Here's a long and thoughtful article by Gary Kamiya on Salon, titled "The Readers Strike Back." The article is as long as it is thoughtful. Kamiay brings out the many ways in which unedited, immediate and intense reader feedback (especially at newspapers & e-zines) affects writers and their craft. Here's the before…
I’ve recently been digging into the family of blogs that goes under the umbrella name: scienceblogs.com. Here’s the general mission: Our mission is to build a community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about science and its place in our culture, and give them a place to meet. The Science Blogs are…
I’m reporting again from Memphis, where I am attending the National Conference for Media Reform sponsored by Free Press.
This morning, I attended a panel discussion entitled “Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media. The panel was headed by Eric Klinenberg, who teaches sociology at New York University. He is also the author of Fighting for Air: the Battle to Control America’s Media (2007).
Klinenberg indicated that we have been experiencing decades of deregulation in the media industry and we’re now paying for it. To those who attended this conference, however, he asked whether they remembered the moment when they figured out that they did not have to accept the toxic misleading filtered version of the media that they had been getting. He asked them if they remembered that moment when they realized that they could do something about this problem, about this media that has become “a war-mongering media.”
Large corporations are striving to finish the job of taking over the media. They are trying to take over the entire media system and to “plunder” it for their own profits. How bad have things gotten? Klinenberg states that he can’t find a single person who is more pleased with the media today than he or she was 10 years ago. No one he asks tells him that “after that newspaper chain took over, I learned so much more about my community.”
Pete Tridish of Prometheus radio was the first speaker. Prometheus is handing out flyers containing …
About ten years ago, when I first started auditing graduate-level classes in cognitive science, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of information I needed to learn (I still do). The topics included such things as connectionism, evolutionary theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and education theory. It felt like I was learning less and less about more and more to such an extent that I was eventually going to know nothing about everything.
One of the professors acknowledged the enormous scope and depth of the material. He commented to me “it’s like trying to take a drink of water out of a fire hydrant.
That phrase stuck with me ever since. It seems like I run into yet another entirely new overwhelming topic every few weeks. It helps me to keep in mind that it’s often not supposed to be easy. That’s why people spend much of their lives getting good at each of the many hundreds of disciplines. There’s very few people that have command over more than a few of the numerous challenging fields out there.
That feeling of being overwhelmed while studying cognitive science reminded me that I felt the same way in my first year of law school. If you did what many of the professors told you to do, you would be spending 18 hours every day reading material that would be largely unhelpful. An alternative strategy that worked for me was to work hard to quickly determine what to ignore. In law school, …
I would like to take a few lines to introduce people who don’t already know this writer to James Morrow. As it happens, Jim is a friend of mine. I admire and respect him and I find his writing a delight. He is first and foremost a satirist, of the…