One of my friends is a big fan of .ORG (managed by PIR). Today, I got an idea for how to figure out the meaning of “dot org”. Google it, bing it — and see what comes up!
This is what I have said, and what I maintain, with no vacillation whatsoever. The reasons I can cite today are absolutely valid and even more important, since all of the events which have taken place over the last 40 years confirm them, today with more justification than ever, since – among Marxists and Christians, Catholic or not; Muslims, Shiite or Sunni; free thinkers, dialectical materialists and thinking people – no one would be in favor of witnessing the premature disappearance of our irreplaceable species, waiting for the complex laws of evolution to produce another one which would resemble ours and be capable of thinking.
We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us. We conceal it from our sight, because it troubles us; and if it be delightful to us, we regret to see it pass away. We try to sustain it by the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching.
Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.
The International Book Fair in Leipzig is this weekend. Gottfried Honnefelder (“Vorsteher des Börsenvereins des Deutschen Buchhandels”) said yesterday during his opening speech that without copyright and the protection of intellectual property, the free flow of information will suffer:
I would like to know:
Are you for or against ACTA (the “Anti Counterfeiting Tradement Agreement”)?
Sexismus ist nicht etwa ein gemeinsames Problem, sondern das der unterdrückten Frau.
[...]
So lange wie möglich müssen [Männer] sich in einer Stellung halten, um einer Sache, einer Partei, einer Firma, einem Land, einer Armee, einer Fußballmannschaft und der Familie zu dienen. Das ist die Rolle des Mannes.
Ralf Bönt, “Das entehrte Geschlecht” (p. 14, 16, 22) — link to PDF.
Leadbelly’s in the background
Being drowned out by the grind
He’s singing about “Rock Island Line”
Nobody seems to pay him any mind
Bestsellers and bookshelves
Full of self-help printed word
Some faint elegance is heard
Now was that Ellington or Bird?
Has it really come to this?
Can ignorance be bliss?
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop
Jazz at the bookstore
And blues in the coffee shop
Jazz at the bookstore
And blues in the coffee shop
There’s a man standing at the crossroads
With a dark roast in his hand
Livin’ in white yuppy hand
Over by the milk and sugar stand
Have i really come for this
This cup of caffeinated bliss?
So we browse around
All over town
Sipping coffees that we can’t pronounce
And meanwhile in the blues cemetery
All the coffins commence to bounce
Leadbelly’s in the cold ground
Rolling over in his grave
The hard road where so many slaved
Is now so smooth and paved
Has it really come to this?
Can Ignorance be bliss?
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop
Jazz at the bookstore
And blues in the coffee shop
Jazz at the bookstore
And blues in the coffee shop
People often talk about the importance of context when they talk about content — but that leaves out a very important piece of information: the container.
For years, I used to equate the container with the context — obviously, I was not thinking outside of the box! :O
In graduate school, I did empirical research on the meaning of titles to students enrolled in a library school program. I found the theme-rheme theory substantiated: Titles are like rhetorical questions that the corresponding texts are supposed to answer — at least that is the way most authors, readers and also librarians tend to think of them.
However, the cover of a book also functions like a skin that separates the entire universe into a sort of dichotomy in a different way: The “objective” reality outside of a book is balanced out by the “virtual” reality inside the book.
Therefore, the container that that separates the content from the “outside of the box” is actually not inert and constant, it is not a clear, mathematical demarcation in the sense of being a cool, rational, disinterested and logical set theory. Instead, it is functional: it lives and breathes just like the pores in our skin perform different functions under different circumstances. It impacts and affects both the internal and external environments in the universal system it is an integral part of.
This becomes most clear — not in an obvious, “in your face” manner, but nonetheless in a “readily apparent” manner — when we consider this trichotomy of content, container and context in an online / internet / world-wide web setting. Compared to the cover of a book, a website like facebook.com and/or google.com contains code (computer programs) which is (are) very thick-skinned: they are multi-functional — in other words, they perform many multi-faceted functions. In many cases, these functions go far beyond the simple linguistic function of the way the words of language used in the title / domain name of the web site function to form a relationship between the contents, the user and the “rest of the world” (note that I am here attempting to reduce and simplify an immensely complex system). For example: Google will quite often change the user’s entered search query to return results that have been chosen to be “more relevant” than what the query text chosen by the user would otherwise return according to Google’s algorithms (which are, by the way, also constantly changing and therefore not “reliable” yardsticks). Likewise, in a drastically more obvious manner, Facebook regularly changes the website design and adds or removes various functions (at the moment, Facebook is introducing a change which basically eliminates the use of RSS feeds from most of the of the website — therefore, users will no longer be able to follow user-shared “updates” unless they actually are logged in and looking directly at the website as the updates flow down the screen).
Ultimately, users will need to be much better educated in online literacy skills in order for people to be able to be skilled and able function in any advanced society in which such information sources and media play a central role. Put simply (indeed to vastly oversimplify the very complex, in order to make very clear): users must learn how to choose between thick-skinned websites versus thin-skinned websites in order to be able to evaluate and interpret the contained information — i.e., the content — reliably.
