Since the postwar boom, we’ve had a surfeit of intellect, energy and time.
Join Clay Shirky as he charts the effects that this ‘cognitive surplus’ - aided by new technologies - will have on 21st century society, and reveals that the choices we make are not only economically motivated but are also driven by the desire for autonomy, competence and community.
Kevin Slavin, urban consultant and co-founder of New York computer games studio Area/Code presents a powerful argument for games as social systems with people at the centre; for the “software” of cities as what runs on the “hardware” of buildings and streets; for an “urban sport” that can educate behaviour by leaking from computers into the social world; and above all, for designers today to build the systems that will propagate and feed us, not the things we will consume.
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Lawyer David Cole was interviewed on the subject of lawyers who authorize torture. About the subject he also wrote an article in the NYT called The Torture Memo. He refers to memo’s that came from lawyers who informed the Bush administration how they could legally use enhanced interrogation techniques (a euphemism for torture) or alternately use them and avoid being called to defend the use in court. These memos have been secret until recently, but bit by bit are becoming public only now, thanks to legislation under the Obama administration.
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This broadcast of Media Matters had Christoper Hedges as a guest. Hedges is worried about the decay of literacy in US society. His point is that the big problem is not analphebetism per se, but rather the culture that has replaced the written one. There has always been an elite in culture that was informed and educated and as such steered culture and policy. When this was a culture of the written word, it had values such as giving sources, checking sources, making investigation and so on.
This literate culture has been replaced by a visual culture and in this culture it is the spectacle that reigns. In that culture there is no value for checking sources and making thorough investigations and consequently, this new culture is one of dreams. Hedges warns that Americans, also the elite, is losing their connection with reality and lack the means of catching up. This in a world with threats of climate change and continuous dwindling of US supremacy, militarily, economically and culturally, is ultimately suicidal. he paints a picture of America happily consuming its way into oblivion, without even noticing it.
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From TED 2009: Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for "practical wisdom" as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.
http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_our_loss_of_wisdom.html
Now, Malcolm Gladwell is taking on success itself, in a new book called “Outliers.” He’s looking at how society and culture determine who we are, and in particular, what accounts for super-success — for the outsized success of superstars.
It’s not what you may think, he says. Not genes or bootstrap grit. There’s a whole ecology to it, he says. Time Magazine calls his new book “a frontal assault on the great American myth of the self-made man.”
This hour, On Point: Malcolm Gladwell, on the ecology of success.
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2008/11/malcolm-gladwells-outliers/
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