66 thoughts on “Experience Paradigm”

1.  
   » Wed 10/28 Dis­cus­sion Prompts:

   First com­ment:

            (sec­tion 015 due 11:30am   | sec­tion 021 due 12:30pm)

   1. Post a short quote from Wieseltier, 1–2 sentences
   (some­thing thought-provoking or provoca­tive, per­son­ally relat­able, surprising/puzzling, etc; or just your favorite sen­tence of the reading).
   2. Briefly note (1 sen­tence) how the per­spec­tive you’ve noted frames “expe­ri­ence” (worldview/paradigm?) — per­haps whether sim­i­lar to / dif­fer­ent from your own under­stand­ing (first-hand, studied/observed, taught).
   → addi­tion­ally, maybe ref­er­ence your project insights about experience/knowledge sit­u­ated in the Infor­ma­tion Paradigm.
    

   Class­mate reply:

   (sec­tion 015 due 12pm   | sec­tion 021 due 1pm)

   brief response (1−2 sen­tences) extend­ing dis­cus­sion. For instance, comparing/contrasting; adding exam­ple (per­sonal, stud­ied, observed); con­nect­ing to your quote, the video, or another reading/thinker/perspective.
   You might also pose a ques­tion, or con­nect to class focus (Unit 3, prior units, or over­all study).

   *note: these are just a few sug­ges­tions (need not use all/any options!) — with other approaches encour­aged as long as they are pro­duc­tive for discussion
   (besides agree/disagreeing, or sim­ply not­ing classmate’s good selec­tion of quote)
    

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   1.  
      → key top­ics to look for as you read and con­sider for discussion:

      Human­ism, Posthu­man­ism, anti-Humanism
      Quantification
      technology/technologism :: science/scientism
      world­view, knowl­edge, information
      market/economy; means & ends (aims/objectives)
      phi­los­o­phy, reflec­tion, (self-)understanding
      expe­ri­ence & iden­tity (indi­vid­ual & collective)

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   2. “Our very mas­tery seems to escape our mas­tery,” Michel Ser­res has anx­iously remarked. “How can we dom­i­nate our dom­i­na­tion; how can we mas­ter our own mas­tery?” Every tech­nol­ogy is used before it is com­pletely under­stood.” (Wieseltier 2015). I believe this to be indeli­bly true in all walks of life. We are never done learn­ing, we can never know enough. This, as explained in my project, is par­tic­u­larly appar­ent in the field of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, as infor­ma­tion is con­stantly evolv­ing and grow­ing within the field and thus it is impos­si­ble to really master.

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      1. This quote also res­onated with me. It really made me think about how I use tech­nol­ogy and how the dig­i­tal world has changed the way I think about learn­ing. Do you think that tech­nol­ogy exag­ger­ates or min­i­mizes this question?

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         1. I like the train of thought going on here. I noticed this quote as well, how­ever being in a sci­en­tific back­ground, tech­nol­ogy is the only way we have to con­firm our results. There are bil­lions of things that we must know about in sci­ence, and tech­nol­ogy does a great job at com­mu­ni­cat­ing this knowl­edge eas­ily. I think the only way we can attempt to mas­ter our own mas­tery is with the help from tech­nol­ogy which makes it eas­ier for every­one to bridge their ideas together.

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2. “The notion that the non­ma­te­r­ial dimen­sions of life must be explained in terms of the mate­r­ial dimen­sions, and that non­sci­en­tific under­stand­ings must be trans­lated into sci­en­tific under­stand­ings if they are to qual­ify as knowl­edge, is increas­ingly pop­u­lar inside and out­side the uni­ver­sity” (Wieseltier, 2015). I have per­son­ally wit­nessed this neces­sity to quan­tify many con­cepts and that, as noted in my project, that sci­en­tific proof is what con­sti­tutes knowl­edge. It was inter­est­ing to have this stated in terms of the human­i­ties, as well.

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   1. Marielle.. So do you agree with the state­ments that this must hap­pen in order to “qual­ify knowl­edge” for the people?

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      1. I per­son­ally think that knowl­edge comes in many forms, not just sci­en­tific fact. It just appears this is a pat­tern in soci­ety at large that noth­ing is taken as true unless inves­ti­gated scientifically.

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   2. I feel that this “notion” has been ever present through­out human his­tory and to critic it as a new way of under­stand­ing the world is ridiculous!

