Category: ideas

Creativity is much revered, and yet, so often, it seems, the individuals responsible for creative genius disappoint when viewed as human beings. “Art seems to require an inviolable freedom to seek the good of the artifact, without either overt or covert messages being forced into it. And history demonstrates that it is simply a statement of fact (to paraphrase Aquinas) that rectitude of the appetites is not a prerequisite for the ability to make beautiful objects. Thus our poisoner with his exquisite prose style. Or Picasso brutalizing the women in his life. Or the legion of artists and scientists who drank or drugged themselves to death.”

Online games are big business, and now players are making real money and becoming stars at it. In South Korea, at least a quarter of the population has participating in a game called Kart Rider. “Kart Rider competitions have been broadcast on two cable channels, and Kim Hyun Wook — who has won several of them — has emerged as a pop idol among gamers. A local apparel company, Spris Corp., sponsors Kim and three others as professional Kart Rider players. Some tournaments have been sponsored by the likes of Coca-Cola Co. (KO ) and offer as much as $50,000 in prize money.

Too noisy where you work? Office mates talk too loud? Now there’s a gadget that scrambles voices and makes noise easier to take. “It works by electronically listening, then repeating back random bits of what it hears. The resulting sound is blurred — as if familiar voices were speaking in a foreign language I can’t quite make out. We’re hard-wired to like the way the human voice sounds. The problem isn’t sound — the problem is that the search for meaning demands attention. Noise that settles into the background can be very pleasant.”

During the last couple of decades, the American economy has undergone a variety revolution. Instead of simply offering mass-market goods, businesses of all sorts increasingly compete to give consumers more personalized products, more varied experiences, and more choice. As the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.”

“The nearly 1 billion people online worldwide — along with their shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power, and more — are rapidly becoming a collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass cooperation across time and space is suddenly economical. ‘There’s a fundamental shift in power happening. Everywhere, people are getting together and, using the Internet, disrupting whatever activities they’re involved in’.”

A new study says that having close friends is more important to a healthy happy life than close family ties. The study reports that “those with the strongest group of friends and confidants were found to have lived longer than those with the fewest friends. Close contact with children and relatives had little impact on survival rates over the 10 years.”

The end of the Michael Jackson molestation trial sparked a predictable run of outrage in the tabloid papers which had already convicted the pop star in their pages. Phil Kennicott says that the use of celebrity photos to tear down individuals deemed to be too big for their britches has been elevated to a horrifying art form in recent years. “The camera is the weapon of last resort against celebrity. The camera is, of course, essential to the making of celebrities, but it can also break them with extraordinary speed and efficiency. The perp walk, the mug shot and photographs such as those [of Jackson] that ran yesterday are a populist scourge against people who are presumed to live by laws more lax and accommodating than those to which mere mortals are subject.”

The word ‘prosumer’ was coined in 1979 by the futurist Alvin Toffler. Initially, it referred to an individual who would be involved in designing the things she purchased (a mash-up of the words ‘producer’ and ‘consumer.’) These days, the term more often refers to a segment of users midway between consumers and professionals. This kind of prosumer doesn’t necessarily earn money by making music, videos, or photos, but is still willing to invest in more serious hardware and software than the typical dabbler, and spend more time using it.”

How exactly did American life become so saturated with ethical dilemmas? From Deep Throat to Tom DeLay to journalists who invent characters and plagiarize each other’s work, hardly a day seems to go by anymore without someone, somewhere, causing severe moral outrage. “Does that proliferation mean we’ve become a less ethical society? It’s hard to know. One man’s blatant violation can be another’s technicality… Ethical questions that seem clear-cut in theory – I would never lie – can become complicated in reality.” Of course, gray areas of ethics have always existed, but only in the age of instant information and amateur journalism have they become so likely to cause serious problems for so many individuals.

“There is an un-American secret at the heart of American culture: for a long time, it was preoccupied by class. That preoccupation has diminished somewhat – or been sublimated – in recent years as we have subscribed to an all-purpose, mass-market version of the American dream, but it hasn’t entirely disappeared. The subject is a little like a ne’er-do-well relative; it’s sometimes a shameful reminder, sometimes openly acknowledged, but always there, even, or especially, when it’s never mentioned.”