Essays: January 2003 Archive Page

"The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and the users of MS-DOS-compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the "ratio studiorum" of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory. It tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reachóif not the Kingdom of Heavenóthe moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation. DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment." Umberto Eco's 1994 essay turned up on an index to Marshal McLuhan Studies.

--Mac vs. DosMcLuhan Studies)

If you've ever gotten a "CONFIDENTIAL" e-mail from a Nigerian official whose shift key seems to be stuck, you'll appreciate this spoof. --Spoof of "Nigerian E-mail Scam"Palnatoke)

"The evidence that mother-only families contribute to crime is powerful. When two scholars studied data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, they found that, after holding income constant, young people in father-absent families were twice as likely to be in jail as were those in two-parent families. And their lives did not improve if their mother had acquired a stepfather. Fill-in dads don't improve matters any more than do fatter government checks." James Q. Wilson

--The Family Way: Treating Fathers as Optional has Brought Big Social CostsOpinion Journal)

Some bold statements that you don't hear people making every day; one hopes that this article won't simply be dismissed as being "reactionary", and that the important pro-fatherhood message won't be drowned out by voices accusing the author of wanting to bring the woman-oppressing 50s back. Of course there are families that are better off without a father, but most single mothers aren't Rosie O'Donnell or Jodie Foster. This article calls for active, involved fathers, not lord-of-the-manor breadwinners who demand the food on the table when they come home from the local bar so that they can spend the evening reading the paper and watching sports.

Google didn't find anything on the "National Longitudinal Study of Youth," but it did return a National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It's annoying that I can't check Wilson's sources -- it wouldn't have taken up much space to give the names of the two scholars he mentions.

The article also paraphrases advice from William Galston, a former assistant to Clinton: "To avoid poverty, do three things: finish high school, marry before having a child, and produce the child after you are 20 years old. Only 8% of people who do all three will be poor; of those who fail to do them, 79% will be poor." Wilson's use of the statistics seems to confuse causality with correlation, which is something I'm sure Wilson wouldn't permit his philosophical opponents to do. Still, it sure looks like a strong correlation.

"Big media barons are routinely accused of dominating markets, dumbing down the news to plump up the bottom line, and forcing U.S. content on world audiences. But these companies are not as big, bad, dominant, or American as critics claim. And company size is largely irrelevant to many of the problems facing today's Fourth Estate." Benjamin Compaine

--Global MediaForeign Policy)

Since I've devoted class time and blog bits to lamenting the reach of multimedia corporations, it seems only fair to link to this opposing view. Interesting quotation from the article: "A merger of Time Inc. with Warner Communications and then with America Online dominates headlines, but the incremental growth of smaller companies from the bottom does not." Weblogs are apt vehicles for promulgating the "media convergence is bad" meme, but if Compaine is right, then the growth of weblogs themselves is an argument against the idea that convergence is the dominant model. Another quote from the article: "Make no mistake: an activist with a dial-up Internet connection and 10 megabytes of Web server space cannot easily challenge Disney for audiences. But an individual or a small group can reach the whole world and, with a little work and less money, can actually find an audience." That sounds more like the point of view expressed in the blogosphere.

"Throughout the 1990s, my basic philosophy was this: Work=Boring, but Work+Speed+Risk=Cool. Speed and risk transformed the experience into something so stimulating, so exciting, so intense, that we began to believe that those qualities defined 'good work.' Now, betrayed by the reality of economic uncertainty and global instability, we're casting about for what really matters when it comes to work." Po Bronson --What Should I Do With My LifeFast Company)

This essay wins my prize for "best cultural reflection written by somebody sharing the name of a Teletubbie."

"You find technology virgins everywhere: Teachers who insist on getting detailed training for every new piece of technology that shows up; librarians who refuse to figure out the Internet text searching tools; doctors who won't use computer technology because it is beneath them; managers who deny their employees access to the Internet. Common to them all is that they are severely middle-aged -- in soul, if not necessarily in body -- and still think of PCs and the Internet as something new and extraneous to their jobs and lives, something they can choose not to be involved with." Espen Andersen

--Stamp Out Technology VirginityUbiquity)

See also Henry Adams's "The Dynamo and the Virgin" (1900). An excerpt: "As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring,-scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power,-while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force."