Notes about researching and teaching philosophy…
Religious Nones
“Nones are the undecided of the religious world. We drift spiritually and dabble in everything from Sufism to Kabbalah to, yes, Catholicism and Judaism… We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt… We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: ‘It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.’” - http://nyti.ms/ssLTxN
On Metricizing Knowledge
“Besides, the research tradition in academe has always been to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Often a scholar has no obvious endpoint in mind when he or she embarks on a particular project but may unexpectedly make a monumental discovery. We cannot predict ahead of time if someone’s research project will be so important that it will win the Nobel Prize, or the Pulitzer Prize, so it would be counterproductive to determine in advance that scholars in any given area should not be conducting research and instead should be teaching more. That applies to every discipline, including those in the sciences.” - “How Not to Measure Faculty Productivity,” The Chronicle, http://bit.ly/tuSFFH
Metaphysical McLuhan
“I am not a ‘cultural critic’ because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities.” - Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, cited in The Essential McLuhan, pg. 1
On Face Recognition
“…many users do not understand that Facebook’s tag suggestion feature involves storing people’s biometric data to re-identify them in later photos.”
“There are many risks,” Mr. Caspar says. “People should be able to choose if they want to accept these risks, or not accept them.” He offered a suggestion for Americans, “Users in the United States have good reason to raise their voices to get the same right.”
“Face Recognition Makes the Leap From Sci-Fi,” http://nyti.ms/vrRpW3
4 Myths of Digital Learning
“I am a technophile. I believe strongly in the effective application of a variety of technologies to learning, and in the benefits they can provide. I have designed many online- and blended-learning courses at my university. However, every technology has both strengths and weaknesses.”
- Myth 1: Digital natives are automatically digital learners.
- Myth 2: Students prefer using technology to learn.
- Myth 3: Cyberspace is the new classroom.
- Myth 4: Today’s students are multitaskers.
“Why ‘Digital Natives’ Aren’t Necessarily Digital Learners,” on The Chronicle: http://bit.ly/smYNbi
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.