Philosophical notes…
On Humanities and Technology
“Edwind Land, when Steve was starting out, the guy who started Polaroid, said that the place to stand is at the intersection of the humanities and technology. And we do [tend to have this binary] in this day and age, which is why I like writing about Ben Franklin and Einstein, because these are people who combine love of science and love of humanities. This is what you get with Steve Jobs as well. And that sort of explains to me a whole lot of it - that part of his mind that was artistic and poetic, and that part of his mind that was a business man and engineer. And for many people that doesn’t come together, especially technologists. They don’t have the feel for art, but Steve did.” -Walter Isaacson, “Interview on the Biography Steve Jobs,” on The News Hour, 29 October 2010, http://youtu.be/b_MyXrxFF1A
The meaning of life according to Siri:
“I don’t know. But I think there’s an app for that.”
“Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in and try to live in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”
“I give up.”
“Life: a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings. I guess that includes me.”
“To think about questions like this.”
“42.”
“Life: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter including the capacity for growth, reproduction functional activity and continual change preceding death.”
“I can’t answer that now, but give me some time to write a very long play in which nothing happens.”
“All evidence to date suggests it’s chocolate.”
The Birth of a Word
“As our world becomes increasingly instrumented and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context they’re saying it in, what’s emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen. It’s like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication.” -Deb Roy, “The Birth of a Word,” http://bit.ly/qM1sOc
Jon Rafman on Google Street View
Although the Google search engine may be seen as benevolent, Google Street Views present a universe observed by the detached gaze of an indifferent Being. Its cameras witness but do not act in history. For all Google cares, the world could be absent of moral dimension.” - Jon Rafman, http://wp.me/pY8Oz-2h2
"Then... Sin Entered the Map"
Since Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, the importance of maps for national identity has been a commonplace in humanities discourse. Whereas the physical geographer measures the physical world in order to make a map, the cultural geographer measures the map in order to understand how people make their worlds. What then does the cultural geographer make of Google Maps? One little inkling can be found in a recent article in the Paris Review, “The Grand Map,” by Avi Steinberg:
Still, we have succeeded at folding many unruly miles of earth, from Manhattan to the Arctic Circle, into our own Grand Map. And, using our newfound ability to step through the cartographic looking glass, we began making discoveries… First, we noticed the fantastical creatures. The boxes with legs, the transcendent weirdos, the off-duty robots and headless zombies, the sad-sack centaur. Then things got a bit more serious. Sin entered the map.
An Interview with Cornel West
Eduarto Mendieta: But don’t you think that religion requires something like theology to articulate that experience of, to use Schleiermacher’s expression, “utter dependence”?
Cornel West: Yes, I think that theology is indispensable for religious communities to make sense of themselves and their changing views about the world in light of what is perceived to be revelation, but, at the same time, that theology can have a pretentiousness, or double pretentiousness, if it is acontextual as opposed to contextual, if it is foundationalist as opposed to antifoundationalist, or ahistorical as opposed to historicist, you see.
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=26570