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3. “The streets of Amer­i­can cities are haunted by the ghosts of book­stores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the great­est thugs in the his­tory of the cul­ture indus­try.” (Wieseltier, 2015)
   I love this quote because it shows how pow­er­ful media has become, and it is quite sad in my opin­ion that books and hard copies of books have become almost obsolete.

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   1. Why would you say it is sad? While I agree there is a dif­fer­ent aes­thetic about read­ing a paper book ver­sus an online one, is tech­nol­ogy then infe­rior for read­ing while soci­ety uses it at such great lengths for many other actions includ­ing edu­ca­tion and communication?

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   2. I think that this com­ment brings to the sur­face another very inter­est­ing topic. I have never thought of cul­ture as an indus­try. If you think about it, cul­ture is traded, bought, sold, and stolen like com­modi­ties. Did any­one else notice that? I went straight to that and almost com­pletely ignored the book­store dilemma because it is a part of cul­ture that has been outdated.

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   3. I agree with you, this quote was rather depress­ing. I adore phys­i­cal books, so much so that I place much greater value in them than any­thing the internet/digital world could pro­vide me, and am sad­dened that they are dis­ap­pear­ing from impor­tance in our mod­ern culture.

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4. I agree with you! I once thought I liked hav­ing phys­i­cal copies of book so much that I would not get an e-reader. I did not stick to that con­vic­tion for con­ve­nience and eco­nomic rea­sons! Do you feel the same way about art? Is art more pow­er­ful if you know it was crafted com­pletely by hand? In rela­tion to the video, would you make STEM become STEAM?

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   1. (this was a reply to Natalie’s comment)

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5. “Where wis­dom once was, quan­tifi­ca­tion will now be. Quan­tifi­ca­tion is the most over­whelm­ing influ­ence upon the con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can under­stand­ing of, well, everything.”

   This relates really well to the dis­ci­pline of soci­ol­ogy and the infor­ma­tion par­a­digm from the pre­vi­ous unit because soci­ol­ogy stud­ies an abstract action like behav­ior that can’t nec­es­sar­ily be quan­ti­fied, there­fore I argued that there isn’t true fact in that field. Soci­ol­ogy tried to quan­tify expe­ri­ences that can only be qualified.

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   1. I couldn’t agree more. Sim­i­lar to soci­ol­ogy, many other dis­ci­plines such as sci­ence and eco­nom­ics are also study­ing the behav­ior of how humans and ani­mals inter­act and make choices. The wis­dom we gain from observ­ing this is lost when we quan­tify these expe­ri­ences into numbers.

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6. “…the view that the strongest defense of the human­i­ties lies not in the appeal to their util­ity — that lit­er­a­ture majors may find good jobs, that the­aters may eco­nom­i­cally revi­tal­ize neigh­bor­hoods — but rather in the appeal to their defi­antly non-utilitarian char­ac­ter, so that indi­vid­u­als can know more than how things work, and develop their pow­ers of dis­cern­ment and judg­ment, their com­pe­tence in mat­ters of truth and good­ness and beauty, to equip them­selves ade­quately for the choices and the cru­cibles of pri­vate and pub­lic life.”

   This quote points out that in a world dri­ven by the econ­omy, cap­i­tal­ism is so ubiq­ui­tous that it defines what is “good” and “wor­thy.” As a con­se­quence, what was con­sid­ered high art and the pur­suit of knowl­edge for the sake of know­ing becomes a quest that is con­sid­ered invalid because it can­not be mea­sured on a profit scale.

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7. A com­ment I really found intriguing:
   “There are “met­rics” for phe­nom­ena that can­not be met­ri­cally mea­sured. Numer­i­cal val­ues are assigned to things that can­not be cap­tured by num­bers. Eco­nomic con­cepts go ram­pag­ing through noneco­nomic realms.”
   My web text was based on this idea that data and num­bers cap­su­late all that is said by eco­nomic arti­cles. In fact I voiced my dis­sat­is­fac­tion with this at times, because it makes things less inter­est­ing. As tech­nol­ogy pro­gresses, we are lean­ing more towards datas and num­bers to take over every­day things, but I’m not sure I’m ready for it.

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   1. This is an inter­est­ing idea, because in many fields (eco­nom­ics included I’m sure) have aspects that aren’t quan­tifi­able. But do the num­bers and data help to express gen­eral trends in the field? I feel like some­times num­bers and data can lead to over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, but we use them because they do help us as well.

