March 2012
4 posts
How to sound like an Internet pundit: 1974 edition
From Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s 1974 collection of essays “The Consciousness Industry; On Literature, Politics and the Media”
The open secret of the new electronic media, the decisive political factor, which has been waiting, suppressed or crippled, for its moment to come is their mobilizing power. When I say mobilize, I mean mobilize, make men more mobile than they are. As...
Here comes sloppiness
Clay Shirky is not on the list of my favorite writers. Why? I find many of his arguments to be sloppy, populist and, occasionally, unfair to the people he’s criticizing (see my review of Cognitive Surplus).
I’ve been rereading Cognitive Surplus and found a very good example that encapsulates it all. At one point in the book, Shirky criticizes the elitism of restaurant critics - who,...
How to dedicate a book
Spotted in the acknowledgements section of Mary Poovey’s “A History of the Modern Fact”:
Finally, readers who do not know me may wonder why I have dedicated such a challenging book to a dog. My answer is simple: even though she did not live to see its publication, Sufi presided over all the stages of this book’s research, writing, and revision. Without her imperious...
How to sound like an Internet pundit: 1978 edition
The quote below is from Daniel Boorstin’s The Republic of Technology (originally published in 1978; part of this quote appears in my book, The Net Delusion).
It’s hard not to notice just how little the populist techno-babble changes, even as the underlying technologies change. Just try replacing “television” with “the Internet” and “Vietnam War”...
