Anthropology
Where trivia and gossip pass for news…
A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now. We will either wake from our state of induced childishness, one where trivia and gossip pass for news and information, one where our goal is not justice but an elusive and unattainable happiness, to confront the stark limitations before us, or we will continue our headlong retreat into fantasy. - Hedges
Related posts:
- Inverted Commas: Andy Warhol:
Interesting Andy Warhol quote via Boing Boing and The Happiness Project:
"Actually, I jade very quickly. Once is usually enough. Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.”
- In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It's a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China. "Come help us spy!" the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world's leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call. via Rolling Stone
- Frame analysis reveals the complexity of mundane social activities and it brings out the arbitrary nature of any fixed, social-domain or activity-based dichotomy between what is "staged" and what is "real". It brings out the reality-constructing capacities of what is staged, but also the staged nature of the everyday tangibly real. Note in this respect for instance that mass-media communication - including especially the solidly real called "news broadcasting" - is saturated by frame laminations which are deliberately and purposefully staged. What's more, an understanding of media communication is rather hard to arrive at, unless one comes to terms with the constructed pretense of an absence of mediation and the audiences' routine submission to an illusion of direct communication - even in situations where such a pretense becomes extremely hard to sustain... via Stef Slembrouck | What is meant by discourse analysis?
- Way back in the 1950s, sociologist Erving Goffman proposed in his study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that the very warp and woof of the social world consists of carefully constructed dramaturgy, albeit of a manner that most performers were unconscious. Our daily lives and cultural rituals provide all the settings, costumes, props and scripts we need to take our roles. The same logic underpins our movement through digital spaces and online communities, but unhinged from the necessities of physical limitations, and with a greater promise of self-transformation -- the dream of a complete rebooting of the self. via Rhizome
- Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.
Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.Source: New York Times
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