None…

To your credit, Duncan, you do oft. find good content. Going forward, when one of your posts arrives in my RSS Aggregator, I will simply extract all the links. Reading the post itself and the comment war that ensues is generally a monumental waste of time.

Note to Arrington: Duncan should do google searches and news scouring all day for content (something a monkey can do) and send it to a writer, not a driveling child.

my 2cents, as it were.

Her one line about studying “computers” was meant to be a joke.

So this woman has a “very narrow understanding of the world” because she doesn’t represent the hard sciences? Really? Your hubris is staggering if that is truly your opinion.

I am certain that Muhammad, Martin Luther, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Ghandi, Gen. George Patton, Rev. M.L. King, Jr., Harry Truman, or Jesus Christ did not practice the hard sciences. As a history major I find your naive assertions, that the only people who either “understand the world” or have profoundly influenced it are those in the hard sciences, somewhat troublesome.

I will gladly admit that the hard sciences have provided amazing contributions to the world; both in necessities and conveniences. I would never make such a sweeping and wholly misplaced assertion regarding those studying in the areas where I didn’t.

I once heard a smart man say that the hard sciences make life possible, wherein the liberal arts make life worth living. You should get out more.

The thing is, the real world is to be found through mathematics. History has always shown that it is the scientists, the engineers, and the mathematicians that bring about the true lasting change in the world. And yet this storyteller has the nerve to say that “young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality”, when she herself has a very narrow understanding of the world. She could not do Albert Fert or Peter Grunberg’s job. They won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, and they are both very specialized in their knowledge and schooling, and yet their work has had far more impact on society then her writings.

In reference to her speech, she is far too hung up on what kind of media is used to display information. There is nothing inherently good about books. Books are obsolete and the only reason they are still in use is because people enjoy them for one reason or another.
What is not obsolete are the ideas, and a good idea is still a good idea whether you read it in a book, read it off a computer screen, or heard it in a speech. It does not concern me that people do not use libraries anymore, because the information in a library is far easier to find on the Internet.

It is generally common practice, I think, to “not memorize facts anymore, but memorize how to find them.”
(I take it you haven’t heard the adage about Einstein looking up his phone number when asked for it)

However, that above is just a side point; sorry for the rant.
Oops: one more:

My real point is twofold:
First: Believing that “culture” is reserved for things not computer-related or online is pretty ignorant. I hope I misunderstood.
Knowing “only” ANY one specialty thing is narrowing, sure: be it ballet, renaissance oil painting or computers. But “computers” and things technical and things distributed in this medium *is* part of our culture.

Second, the entire argument of “the internet making people dumb and uncultured” is like calling something a cart because it happens to be behind a horse.
I agree, we may be in a fragmenting culture, but it is not “the interwebs” that does this, or google, or computers. It’s ourselves. An example might be like saying ‘guns kill people’. A gun might be a tool that some people use to kill people, but people were killing each other long before guns. Similarly, (it’s an analogy: don’t know what that is? Look it up) “computers” and “the internet” isn’t fragmenting society, it’s a tool that some people use to fragment themselves. You want to solve the problem of killing people? Deal with what it is that makes people kill other people. You want to solve the problem of “dumbing down” and not having “culture”? Fix what it is in us that motivates us avoid knowledge/be lazy/ or whatever. Take some responsibility for your own “culture” and knowledge. Assuming you believe that there’s a “dumbing down”, “fragmenting” and “lack of culture” of society, it’s not the internet’s fault.

Thanks for reading.

via TechCrunch
This kind of stilted ignorance is what makes people stand out as not knowing a blind thing about the internet outside the crap (read YouTube, MySpace etc.) that floats to the top of popular culture. The Internet is a tool, a medium and a…

Αντι-ιερεμιάδα κατά Dorris Lessing: “Let them eat their elitist intellectual cake, because the world is changing for the better, and there is nothing they can do to stop this”…

thank goodness the internet has you on its side Duncan, who knows what those know-it-alls would try to get away with.