Another ethically hacked newspaper. This time, it’s local. Enjoy, again in the spirit of New Media inf115.
Another creation of newspapers sans respect
Reclaiming Conversation?
Yes, this is a question, inspired as it is by Sherry Turkle’s new book (Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Penguin Press 2015,) and my friend Dan Ausbury’s own reflections which he’ll share with our inf115 class later.
flickr photo shared by Ti.mo under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license
Alan Levine suggested in one of our brainstorming sessions at STEMmED, to elaborate around Turkle’s ideas through a compelling tool named Hypothes.is. This is a note-taking plugin that can be added to a browser. With it people can add chunks of annotations on any text segment from an article, be it on a webpage, a pfd file, etc.
In preparation for next class, I’m leaving here for reference two articles: one written by the very Dr. Turkle on the NY Times, and another, which Alan suggested, of a contrary opinion. We’ll explain later what is the job to be done.
Another reference may be the review on Turkle’s book published on The Atlantic: The flight from conversation by Lauren Cassani Davis, 7 Oct. 2015).
I am feeling so bad today, with a cold coming out of me, that after sleeping a lot, I decided I wanted to take a break and enjoy hacking a website. Of course, as an example of academic work for my class of New Media inf115. Thus, I installed the fantastic add-on Page Hacker | Firefox Add-on for Firefox, and could immediately –and WYSIWYG-ly– change the full page of the newspaper El País into something completely invented out of the blue. Hope you understand Spanish! If not, contact me. Of course, this is a joke. I sure hope my students will do something better and in better taste. Still, I enjoyed it, and enjoyed that little lightness that came out of this exercise.
A divertissement done with Page Hacker.
When we say we must prepare students for jobs that do not even exist today, are we prepared to see a likely work-force reduction of 50% in the next 30 years?
Image from Villemard, 1910. Le Barbier nouveau Jeu. Paris, BNF, Estampes. In: http://paleofuture.com/blog/2007/9/10/french-prints-show-the-year-2000-1910.html
Meaning, the jobs we study today for will not be there in 30 years, period. That’s the same period I have been living in Puerto Rico; and in this same period the job market has changed much –but not that much. We still have computer science professors and cleaning personnel. Secretaries and construction workers; doctors, nurses, lawyers. But tomorrow?
So, what are we educating about in higher ed?
flickr photo shared by kainet under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC ) license
Here, I am only going to share a couple of passages from the book. It’s a comedy made of small parts. A puppet theater with Stalin and Kalinin, and some sarcastic irony. But essentially it is a novel about insignificance as the key to wisdom, and its importance in this time where we take for given seriousness and heaviness in doing things that is just that, heavy and useless. Of course it reminds me his most-known novel, The unbearable lightness of being, which I unbearably loved.
Insignificance, my friend, is the essence of existence. It is all around us, and everywhere and always. It is present even when no one wants to see it: in horror, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters. It often takes courage to acknowledge it in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name. But it is not only a matter of acknowledging it, we must love insignificance, we must learn to love it.
This, quoting Hegel:
Only from the heights of an infinite good mood can you observe below you the eternal stupidity of me, and laugh over it.
Don’t you love this, The eternal stupidity of me?? This also reminds me of a joke by Groucho Marx:
Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.
Last:
There’s only one possible resistance: to not take [the world] seriously. But I think our jokes have lost their power.
Clear?
