
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

- There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first, the Orwellian culture becomes a prison. In the second, the Huxleyan culture becomes a burlesque.
- What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countena
Notes On Amusing Ourselves To Death
The emphasis in all these cases is on knowledge being “actionable” because of the business context, and on knowledge being a refinement of information because that’s how we extracted value from data. That may be a useful way of thinking about the value of information, but it’s pretty far from what knowledge has been during its 2,500 year history. T
... See moreDavid Weinberger • The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy
than intellectual rigor. When
Martin Gurri • Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
When it comes to the quality of our thoughts and judgments, the amount of information a communication medium supplies is less important than the way the medium presents the information and the way, in turn, our minds take it in. The brain's capacity is not unlimited. The passageway from perception to understanding is narrow. It takes patience and c
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