Joseph
@jmb
Joseph
It is the story that makes the difference.
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
“And I think it was memory that saved us. You see, we have already known that
Adam Nossiter • ‘Memory Saved Us’: How France Blocked the Far Right
Clocks are mechanical media that transform tasks and create new work and wealth by accelerating the pace of human association. By coordinating and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange.
Marshall McLuhan, 1961.
The choice of material to go into a newspaper, and the decisions made as to limitations on the size and content of the paper, and treatment of public issues and public officials—whether fair or unfair—constitute the exercise of editorial control and judgment. It has yet to be demonstrated how governmental regulation of this crucial process can be... See more
Rereading “Editorial Discretion”
The Free Speech, from Berger.
Fiction’s abyss is si-lence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is To-tal Noise, the seething static of every particu-lar thing and experience, and one’s total free-dom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.
David Foster Wallace • Deciderization 2007—a Special Report
More on Total Noise
Availability is no longer determined by one’s time, but by one’s attention. The problem, of course, is that our attention is constantly absorbed by the tools we use everyday, making us feel like we’re never truly available. As these tools continue to get nicer, prettier, and more powerful, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop checking them,... See more
Lawrence Yeo • The Omnipresence of Work - More To That
You’d simply drown. We all would. It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this—about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by ‘informed.
David Foster Wallace • Deciderization 2007—a Special Report
DFW on Total Noise
Complete attention,” Weil declared, “is like unconsciousness.” As such, it is a state that does not entail a particular action or stance, but instead suggests a form of reception, open and nonjudgmental, of the world.
Robert Zaretsky • Simone Weil’s Radical Conception of Attention
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.