Salut,

Sincer, as fi preferat un comentariu al articolului pe care tocmai l-am postat. Tu ai citit cartea recomandata de Ioana? Cum ti s-a parut?
Daca nu ai apucat sa o citesti, o poti imprumuta din biblioteca FRIENDS.

Cat despre raspunsuri si cine si ce raspunde, sa ne zici daca ai primit vreun raspuns care nu te-a multumit. Daca mai ai nevoie de detalii, ne zici si putem sa iti raspundem pe rand, toti cei din redactia The Fishington Post. Pana la urma poate unul dintre noi va nimeri un raspuns multumitor .

Pentru a imprumuta carti din bibilioteca Friends, scrie-i un mail Corinei: [email protected]

Ea te va lamuri si ajuta.

Continuare -

Living in an Artificial World

Extract from Chapter 1 of Authenticity
We have come through a period of unprecedented prosperity and aggressive certainty, ushered in by the end of the Cold War and the internet revolution. We have been told endlessly that the future is going to be overwhelmingly global and gloriously virtual, and that the two strands are intricately related. We have seen the pictures of rabbis in black robes with ringlets, putting their mobile phones up to Jerusalem's Wailing Wall so that relatives in New York could pray. We have read about the call centre staff in India who are given detailed lessons in the niceties of Eastenders, so they can exchange chit-chat with callers ringing about gas leaks in Weybridge. We've probably talked to them ourselves without knowing it. The recession may have slowed down the 'inevitable' progress towards a virtual world, but we most of us accept that globalisation is with us for good.Yet that ubiquitous trend has begun to spawn its opposite, and – although the demand for the real is barely showing itself above the horizon yet – it has already begun to make itself felt in many different areas of cultural life, from poetry to politics and from food to fashion. It is beginning to be clear that the dominant cultural force of the century ahead won't just be global and virtual, it will actually be a powerful interweaving of both opposite drives – globalisation and localisation, virtual and real, with an advance guard constantly undermining what is packaged and drawing the rest of society along behind them.
The New Realists increasingly want 'real' food – maybe organic – that tastes of something, doesn't involve the genes of fish for temperature control, and comes from a real place somewhere on the map. They don't want the kind of consumables leached of flavour and interest in the form of pills or tubes that the experts used to tell us represented the future of food because the Apollo and Gemini astronauts used them.
They want real sound of people working, not the fake recorded mutter that the BBC shelled out £2,300 in 2000 when they worried that their accounts department was too quiet.
Or the fake smells that London Underground tried in their tunnels the same year.
Or the fake places that all look the same, with the same global storefronts in every town and city around the world, in the cheapest international style of glass and concrete.
Or fake politicians whose slightest utterance is tested before focus groups and scripted, and who – like George W. Bush – even have the word "Wow!" on the teleprompter.
Or the fake relationships people create online, never having to meet, using fake names – sometimes even breaking up real flesh-and-blood relationships in the process.
Or fake community activity, like the Holiday Bowling Lanes in New London, Connecticut, which social theorist Robert Putnam describes in his book Bowling Alone, with giant TV screens above each lane, where the players never talk to each other between turns, but just stare sadly upwards.
Or the kind of world where, except for the very rich, most of us will have to rely on virtual bankers, virtual doctors, virtual pharmacists, virtual carers and virtual teachers.
That's not to say that there's no market for internet chat rooms, Pot Noodle, NHS Online – or George W. Bush for that matter. There clearly is. But there's also a growing suspicion of a world where we don't have to see people or touch anything, and a longing for something we can't quite put our fingers on. Just how big that market is, I'll discuss later – but what large numbers of people in the Western economy want, they tend to get.
It's a key reason that so many people are starting, in the media equivalent of a dim light, to feel around them for something firm to grasp."

Stefan Dima

Real Relationships
Extract from Chapter 8 of Authenticity
The most recent vision of the future written by Microsoft's enigmatic founder Bill Gates, [email protected] speed of thought includes a strange piece of nostalgia about dating a woman who lived somewhere else. Gates describes how they spent time together on email, because they were too busy actually to meet. "We figured out a way we could sort of go to the movies together," he writes. "We would find a film that was playing about the same time in both our cities. We would drive to our respective theatres, chatting on our cellular phones. We would watch the movies and on the way home we would use our cellular phones again to discuss the show."
He goes onto promise that this kind of 'virtual dating' will be better when it's combined with video-conferencing. This is an odd story because Gates shows no signs that he understands that this virtual dating is a pretty miserable business compared to the real thing. As Howard Rheingold of the WELL network says, "you can't kiss anybody" in virtual communities – however wonderful the virtual kiss.
This is a blindness shared by many of the cheerleaders of the virtual revolution, with the notable exception of Jaron Lanier who believes the new technologies must help people engage more closely, rather than to escape from each other – and to prove the point, he doesn't 'disengage' with drugs, alcohol or chocolate either. But few virtual writers accept that there's a qualitative difference, for example between real and virtual teachers.
We hear, for example, that providing more computers in schools is the most important imperative for the educational world – which is why schools are cutting back on arts and music to provide them. Especially in the USA, after the Clinton administration's determination to make computers "as much part of the classroom as blackboards". We even hear about virtual examiners. The New Jersey-based Educational Testing Service now uses 'e-raters' to mark G-MAT test essays for entry to graduate management courses. Actually the way forward for education, says the philosopher Theodore Roszak, is to "find out what Bill Gates wants schools to do and don't do it."
Of course there should be computers in schools. Children need to be proficient in computing, and computers can help them study by themselves and find out information for themselves. But they can't ever be a substitute for the kind of real education that can take place in the meeting of minds between pupil and teacher. That may not happen often enough – and it's a difficult alchemy to create in our monstrous factory schools – but that isn't the point. Computer education by itself is push-button, relationship-less education, and that is infinitely poorer because it is less human."

Stefan Dima

The New Renaissance
Extract from Chapter 12 of Authenticity
At the same time, we have also seen the emergence of an articulate but growing minority of the population who are rejecting the idea that the unstoppable march of progress meant a fake, second-rate world and are demanding something authentic – real human contact, real experience, real connection. They don't just want authenticity – this is no puritanical return: they want to enjoy getting drunk occasionally, they want fast food when it's convenient, and they certainly want to use the internet. But they don't want that to be their only choice. They want something authentic to go back to.
Their demand for reality is partly in response to the failure of these technocratic dreams, but also partly because some of them have been so successful – the rise of personal computers, fast food and food additives, for example – that they fear for their grip on reality. They are the living embodiment of Robert Nozick's prediction: 'In a virtual world, we'll be longing for reality even more'.

Sper ca am reusit sa va starnesc curiozitatea pentru aceasta carte.

Stefan Dima

Stefan,
Sar'mana mult.