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8. “The con­trary insis­tence that the glo­ries of art and thought are not evo­lu­tion­ary adap­ta­tions, or that the mind is not the brain, or that love is not just biology’s bait for sex, now amounts to a kind of heresy.”
   In my expe­ri­ence, these views are not here­sies, and are widely espoused. Both arts and sci­ences have their place in mod­ern edu­ca­tion, and they almost never con­tra­dict one another, because they don’t deal with the same subjects.

   The author also talks about the “tyranny” of tech­nol­ogy in mod­ern life. Tech­nol­ogy is such a pow­er­ful tool that we are able to read this NYT arti­cle online for free on our phones, and I think obvi­ous ben­e­fits like that can­not be dis­counted in explain­ing its prevalence.

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   1. I think that the author is point­ing out that the Arts seem to be tak­ing back­stage to Tech­nol­ogy and that “effi­ciency” (like twit­ter and adver­tis­ing type one-liners) is trump­ing the depth and breadth of the pur­suit of knowl­edge. But. I agree with you that the two can co-exist and even flour­ish together if every­one remem­bers that they both have inher­ent worth.

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9. I think that the notion that human­ism can take a cruel approach, like in post human­ism, is a total crock. There is no way that we can ignore the agen­cies of human­ity. We have indef­i­nitely and undoubt­edly caused there to be cul­ture, opin­ions, and ulti­mately world­views. I feel that triv­i­al­iz­ing that in any way is abysmal. I do agree that some views are por­trayed over oth­ers for cul­tural and social rea­sons. For this rea­son, there are some views that are more posthu­man­is­tic than oth­ers, but this is not delib­er­ate. I feel like the part about posthu­man­ism can some­times apply to non­ma­te­r­ial top­ics (still, I don’t like it) and mate­ri­als can only be described human­is­ti­cally. This is because the post human­is­tic approach is actively pur­su­ing the process of banal­iza­tion. This is eas­ier to do with non­ma­te­r­ial items because they are not tangible.

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10. “The dis­tinc­tion between knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion is a thing of the past, and there is no greater dis­grace than to be a thing of the past.”

    I found this inter­est­ing because, knowl­edge is acquired by teach­ings and read­ings and it some­thing that is col­lected and learned over time, while infor­ma­tion is given and not necis­sar­ily retained. With tech­no­log­i­cal social media tak­ing front stage the need to acquire knowl­edge is no longer needed like in the past because infor­ma­tion is read­ily avail­able through technology.

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    1. I agree with this quote and what you added along with it. Peo­ple are now start­ing to view infor­ma­tion and the infor­ma­tion they receive as knowl­edge, when knowl­edge is clas­si­fied more as a greater under­stand­ing or as a world­view. Knowl­edge depends on how you use the infor­ma­tion you retain and how you apply it to your thoughts, not nec­es­sar­ily infor­ma­tion itself.

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    2. This is inter­est­ing and so true! Knowl­edge can come to any­one with the capa­bil­ity of uti­liz­ing tech­nol­ogy. I like that you tied this into mod­ern day, and also that you chose a quote that isn’t such a nice one, because it sig­ni­fies that the world will move on whether some­one is ready or not.

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11. “Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for Amer­i­can intel­lec­tu­als and writ­ers than to think crit­i­cally about the salience, even the tyranny, of tech­nol­ogy in indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive life. All rev­o­lu­tions exag­ger­ate, and the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion is no dif­fer­ent” (Wieseltier, 2015)

    This arti­cle rep­re­sents to me the melo­dra­matic reac­tions of some writ­ers and indi­vid­u­als who refuse to define their work in a con­text that is truly their own in a world that is con­tin­u­ally chang­ing. Change is inevitable and lament­ing over how it’s being defined on mass is like argu­ing for the return of horses as our pri­mary mean of transportation.

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    1. I see your point, and I agree with you that it is over-dramatic to a point, but I think that this is inten­tional. More than any­thing, I think this author is fight­ing for the right to defend old over the new. I think there is a ten­dency in mod­ern soci­ety to denote some­thing “new” as inher­ently bet­ter (con­versely, con­ser­v­a­tives often make the oppo­site mis­take: assum­ing the “old” is inher­ently best). It is impor­tant to remem­ber that “change” in itself is not nec­es­sar­ily bet­ter, although often it is. Argu­ing that books are just “old news” and not hear­ing the argu­ment for how they are actu­ally bet­ter is as close minded as say­ing that all tech­nol­ogy is harm­ful to society.

