Category: ideas

Students are reading less? Does it matter? “The college students who now show up in my classroom come with an informational sophistication unimaginable in my generation. They find what they want, they use what they find, and they discard immense amounts of information made available to them. Are they naïve about authority, methodology, logic and accuracy in these endless streams of information? Sure, they are. Who should teach them how to sort this stuff? We academics, sophisticated readers ourselves who all too frequently escape into trendy obscurantism rather than engage the real world information flow that constitutes the actual cultural context of our time. We, the literate part of the American population, need to reconnect with the actual cultural context, rather than fight micro-academic battles of almost no interest to people outside the elite tiers of the academy.”

“People hardly blink, anymore, at the potency and omnipresence of technology and its attendant powers of transformation. The information stream that was not so long ago channeled by newspapers, network television and radio, has become an unrestrained torrent that surges through cable and satellite television, cell phones cellphones, Internet blogs, podcasts and chat rooms chatrooms. It’s all changing faster than even the most keen-eyed futurists can predict. And so are we, in culturally pervasive ways, changing as well.”

There are 31 million hours of video programming produced each year. And the ways we’re going to access it are changing rapidly. “Every major cable company is making investments to allow TV to be distributed over the Internet, giving you access to each one of those 31 million hours. And then there’s this year’s 36-fold explosion in consumer-generated video on the Internet. This onslaught is already turning the entertainment business inside out. More music videos are being watched on AOL than on MTV. Procter & Gamble is cutting down on pricey 30-second TV spots to beef up the online presence of its packaged goods. TV Guide announced in July that it would drastically cut the amount of space it devotes to listings, an acknowledgment that viewers now turn to the Internet and onscreen programming guides.”

According to a new study, Asians look at things differently from Americans or Europeans. “The researchers tracked the eye movement of the Chinese and Americans as they looked at pictures. The Americans looked at the object in the foreground sooner — a leopard in the jungle for example — and they looked at it longer. The Chinese had more eye movement, especially on the background and back and forth between the main object and the background.”

“Aiming to replace the traditional tour experience of following the tour guide with the red umbrella, audio walking tours allow travelers to have an expert guide downloaded to their iPod or MP3 player. Audio tours run about 30 to 90 minutes and cost up to $15. A printed map usually comes with it, and you can preview samples to see whether they fit your style.”

Oxford University is considering banning child prodigies from the school and declaring a minimum age of 17 for admittance. “Despite an almost perennial flurry of headlines on children barely in their teens being offered places, the university is considering an unprecedented blanket rule on minimum ages for undergraduates.”

A public school in Arizona ditches textbooks and gives each of its students iBook computers instead. “Students get the materials over the school’s wireless internet network. The school has a central filtering system that limits what can be downloaded on campus. The system also controls chat-room visits and instant messaging that might otherwise distract wired students. Students can turn in homework online. A web program checks against internet sources for plagiarized material and against the work of other students.”

Is our attraction to certain kinds of sounds and music something we get from the culture around us or is it an innate physical response, there when we’re born? A new study hopes to pin down some answers.

“Do you want to know what depresses the American spirit? Do you want to know why it feels as if the center cannot hold and the tyranny of mediocrity has been loosed upon our world? Do you want to know what instills thoughts of suicide and creates a desperate, low-level rage the source of which we cannot quite identify but that we know is right under our noses and that we now inhale Prozac and Xanax and Paxil by the truckload to attempt to mollify? I have your answer. Here it is. Look. It is the appalling spread of big- box strip malls, tract homes like a cancer, meta-developments paving over the American landscape, all creating a bizarre sense of copious loss, empty excess, heartless glut, forcing us to ask, once again, the Great All-American Question: How can we have so damned much but still feel as if we have almost nothing at all?”

“Gossip has long been dismissed by researchers as little more than background noise, blather with no useful function. But some investigators now say that gossip should be central to any study of group interaction. People find it irresistible for good reason: Gossip not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual.”