OLPC advertisement with a conscious effort to shift the focus from “laptop” to “education.”

My name is Zimi.
I am 7 years old.
I came from a place you’ve never heard of,
a country that you can not pronounce,
a continent you would rather forget.

Our only problem is access to education,
with education we will solve our own problems.

To the person who gave me this XO laptop;
thank you.
You have changed my world.

I just came across a good interview with Sherry Turkle that, when compared with her general techno-utopianism in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, is more representative of her increasingly measured approach to the societal effects of new technologies. Her recent assessments are more nuanced and rather satisfying.

Our society tends toward a breathless techno-enthusiasm: “We are more connected; we are global; we are more informed.” But just as not all information put on the web is true, not all aspects of the new sociality should be celebrated. We communicate with quick instant messages, “check-in” cell calls and emoticon graphics. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not meant to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling. Although the culture that grows up around the cellphone is a “talk culture”, it is not necessarily a culture that contributes to self-reflection. Self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one’s time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it.

Interviewer: Is this a bad thing?
The self that grows up with multitasking and rapid response measures success by calls made, emails answered, messages responded to. In this buzz of activity, there may be losses that we are not ready to sustain. We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted. (Else 2006)

Else, Liz. (2006). I’ll have to ask my friends. New Scientist, 191, 48-49.

Side-note: I think the Second Life enthusiasts are getting to me. Step away from the kool-aide, people.

From Willard McCarty, Modeling: A Study in Words and Meanings in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Out on site, you were never parted from your plans. They were your Bible. They got dog-eared, yellowed, smeared with mud, peppered with little holes from where you had unrolled them on the ground. But although so sacred, the plans were only the start. Once you got out there on the site everything was different. No matter how carefully done, the plans could not foresee the variables. It was always interesting, this moment when you saw for the first time the actual site rather than the idealised drawings of it.

He knew men who hated the variables. They had their plans and by golly they were going to stick to them. If the site did not match the drawings it was like a personal insult.

He himself liked the variables best. He liked the way that the solution to one problem created another problem further down the line, so that you had to think up something else, and that in turn created another problem to solve. It was an exchange, backwards and forwards. Some men thought of it as a war, but to him it was more like a conversation.

Kate Grenville, The Idea of Perfection

This is a doozy of a sentence from “The Fixation of Belief” by Charles Sanders Peirce:

Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.

A little more straightforward:

An interesting post to an academic listserv today regarding a unique online social movement mentioned, for contrast, actions from groups responsible for “a set of unfunny memes such as the LOLcats.” Of course all I could think about from that point on was “wait — LOLcats aren’t funny? Since when?”

Really, how can you not find find them entertaining? It’s cats, which everyone loves, and then wacky spelling and grammatical syntax — I mean c’mon!