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    2. I agree with you that this seems to be a ris­ing theme for writ­ers. I feel like many writ­ers are attached to this roman­tic notion of a pen and paper, or a type­writer or some crap like that. Its as if they feel that just because they are typ­ing words on to a screen and not a phys­i­cal piece of paper, that the words may as well just not exist at all. I enjoyed how you used horses to cars as an exam­ple. To return back to only using or writ­ing on phys­i­cal media just isn’t practical.

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    3. Bravo sir, I couldn’t say it bet­ter myself.

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12. “There are “met­rics” for phe­nom­ena that can­not be met­ri­cally mea­sured. Numer­i­cal val­ues are assigned to things that can­not be cap­tured by numbers. ”

    I found this quote thought pro­vok­ing because it calls out how our soci­ety has some how related a sci­ence and a mea­sure to cul­tural aspects in order to assess their great­ness. How I was able to under­stand this quote was think­ing about the music indus­try and how an albums great­ness or suc­cess is based on youtube views, num­ber of down­loads, albums pur­chased, and how long it was on the bill­board top 100, instead of the actual musi­cal con­tent of the album.

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    1. This is another inter­ested quote right under the one you posted that said “Eco­nomic con­cepts go ram­pag­ing through noneco­nomic realms: Econ­o­mists are our experts on hap­pi­ness! Where wis­dom once was, quan­tifi­ca­tion will now be.”
       – what struck me most was that econ­o­mist are con­stantly mea­sur­ing out hap­pi­ness and we see this all over the inter­net and media now such as on Face­book like “Find our from 1–10 how happy you are” Just a thought!

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    2. A lot of med­ical paper­work and other sur­veys serve as exam­ples of our soci­ety using numer­i­cal mea­sures to assess pain, per­son­al­ity traits, etc.

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13. “Sen­ti­men­tal­ity is not always a coun­ter­feit emo­tion. Some­times sen­ti­ment is war­ranted by real­ity.” Wieseltier brings up a bizarre con­cept within our society–this quote was intrigu­ing to me because it por­trays the ques­tion of what emo­tions we are capa­ble of fak­ing to one another. Can you really tell if some­one is ever sincere?

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    1. This quote stood out to me as well. Some­times emo­tions are entirely war­ranted, other times they are com­pletely “fake.” What I am inter­ested in is what an individual’s goal might be in any given sit­u­a­tion when true emo­tions are not at play. Is there some­thing they wish to obtain? Is the por­trayal of false emo­tions always a self­ish act?

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       1. I don’t think it is always self­ish, it could be to make the other per­son feel bet­ter. Like for instance, have you ever had that friend that only com­plained about things and you feigned like you cared? The per­son would be more hurt if you straight up told them you don’t care than if you con­tin­ued lying to them.

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    2. I find this quote really inter­est­ing because it describes insin­cer­ity as a cur­rent phe­nom­e­non. How­ever what makes this gen­er­a­tion more or less sin­cere than the last? If any­thing peo­ple are now able to voice their opin­ions openly (via tech­nol­ogy), but is this still insin­cere communication?

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    3. I found this quote really inter­est­ing too, I could see that in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions peo­ple might have to fake an emo­tion for the sake of another per­sons emo­tion. I think fak­ing emo­tion is used in a way to get peo­ple to tell the truth or gain infor­ma­tion from some­one that only wants to open up to some­one they trust. I feel like pre­tend­ing that you can be trusted (which a lot of peo­ple do) can get you answers and it makes peo­ple feel like they can talk to you.

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14. “Every tech­nol­ogy is used before it is com­pletely under­stood. There is always a lag between an inno­va­tion and the appre­hen­sion of its con­se­quences. We are liv­ing in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose.”

    This quote stood out to me because, in my opin­ion, it sums up the effects of tech­nol­ogy and our recent advances in that tech­nol­ogy that keep us from truly under­stand­ing and dis­cern­ing infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge. We act or speak before we truly know the consequences.

