20 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Cognitive Prostheses
The sense-represent-plan-act picture is a heroic one, but it is biologically implausible. I don't need to memorize the layout of the physical environment around me — this desk, this room, this city, this country. After all, the desk, room, city are there before me and we are built — through evolution — to have ready sensory access to it.
Shut your eyes. Can you remember the detailed layout around you? It turns out that beyond the broad outlines — the basic schematic organization of... 1 
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notesGoogle doesn't make us stupider by letting us get by without having to remember things we can retrieve, and the idea that it does comes from a misunderstanding about how humans remember things and how we have always used technology to supplement our memories.
23 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Experienced Becoming Replaced with Facsimile
Art objects contain a dynamism based on scale and physicality that produces a somatic response in the viewer. The powerful visual experience of art locates the viewer very precisely as an integrated self within the artist’s vision. With the flattening of visual information and the randomness of size inherent in reproduction, the significance of scale is eroded. Visual information becomes based on image alone. Experience is replaced with facsimile.
As admittedly useful as the Internet is, ea... 1 notes
notesWe are replacing the real world, real experience, with images and film, replicating it, but the experience is degraded in the replication.
23 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Cultural Impacts of Easy Access to Pornography on the Int...
The Internet is awash with sex. In a few hours, an innocent can see more of the pleasures and perversions of sex, in a greater number of close-up couplings, than a eighteenth century roué could experience in a lifetime devoted to illicit encounters. The Internet is the greatest sex education machine — or the greatest pornographer — that has ever existed. Having spent time teaching at a Muslim university, where the torrent of Internet sex was a hot topic, I would not underestimate its imp... 1 notes
notesWhat are the cultural and emotional impacts of the flood of pornography to people accessing the Internet?
