Monday, May 10, 2010

Oh Dear....

Yet another reason to stop blogging.

h/t Normblog on Twitter (Twitter being yet another thing to stop doing).
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3 comments:

AKUS said...

Actually, i think its worse than that. The use of embedded links (sorry, Yakov - we all do it, however -e.g. my article, if you will excuse this recursive comment: The Walled Guardian) corral the reader to only the information the author wishes to present. This essentially dumbs down the audiences who will tend to only view information that essentially agrees with their preconceptions, since it is just so easy to follow the links rather than search for alternative viewpoints.

We are all guilty of that. Pre-Internet, it was more likely we would get a diversity of opinion on the printed page in a newspaper or magazine.

May 10, 2010 at 3:32 PM
Anonymous said...

at first glance Twitter looks just like a note pad for all the links which looked useful at first glance. But my experience from the good ol' days is that if you want to have a really functioning filing cabinet that deals with all the stuff not sorted by ABC or 123 than you have to do a thorough revision once a year, throwing out rearranging and bundling/summarizing under new headlines and typing a revised filing memo.

but much worse than Twitter at first glance - there was a lengthy portrait of General Petraeus the other day which called on "us" to admire the guy for being constantly on the move from continent to continent, coping expertly with jet lag and being always on top of it. And in just about evry portrait I read it is pointed out to me with how little sleep the portraited pride themselves on doing - seems that's the new macho where women can compete well

It frightened me quite a bit i.e. our every day life (or death) is decided on by people who never have time to let their thoughts ramble incoherently unguided undirected?

I have a podcast subscription on Obama's speeches - I feel that so many of them are OK for a poster child but not for a decider - a decider needs to go feed the ducks in the park, stroll around with his buddies chatting about nothing etc. etc.

(one funny thing though - the same commentariat that regularly got the hysterics because of Bush's mountain biking finds Obama's golfing OK - at least I haven't seen anybody yet keeping track of the hours he does it)
Silke

May 10, 2010 at 3:40 PM
Anonymous said...

AKUS
I keep getting told that one also but my personal experience is that I have gotten a lot more critical and selective as to my personal heroes and that largely thanks to access to "biased" but obviosly thinking voices like yours.

Also in the ol' times it wasn't quite like that at least not for me

- if you read Der Spiegel you would get predominantly one mind set while when reading the Frankfurter Allgemeine a different one. This though seems to has changed, now they seem to be trying to cover as broad a range as possible but with the for me big BUT that they are all geared for outrage, anything below "brutal murder" and worse won't do, which makes me ask what a non-brutal murder would be like. - and that is only the most minor of examples - anything has to be upgraded into hyperbole.

Silke

PS: I liked your Guardian piece (I just about stopped myself from writing really well not because I didn't but for the sake of language discipline ;-)
- if you want to find a buddy look at Rod Liddle's rant in his comment in the Sunday Times (it's the second topic)

May 10, 2010 at 3:52 PM

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