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    1. Tay­lor, this is an inter­est­ing quote, I think it does a good job of high­light­ing how tech­nol­ogy can some­times limit the impact of qual­ity infor­ma­tion. We are con­stantly learn­ing and using newer tech­nol­ogy that can in some­ways retract from intel­lec­tual growth. It is inter­est­ing to think about our last two projects and how we had to com­bine infor­ma­tion and tech­nol­ogy prop­erly to com­plete them.

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15. The fre­quency of expres­sion in mod­ern times has effec­tively dimin­ished the force of expres­sion. Cul­ture has a greater part in the dis­cus­sion of busi­ness, met­ric units for not met­ric val­ues. quan­ti­fy­ing ele­ments or hap­pi­ness is a relat­able way to speak to the amer­i­can pub­lic. non­sci­en­tific under­stand­ing is being inter­preted sci­en­tif­i­cally in order to qual­ify as knowledge,
    Non quan­tifi­able infor­ma­tion has become hearsay and that is dam­ag­ing to the progress of our col­lec­tive intelligence.
    “Wher­ever mor­tal beings are thought­ful about their mor­tal­ity, and finite beings pon­der their fini­tude, at what­ever level of intel­lec­tual artic­u­la­tion, there is philosophy.(Wieseltier, 2015)”
    Soci­ety and cul­ture has always wres­tled with what human­ity is, and lim­it­ing the free­doms expressed by the sub­jects in human­i­ties is restrict­ing its growth. The clos­ing line of the arti­cle men­tions an impor­tant mes­sage “Our solemn respon­si­bil­ity is for the sub­stance.” With the con­stant wave of tech­nol­ogy becom­ing steadily more inte­grated with our con­scious, it is the respon­si­bil­ity of human­ists to ensure that qual­ity sub­stance is deliv­ered regard­less of its method.

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    1. I also found that clos­ing line of the arti­cle to be par­tic­u­larly intrigu­ing. I firmly believe it is the respon­si­bil­ity of humans to main­tain human­ity and sub­stance regard­less of the sur­round­ing fac­tors that change (i.e. tech­nol­ogy etc.).

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16. I find it extremely inter­est­ing how the arti­cle states that tech­nol­ogy is a “new means to old ends.” It is easy for many to say how tech­nol­ogy makes things too easy and destroys char­ac­ter, but the arti­cle brings up an extremely valid point: tech­nol­ogy has allowed us to access infor­ma­tion we could not have oth­er­wise with­out it. Tech­nol­ogy helps facil­i­tate learning.

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    1. I like that you chose this par­tic­u­lar por­tion of the arti­cle because so much of it had a neg­a­tive argu­ment towards tech­nol­ogy and often times we only see it in a neg­a­tive light. I am sure there are many opin­ions on the use of tech­nol­ogy to facil­i­tate learn­ing as well. Should we be look­ing at it as a pos­i­tive means to and end or a neg­a­tive one? Do chil­dren now learn bet­ter than chil­dren did many decades ago because of tech­nol­ogy? Or the learn­ing with tech­nol­ogy more dif­fi­cult because we often use tech­nol­ogy before we truly under­stand how it works?

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17. “The dis­tinc­tion between knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion is a thing of the past, and there is no greater dis­grace than to be a thing of the past” (Wieseltier, 2015).

    I was first drawn to this sen­tence because of its men­tion­ing of the past and things hav­ing past from exis­tence, due to many of my inter­ests lay­ing in the past; but the more I look at it, the more I real­ize its (pos­si­bly) intended mean­ing: that the dis­tinct fac­tors sep­a­rat­ing the con­ven­tions of infor­ma­tion (the man­ner in which cer­tain facts are pre­sented) and knowl­edge (the aware­ness and abil­ity to recall said facts) have dimin­ished and fallen into obscu­rity, becom­ing a ‘thing of the past,’ which is no thing to be desired. With nearly bound­less infor­ma­tion quite lit­er­ally at our fin­ger­tips, knowl­edge fell from impor­tance, as infor­ma­tion became more eas­ily accessed on-the-spot than the abil­ity to recall said infor­ma­tion hav­ing been learned previously.

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    1. I like how you explained “…knowl­edge fell from impor­tance, as infor­ma­tion became more eas­ily accessed”. I find that to be a really great insight although my expla­na­tion was dif­fer­ent I think that your sen­tence adds greatly to why infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge are now con­sid­ered things of the past. You also con­tribute an inter­est­ing point about knowl­edge not only being a thing of the past (there­fore a thing of dis­grace) but also a thing of lit­tle no impor­tance any­more. I won­der if that too is true about gen­eral thoughts on knowl­edge in today’s thinking.

