#fare forward

T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages," "Four Quartets"

T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages," "Four Quartets"

(http://farefwd.com/2015/02/american-democracys-great-de-linking/)

I read Jayber Crow after Jake’s analysis and excerpt of it (the same ones, though in a previous article) made me teary!)

Excerpt from Nicholas Carr's The Glass Cage Reviewed by Inez Tan For Fare Forward To my class of mostly eighteen-year-olds who’ve grown up in a culture saturated with Google, Facebook, and Apple products, I think Carr would say that we’ve all had experiences that should make us wary of how technology is changing us—we just aren’t very good at recognizing them. Human beings, Carr claims, tend not to think rationally about the place of technology in their lives. He cites numerous examples of how, over time, workers who come to rely on automation tend to slip into complacency, disengaging themselves from their work with disastrous consequences. In other cases, people become so biased in favor of their machines that they continue to follow them even when they’re issuing wrong or misleading information. In short, we have a tendency to assume technology is infallible when it’s not. Most troublingly, and often without our conscious consent, we cede control not to technology per se, but to the entities who own it, profit from it, and make the decisions about its ultimate objectives. Carr notes that Google’s maps push us to think about space in ways that serve the corporation’s commercial interests, while social networks encourage us to package our identity and online behavior into neat data profiles for advertisers. Yet Carr doesn’t advocate quitting technology anytime soon, even as he cautions, “We shouldn’t confuse those companies’ interests with our own.” After all, technology has certainly served to advance our own interests. What’s more, Carr sees the creation of technology as a fundamentally human pursuit. “Technology isn’t what makes us ‘post-human’ or ‘transhuman’ as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It’s what makes us human,” he writes. “Technology is in our nature.” It follows, then, that we should seek to design and implement technology that extends and cultivates our capabilities, instead of attempting to override them. Carr praises innovation that helps us to interact more deeply with our environment, rather than tune it out. Microscopes and particle accelerators, for example, greatly aid scientists to discover more about the natural world. Carr also points to the recent case of Boeing introducing steering controls that provide artificial haptic feedback to pilots to increase their sense of control over their planes, making them better flyers. For Carr, we ought to embrace technology that makes our work more rewarding, rather than technology that tries to do our work for us. Oscar Wilde, among others at the turn of the twentieth century, envisioned a technological utopia where machines would bear the burden of work, “while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man.” Carr takes the opposite stance. Early on, he cites a study by two University of Chicago professors showing that people are the most fulfilled and engaged when they’re at work—even though they claim to prefer leisure. Work provides goals, challenges, and rewards. It structures time that we might otherwise fritter away. “We become so immersed in the flow of our work,” Carr explains, “that we tune out distractions and transcend the anxieties and worries that plague our everyday lives.” (More: http://farefwd.com/2015/01/nicholas-carrs-glass-cage/)

Fare forward, til you take on water  Til the sea is howling, I'm sorry you're drowning  Til the storm gives in, learns not to throw you wagers  And the sight of home, is that bit nearer 

at least one kind (although here's to a community of two)

From a review of Paul Bogard's The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light by Inez Tan from Fare Forward Bogard's book is twofold in its methodology. On the one hand, he gives a pragmatic and journalistic account of the fate of our night skies. On the other hand, he takes us on a sensory journey from a view of dazzling constellations in Morocco to the best streets to see London’s 1,600 remaining gas lights to Austin, Texas’ famed column of bats to the surreal hours of the night shift in an emergency room. His prose steeps us in the facts and the feeling of the night many of us don’t even realize we’ve lost, and seeks to inspire us with its beauty—“I’m talking about a night sky that leaves you breathless, that makes you want to study the stars, or write poetry, or dance.” On a deeper level, then, Bogard wants to make a case for beauty itself. In a moment of discouragement, an astronomer and fellow dark-sky advocate Bogard talks to quotes a striking passage by art historian John Van Dyke: "To speak about sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense—the power to enjoy through the eye, the ear, and the imagination—is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the would admit it. The “practical men,” who seem forever on the throne, know very well that beauty is only meant for lovers and young persons—stuff to suckle fools withal. The main affair of life is to get the dollar, and if there is money in cutting the throat of Beauty, why, by all means, cut her throat." Beauty—what is it good for? Such is the utilitarian perspective that a Christian understanding of beauty could correct. Flannery O’Connor, by way of Aquinas, argued that art is a thing good in and of itself. We therefore ought to love beauty for its own sake—as God did in calling creation “good”—rather than trying to make use of it to serve our own ends. (Full article: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/fareforward/2014/04/the-end-of-night-searching-for-natural-darkness-in-an-age-of-artificial-light/)