halfway

http://cta.ornl.gov/bedb/index.shtml

on text messaging (and other new forms of communication)

Not that there is much call for Miltonic messaging these days. To use the
scholarly jargon again, text-messaging is "lateral" rather than
"penetrative," and the medium encourages blandness and even mindlessness.
On the Internet there are several Web sites that function as virtual
Hallmark stores and offer ready-made text messages of breathtaking
banality. There are even ready-made Dear John letters, enabling you to
dump someone without actually speaking to him or her. Far from being
considered rude, in Britain this has proved to be a particularly popular
way of ending a relationship - a little more thoughtful than leaving an
e-mail message but not nearly as messy as breaking up in person - and it's
also catching on over here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/magazine/22wwln_lead.html


why do people dump on email so much, huh?? 99% of my most substantive
correspondence happens via email. how can an email (a letter, after all!
in whatever physical form) even compare to a text message with a 200
character limit?

old hidebound fogeys suck. oh wait, no, that was probably a "mindless,
unpenetrative" comment worthy only of email.

um, wow.

i can't help but think that this says something significant about the
state of the western world, or perhaps of academia or writers -- how
incredibly small we can make our intricate worlds! would even Proust have dithered so much on every sentence he wrote? (would he have lived long enough to finish anything if he had??)

then again, maybe they are just trying to get at the same thing as polanyi
(summed up in a slate article on books people found most influential in college)

"Polanyi's gist was that we know more than we know we know, and that
without this connoisseurial, "unsayable" knowledge, science and society
can't function."

and then there were the fish ....

"For fishers of days past the closest thing to a management policy
consisted of finding a fish, learning how to catch it and then catching
all of it."

yum yum ... in case you had forgotten in the 3 1/2 years since Michael Pollan's nytimes magazine article on the beef industry, this is why eating american cows is just a little scary.

doesn't anyone want to play frisbee with me?

so this is why i can't help liking allan bloom....