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18. “Numer­i­cal val­ues are assigned to things that can­not be cap­tured by num­bers. Eco­nomic con­cepts go ram­pag­ing through noneco­nomic realms: Econ­o­mists are our experts on happiness!”
    –I found this very inter­est­ing and increas­ingly true espe­cially for my field of psy­chol­ogy. After fin­ish­ing project 2 I am more aware that psy­chol­ogy is inter­ested in exper­i­ments that offer data con­clu­sions in order to draw knowl­edge from that. The need for the num­bers is cru­cial in peo­ple able to “argue/prove” that there is a cor­re­la­tion between two things.

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    1. I’m a psy­chol­ogy major as well, and I def­i­nitely agree with your com­ment on the need for num­bers. We are con­stantly try­ing to ana­lyze and put infor­ma­tion into num­bers. The num­bers can give ver­i­fi­ca­tion to dif­fer­ent studies.

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19. “The dis­tinc­tion between knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion is a thing of the past, and there is no greater dis­grace than to be a thing of the past” (Wieseltier, 2015). Amaz­ing. There’s a quote in this arti­cle that sums up why I’ve been hav­ing a hard time sep­a­rat­ing the def­i­n­i­tions of knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion. Although I have been some­how been able to make dis­tinc­tions between them in my project, I acknowl­edged that they are inter­change­able and that one’s “knowl­edge” can be con­sid­ered another’s “infor­ma­tion” and vice versa. I find both of these con­cepts incred­i­bly intrigu­ing and haven’t given much thought to how they might now be con­sid­ered things of the past. The sec­ond part of the quote calls upon another idea that is more recent in today’s think­ing, “…there is no greater dis­grace than to be a thing of the past.” Has it really come down to that? I’m not exactly sure if the nov­elty of things of the past is entirely with­out virtue or cred­i­bil­ity for myself at least. I believe we can and have learned a lot from the past that is valu­able to obtain­ing a bet­ter future.

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20. “The most com­mon under­stand­ing of human­ism is that it denotes a ped­a­gogy and a world­view. The ped­a­gogy con­sists in the tra­di­tional West­ern cur­ricu­lum of lit­er­ary and philo­soph­i­cal clas­sics, begin­ning in Greek and Roman antiq­uity and — after an unfor­tu­nate ban­ish­ment of medieval cul­ture from any per­ti­nence to our own”
    I found this quote to eas­ily demon­strate a “world­view” because of the tra­di­tions and norms that we devel­oped from our ances­tors and how they change and how some don’t. These tra­di­tions or habits we have is every­thing we have expe­ri­enced from the start of our life and this could be con­sid­ered “knowl­edge” because of all the expe­ri­ence we have from doing it all the time. We per­fectly under­stand our cul­ture and know that it is based off cul­ture from a long time ago and we have changed it to a mod­ern soci­ety but still keep our traditions.

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21. “And posthu­man­ism? It elects to under­stand the world in terms of imper­sonal forces and struc­tures, and to deny the impor­tance, and even the legit­i­macy, of human agency”. accord­ing to this def­i­n­i­tion of posthu­man­ism, a post humanist’s expe­ri­ence is shaped by fate, not by choice, or free will.

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22. “Jour­nal­is­tic insti­tu­tions slowly trans­form them­selves into silent sweat­shops in which words can­not wait for thoughts, and first responses are pro­moted into best responses, and patience is a pro­fes­sional liability. ”
    I found this quote inter­est­ing, and very rel­e­vant to what is going on in our own soci­ety and cul­ture. Peo­ple don’t want to read long arti­cles any­more. Life is now filled of short answers with followers.People are hav­ing short atten­tion span with all this new infor­ma­tion com­ing at them at such a high speed.

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    1. That’s a great quote to pull out , because it’s so rel­e­vant to today’s time. It make me won­der whether there is a sin­cere long­ing for deeper longer answers or if peo­ple are gen­uinely sat­is­fied with the short answers. It also makes me won­der how the future will be and how rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion will be presented.

