistic, cultural, or social development of note in recent memory, but that's a different conversation.)

5 comments:

Rufus said...

I have a feeling that a major cultural movement is either happening now or will soon happen. I also think it will have to be clandestine to survive without being dumbed down or commodified. So we might well hear about it twenty years after the fact.

Holly said...

Did you see the contrived faux-news thing recently, about why has France not made any great contributions to culture in a while? And France responded by saying a) you're confusing culture with entertainment, and b) we did have that one architect....

It came across as kind of weakly righteous. Very odd.

Rufus said...

The French have a very hard time with their diminished cultural importance. They're very touchy about it.

It also can't help being surrounded by great works of art.

Anonymous said...

I was just going to say there's probably some kind of guerrilla movement going on or about to happen.

I'm also thinking that maybe the anti-affluenza, reducing your carbon footprint, slow-food slow-life simplification movement might actually amount to something.

why do your commenter thingy keep changing? Do you change the format, or is it thrust upon you by blogger/google?

Rufus said...

It's all Blogger. I'm not even sure what it's up to.

The simplification movement will likely become something of its own, instead of just a reaction to larger forces ( if it hasn't already), and then really get interesting.