MediaVidea

I tell university students that every course they take should be about who they are going to marry,...They should read novels about marriage. They should study the neuroscience and psychology of marriage. Universities should offer one course after another in marriage. But our institutions are structured based on this false view of human nature, so they emphasise the professional skills, which are important, but they underemphasise the things that seem soft and squishy and frankly unmanly.

"The distinctions and differences (between religions) are amplified online."

There's no duty to vote, but if you do vote, you have a duty to vote "only for things [you] justifiably believe would promote the common good."  

As a citizen, you do not owe it to others to provide them with the best possible governance.  But if you take on the office of voter, you acquire additional moral responsibilities, just as you would were you to become the Federal Reserve chairperson, a physician, or a congressperson.  The electorate decides who governs.  Sometimes they decide policy directly.  They owe it to the governed to provide what they justifiably believe or ought to believe is the best governance, just as others with political power owe it to the governed to do the same.

so small
so blurry
to better show a sense of movement SOMETHING has to be in sharp focus

No discernible voice/tone in this writing. Rambling descriptions. I, frankly, do not care where each and every person is seated. I don't care what shoe you're wearing. If you take out all the unnecessary details, you'd be left with about seven words.

...Who gets in that rarefied space is still determined by the writer’s gender, connections, beauty, nepotism, youth, or “platform.” Not even the most idealistic among the cultural critics bother to argue that the system is merit-based.

...(these writers) put themselves at great risk, facing jail and exile, to break through the anonymity. They led revolutions and then nations. They faced their time’s great evil with humor and an unwavering stare, and through that created works of great beauty.

There's not a whole lot of courage from the studios,...It's actually very sad where movies, and the studios, are at the moment. Every single comic, every book, is being made into a film. Do you know an author pitching a book nowadays is asked to consider whether there's a possibility of making a film from it? So films are even starting to limit the kinds of books we'll be able to read.

...democracy, justice, political obligation, morality, liberty, and equality.

What troubles me about the Big Idea Book Club is the way ideas often slide toward ideologies—grand unifying theories of culture, cognition, happiness, talent, the Internet, the future, you name it. “The Hidden Side of Everything,” “The Story of Success”: the italics are mine, but the emphasis is theirs.

...I also detect the insidious influence of the Big Idea books, whose grand theories of humanity often wind up simplifying, ignoring, discounting, or occluding many of life’s complexities, including human individuality.

These “wants” of technology provide a long-horizon framework for business—your business. I’ll be doing as many talks at companies and organizations about “what technology wants” as I can in the coming months.

Kelly is not the first technology guru to make a living by selling advice to corporations.

 ...But it is hard to imagine the previous generation of serious thinkers about technology—the likes of Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford and John Dewey—moonlighting as corporate advisers to Danone and Halliburton. 

 ...In contrast, most of today’s technology gurus-from Kevin Kelly to Clay Shirky to Douglas Rushkoff—take special pride in publicizing how deeply embedded they are in the very industry that they are supposed to scrutinize. 

Kelly’s project, by contrast, seeks to deepen the moral void -— and to establish its normative character by claiming that it is propelled by the same forces as evolution. But can evolution really explain the plight of child laborers mining for cobalt—a key ingredient in batteries for mobile phones—in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Zambia? (According to a 2007 study by SwedWatch, a Swedish watchdog, there were some fifty thousand workers under the age of eighteen involved in this practice.) Is exploiting minors for cobalt mining something that technology wants, or is it something that certain businesses, here disguised under the innocent label of the “technium,” require? To claim that such processes follow the normal direction of evolution is to let the mining corporations off the hook far too easily.