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    2. Although I strongly dis­agreed with many aspects of the arti­cle this was one that I agreed with. Quick acces­si­bil­ity and short atten­tion spans severely limit what is read in today’s media. Plat­forms like Face­book, Twit­ter, or even sites that uti­lize buzz­words of what is trend­ing on social media har­ness and encour­age this short atten­tion span and bring people’s focus in with a catchy head­line to read some­thing that may not actu­ally have sub­stan­tial con­tent, but does draw in views. One could argue that this reflects society’s pref­er­ence for quick acces­si­bil­ity over quality.

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23. I know that oth­ers had men­tioned this quote “The streets of Amer­i­can cities are haunted by the ghosts of book­stores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the great­est thugs in the his­tory of the cul­ture indus­try.” (Wieseltier, 2015) but I would like to com­ment on it as well. I just really like the imagery that the author con­jures up when describ­ing phys­i­cal media types that are dis­ap­pear­ing into his­tory. Per­son­ally I really like hold­ing a phys­i­cal exam­ple of my media rather that inter­act with a dig­i­tal inter­face. I guess that this need for a phys­i­cal relic informs my ideas about this sen­ti­ment of human ratio­nal and logic that the author is call­ing humanism.

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24. “Where wis­dom once was, quan­tifi­ca­tion will now be.”

    This kinda stuck with me. In this world that is grow­ing ever more dig­i­tal and inter­con­nected, com­mon wis­dom is being replaced with advice from buz­zfeed on how to do x, or fox news telling you to think y. Com­mon sense is being replaced with what peo­ple assume to be truth.

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    1. I under­stand where you are com­ing from and it is a good point, but I remem­ber think­ing about in a dif­fer­ent way. The idea that came to mind is the thought of a desk job vs. a trade job. For exam­ple desk jobs are becom­ing this job you need cri­te­ria for and then they will teach you the rest. In con­trast a trade job you appren­tice a wise crafts­man and learn the “wis­dom” and then if you are up to par you go out on you own.

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25. “How can we dom­i­nate our dom­i­na­tion; how can we mas­ter our own mastery?”(Wieseltier). This com­ment is exactly how I felt when try­ing to fin­ish up project two this past week­end. The rea­son being is because I felt like I was dig­ging and try­ing to find rhetor­i­cal analy­sis on things I could not even fully understand.

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26. “We can leave aside the ide­ol­ogy of dig­i­tal­ity and its aggres­sions, and regard the devices as sim­ply new means for old ends. Tra­di­tion “trav­els” in many ways. It has already flour­ished in many tech­nolo­gies — but only when its flour­ish­ing has been the objective.”

    This quote is inter­est­ing to me and backs up my reply to Jennifer’s response ear­lier. Tech­nol­ogy is seen in this light as a way to deliver infor­ma­tion, or “tra­di­tion “trav­els” in many ways. This is partly why sci­en­tist glo­rify tech­nol­ogy, it allows for a way to com­mu­ni­cate ideas. Tech­nol­ogy also serves as a way to con­firm dat and results, which means that it is the new way to test and develop. I under­stand what the author is try­ing to get,p at, which is this inhibits a sense of human­ism about the sub­ject, how­ever when deal­ing with sci­ence, it some­times goes way beyond the scope of human exis­tence which, with ref­er­ence to quan­tum mechan­ics, can­not be done strictly by inher­ent brain power. I agree, peo­ple only look at tech­nol­ogy objec­tively when it works, but when it doesn’t we seek out to fix the prob­lem. This does bring in the idea of expe­ri­ence, how­ever I think tech­nol­ogy does the job at allow­ing a sci­en­tist to put their expe­ri­ence into a the­ory, that can be tested on by more tech­nol­ogy. Human­ity is an impor­tant aspect of it, but I think only because it brings forth moral oblig­a­tion, which tech­nol­ogy can­not exe­cute. The study of STEM how­ever, tells us as much about human­ity as we need to know in my opin­ion, and I wouldn’t make it STEAM because STEM could be con­sid­ered “arts”.

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27. “The war between the world­views has win­ners and losers, though none of the world­views are ever erased and there is honor also in loss. ” This quote intrigues me because I think it brings out the whole idea that every­one has there own per­cep­tion and ideas, but the idea that some lose and some win is a whole dif­fer­ent aspect. To have a win­ner and a loser means that some­one (soci­ety) has to pick one, but how is that really decided? Is it by which one makes the most sense or is the most just, but yet again every­one may have dif­fer­ent opin­ions. Also if there is honor in loss, then cat­e­go­rizes and dif­fer­en­ti­ate the two?

