Sparky! I can't remember when I last posted with you. It's good to "see" you.

Emily, outlaw Emily! Exclamation points!

Nilly! It's been quite a while. I've been working on a big project since December and I just finished at the end of April. I'm now working on being around here more, rather than, um, er, working.

Here's Ballard's quote:

Our universe is governed by fictions of all kinds: mass consumption, publicity, politics considered and managed like a branch of publicity, instantaneous translation of science and techniques into a popular imagery, confusion and telescopage of identities in the realm of consumer goods, right of pre-emption exercised by the television screen over every personal reaction to reality. We live at the interior of an enormous novel. It becomes less and less necessary for the writer to give fictional content to his works. The fiction is already there. The work of the novelist is to invent reality.
J.G. Ballard, from the introduction of the French edition of Crash

This is very funny in a tragic kind of way.

When the first person came by to tell the class that the President had been shot, the people thought it was an acting exercise and attempted to get in touch with their emotions about that. When they found out he'd died, they all had a visible outpouring of emotion, such that when they found out it was true, they were all embarrassed to be unable to separate the representation of their emotions from the reality.

This seems the slippery part:

He claims that everyone is a method actor now, because the media feeds egos so effortlessly now that people cannot distinguish between how they feel and how they are supposed to feel.

Supposed to? It all loops back into all the usual Wittgenstein and French critic mess where the authority behind "supposed to" is inevitably self-creating and justifying and itself mediated. Ah, I should probably just read it.

Yeah, what amused me was the reflexivity of your reply. Which is exactly what Mediated is about.

sniff I knew that.

Is it just me? The photo of Willy Wonka standing behind Anakin Skywalker just kills me....

[link]

I've been working on a big project since December and I just finished at the end of April.

Congratulations on finishing, then.

I hardly have been around here lately myself (crazy semester), so, as usual, everything still is my fault.

Interesting, Sue and Sparky. I figured that was more or less what you meant, but I don't really know the details. I'll see if I can fit that in. The program I'm applying to has a really good school librarianship certification program, which is what I'm thinking I will probably do, because that would be handy to have, and I like working with kids, especially teenagers. So it's good to have something to say specifically about education and how that affects access to information.

The new digital divide

From a link to the article (not the article itself):

Not only are there computer havers and computer have-not-ers, but there is a divide between the people who understand and utilize the suite of new tools the Internet has to offer, including blogs, and those who check their e-mail and the weather and know how to use Mapquest.

I think Uma is truly beautiful, but similarities between her physique and Jayne Mansfield escape me, once the list gets any longer than female and human.

I have to pfft at the digerati article. Whether or not Trump/Bush/Clinton use RSS is irrelevant. I doubt they do, yet they wield different sorts of power that far outweighs bloggers and and Firefox users.

Critical Thinking Mini-Lessons.

Induction and deduction, logical fallacies, etc.

The Wason Card Problem was new to me, but I got it right. Although I bet that if I had never studied logic I would have gotten it wrong.