Joseph

Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most successful in the pre-Internet world can be understood in part as modulating the time domain.

The best reason for the layman to spend time studying culture is th at he can learn something useful and enlighten-ing about himself. This can be an interesting process, at times harrowing but ultimately rewarding. One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to... See more

I know that many of these virtues have to do with the ways in which the pieces handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and per-spective that constitutes Total Noise. This claim might itself look slippery, because of course any published essay is a burst of infor-mation and context that is by definition part of 2007’s overall... See more

It is the story that makes the difference.

To humiliate an enemy, he warned, is to provide it with a vendetta.

“An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,”

But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.

There are those, of a psychological bent, who would sa y t hat we are obsessed with time . They can point to individuals in American culture who are li terally time-ridden. And even the rest of us feel very strongly about time because we have been taught to take it so seriously. We have stressed this aspect of cu lt ure and developed it to a point... See more

from the writer Howard Rheingold: “Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.”