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    1. The quote you selected was inter­est­ing to me too. It reminds me of this old idea that “his­tory is writ­ten by the vic­tors”. I feel like the author is get­ting at this notion that world­views, and our under­stand­ing of human­ity as it was and is now, is largely defined by this over arching-concept of tech­nol­ogy. What­ever the tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion of the time may be, it seems that in one way or another, humans will seek to define them­selves through that technology.

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28. “The notion that the non­ma­te­r­ial dimen­sions of life must be explained in terms of the mate­r­ial dimen­sions, and that non­sci­en­tific under­stand­ings must be trans­lated into sci­en­tific under­stand­ings if they are to qual­ify as knowl­edge, is increas­ingly pop­u­lar inside and out­side the uni­ver­sity, where the human­i­ties are dis­par­aged as soft and imprac­ti­cal and insuf­fi­ciently new.”

    This quote, as well as the rest of the para­graph and the pre­vi­ous para­graph were inter­est­ing to me. While I could under­stand his point in the first para­graph about how the qual­ity of expres­sion has dimin­ished by the avail­abil­ity and sheer quan­tity of infor­ma­tion cir­cu­lated in present day, I strongly dis­agree with his soci­etal impli­ca­tions of this phe­nom­e­non. Rather than sim­ply stat­ing that as a soci­ety we have embraced the use of tech­nol­ogy and “sci­en­tism” and it has brought new ideas and ways of think­ing into the world, the author has taken on a more dis­sat­is­fied tone. He seemed to be com­plain­ing about how the sud­den influx of tech­nol­ogy was dis­cred­it­ing every­thing in the human­i­ties field. I strongly dis­agree with this point. I think that tech­nol­ogy intro­duces new ways of think­ing that can help our soci­ety as a whole to under­stand how the world func­tions. This does not mean that the beliefs of human­i­ties about the mind and art and love are not valid. It is merely a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing and it should not be feared it should be embraced as progress.

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    1. I agree. I believe that as a soci­ety we have just moved for­ward, as soci­eties in the past have done. In a way it helps to share dif­fer­ent aspects of the human­i­ties in a new way, poten­tially with more people.

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29. “Here is a human­ist propo­si­tion for the age of Google: The pro­cess­ing of infor­ma­tion is not the high­est aim to which the human spirit can aspire, and nei­ther is com­pet­i­tive­ness in a global econ­omy. The char­ac­ter of our soci­ety can­not be deter­mined by engineers.”

    I found this quote inter­est­ing because it cre­atively iden­ti­fies and “calls out” a major way that we iden­tify our­selves as peo­ple, and a way that soci­eties use(d) to iden­tify them selves. Sim­ple exam­ples lay every­where in com­mon his­tory: we live in the age of information/technology, before us there was the indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion, before this the age of colo­nial­ism, ect, all the way back to things like the bronze age and the stone age. Every “soci­ety” is in a way defined by the tech­nolo­gies that they have devel­oped and are avail­able to them. It seems, that once some­thing new comes along, that is the begin­ning of a new ver­sion of soci­ety or the idea of humanity.

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30. “There are worse things than to be wrong.” I loved this quote when I came across it, because it exposes a cen­tral belief that we may unknow­ingly ascribe to when we glo­rify sci­ence as king: to be wrong is the ulti­mate fail­ure. To believe an untruth is the most shame­ful thing a per­son can do. It leaves no room for half truths, for lies which tell the truth, for truths which veil other truths. It is a belief in a kind of abso­lutism that has noth­ing to do with sci­ence; it under­mines cre­ativ­ity and art with a lack of trust in the self.

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31. “Every tech­nol­ogy is used before it is com­pletely under­stood. There is always a lag between an inno­va­tion and the appre­hen­sion of its con­se­quences. We are liv­ing in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose.”
    While I agree that many times nowa­days we are handed new tech­no­log­i­cal devices, before we have learned to a full capac­ity of how to use the device, I do not nec­es­sar­ily agree that it is much dif­fer­ent form our past, or that we have a lot to lose. Through­out human his­tory new inven­tions have been made, and when some­thing is new, it will always be used before it is com­pletely under­stood. With­out exper­i­ment­ing with new things,society couldn’t move forward.

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