Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.
Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? —T. S. Eliot, The Rock
Jon Gertner • The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
History never looks like history when you are living through it. —JOHN W. GARDNER
Neil Howe • The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End
American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.
Sarah Vowell • The Partly Cloudy Patriot
Our minds were altered less by books than by index slips.
Which is interesting, recognizing not only the absolute vale of content but also its relational value, the value not just of information itself but also of information architecture, not just of content but also... See more
Maria Popova • Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity
Politics has become a product of a diseased culture that seeks its purpose in celebrities who are, as Boorstin wrote, “receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness. They are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror.”29
Chris Hedges • Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
Because history is not the background—history is the stage!