“More and more of us now express our emotions through the devices and software we rely on in our everyday lives. E-mail, text messages, social media, video chat—each platform demands of us different expressions of ourselves. And in the near future, we will have a new range of technologies at our disposal—sensors, monitors, and software with the power to track, nudge, persuade, and coerce. What the clock did to time, technologists hope to do to emotion—regulate and regiment it, measure and monitor it. But taming the temperamental beast that is human emotion might prove a challenge that contemporary technology is unfit to take on.”
Tag: Spring 2018
The Difference Between Culture And Civilization
People are usually sure that they’re living within a particular culture, but typically wonder if what they have is a civilization. It’s been that way since the days of Madame de Staël and Henry James, but the terms are still easily confused. The German historian Oswald Spengler considered civilization the teleological “inevitable destiny of culture.” And Samuel Huntington’s famous book The Clash of Civilizations, largely about the differences between the Euro-American and Arab worlds, protests that efforts to distinguish culture from civilization “have not caught on,” and the “civilization” of which he writes is really “culture,” a set of beliefs rather than a system of rule.
Why Everything These Days Is ‘Curated’, Even Bookstore Inventories And Beer Menus
“‘Curation’ lends to the proceedings a certain air of quasi-professionalism. It seeks to claim for the proprietors an exquisitely refined faculty of discrimination, a sense that ‘objective’ higher standards are being enacted and adhered to. The selection that has been made, we are being assured, was not a product of whim or fancy, let alone crass commercialism. It reflects deep wisdom and heightened competence, a sensibility like that of the museum curator or wealthy collector, or the sommelier who truly knows his wines.”
Now We “Curate” Everything. What A Devaluation Of The Word!
“Curation” lends to the proceedings a certain air of quasi-professionalism. It seeks to claim for the proprietors an exquisitely refined faculty of discrimination, a sense that “objective” higher standards are being enacted and adhered to. The selection that has been made, we are being assured, was not a product of whim or fancy, let alone crass commercialism.