What if social networking and media apps such as Twitter improve our collective sense of empathy?
When I joined Twitter I followed two types people, personal friends and complete strangers. The friends were neighbors or colleagues whom I met regularly in person. Sometimes I met them at school, others I met through other electronic media such as blogs. The complete strangers were celebrities, people whom I had heard of or read about.
I listened to your story about rising gas prices this afternoon and was disappointed by your coverage. It was filled with cliches and lack of creativity.
I have heard man-at-the-pump interviews for the past 6 months. It is time for journalists to come up with a new way of covering this story. Could you not interview an economist or some other expert? Hell, I’d even listen to a public relations person from an oil company if I could be guaranteed that I would not have to hear another man-at-the-pump interview.
I was sitting this afternoon in the coffee shop at Borders. There were about a dozen other people sitting in the shop with me, some of them talking on cell phones, reading, or just drinking coffee and talking to each other. I was reading Integral Psychology by Ken Wilber.
Wilber is an interesting read. His basic method and goal is to integrate the perennial philosophies of the pre-modern world with the psychological advances of the modern world.
Among the many writing projects that I’ve considered pursuing was a series of essays based on gerunds, in English these are nouns formed by adding -ing to the end of verbs. Some examples are falling, reflecting, refracting, wishing, pondering. For example, the essay on falling might have made connections between falling in love, the idea of losing control, the power of gravity, etc. This post isn’t that essay, instead it’s about reflecting, the gerund du jour.
I recently watched two documentaries, Hell House and Revolution OS, back-to-back and want to offer some insights I noticed about the different notions of choice and freedom that both of these films reveal.
Hell House is about a Halloween display put on by a church in Texas. The display is modeled on a haunted house, but instead of ghosts and goblins, the villain is sin. Of course, sin comes in a very conservative Christianist wrapper.
The Ann Arbor Transportation Authority has changed the sound of the ‘stop requested’ bell on their buses sometime in the last few days. Before, there was an anonymous electronic beep sound when you pulled the cord to signal the driver to stop, and then a female voice recording ‘stop requested.’ The electronic bell was similar to an elevator signal, but not quite as tinny and a bit longer duration. Now the single beep sound has been replaced by what sounds like a badly digitized three-stroke bell sound - clang-clang-clang.
Two months ago, as the winter semester wound to its close, I read an intriguing note on miscommunication and measurement in grad school by William Tozier. He wrote
The point being: We often seem to forget how important issues of pragmatics and culture are in the pedagogic cycle. Instructors know the damned answer. The older the student is, the more confidence the instructor should have that the student also knows the damned answer.
MaryAnn Johnson, a Generation Xer, who blogs at FlickPhilosopher and GeekPhilosophy recently saw An Inconvenient Truth and came out of the theater galvanized.
I’ve been letting the experience of seeing the film and seeing Gore in person sink in, and I find myself feeling optimistic, maybe, for the first time in a long time, optimistic about the direction our society may be going in. And I’m itching to do something about pushing us in that direction.
At this weeks SF/F reading group meeting the question was raised: what really makes a good book. So I’m trying to describe, at least to myself, the dimensions in a work of fiction that I enjoy and consider when trying to decide wheteher some book is good. So far here’s what I’ve come up with.
Sympathy and empathy for characters. There should be some connection between me and the characters of the book.
There is nothing of greatness about the United States that is not
also the greatness of all human beings. Everyone who lives or dies
in this world is entitled to the same respect, the same rights, as
those whom chance has allowed to be born in the United States. To
imagine that we are above humanity, that we are the greatest nation
that has ever existed, is ultimate hubris.
It is the hubris that allows us to torture others without complaint.