Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era
google.com
google.com
The historical comparisons are interesting, but I suppose it's one of those questions where technology is available but human nature and morality are lagging.
I'm not convinced that Obama can distinguish between "stupid ideas" and "ideas which are contrary to the Obama agenda" though. Of course he's hardly unique among politicians for this, but I do think he's less likely than, say, President Bush, to acknowledge the existence of informed and principled opposition to his policies.
It's interesting that the internet has allowed the political right to get organised in a way that it never really has before. The left-wing political protests of the 1960s had universities as their organizational focus, whereas the right never really had any similar way of getting a protest movement off the ground until the internet.
There's only a few quotes from the actual speech given but bits like this:
"You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter"
sound a little to me like a man bitter that the internet is being used to spread arguments disagreeing with his own.
If you don't get how having to deal with stuff like that at the expense of substantive debate harms our nation, I don't know what to tell you.
Why their communications team (and remember his chief speechwriter since 2007 is a guy born in 1981[1]) keeps linking this with video games and iPods (which he certainly does know how to use; it's a bizarre line) has to be some sort of polling data. Cause, on its face, it's asinine.
As evidence, witness how quickly and reflexively this thread jumped into a discussion of birtherism.
Anyway, I guess my point is that would be hypocritical for Obama (or, in all fairness, pretty much any politician out there) to complain about the infantilization of political rhetoric. This, after all, is the man whose favourite rhetorical device is the "There are those who say [something that nobody actually says]" strawman.
I've heard multiple anecdotes (I know, not a representative sample) where someone "came up with" the public option but didn't explain it with those words, and their friends thought it was a good idea, but the "public option" was "government intervention and death panels."
The problem isn't the competing ideas -- the problem is the level of the debate.
You won't find any disagreement from me if you say that the level of political discourse is too low. You will find disagreement if you try to claim that Barack Obama has a genuine desire for it to be higher.
but as i said elsewhere, when you have one side poisoning the well and otherwise completely pulling shit out of their ass, the other side doesn't have many easy options. the negativity drowned out the actual info
also keep in mind Fox is a propaganda network that many people take seriously
i noticed some lessons have been learned, though. you can see this learnination in how the financial reform has played out, with the president full stop calling out the opposition's assertions as false
He regularly acknowledges other viewpoints and their validity.
What he is speaking out against is obvious mistruths: birtherism, "Obama is a socialist", death panels, "Obama is a secret Muslim", health care reform gives the government the power to pull the plug on grandma, etc.
Let's read that before spending a bunch of effort debating only a single sentence of it.
(It didn't take me long to find. It is the speech he planned to give, not a transcript, so there may be some minor differences in the actual address.)
He's speaking at a HBCU to a largely if not all black graduating class. This isn't Stanford or MIT. I know theres a blind spot to the inequality African American students face and that this is a sensitive issue, but I don't think telling African American students who are graduating college to be wary of a lot of the distractions these days such as xbox and twitter is a bad thing.
I could go on for a bit about why, but Obama lays out the statistics for you...
American students are ranked about 10th overall compared to top-performing countries. African Americans, however, are ranked behind more than twenty nations, lower than nearly every other developed country.
I would say that Obama is inspiring a generation of African Americans to work harder and strive for more because inequality is still pervasive throughout American society and education is the key to overcoming this. Why is it so hard to miss this message?
If I read his speech on my iPad, does that make it a distraction, a diversion, or entertainment in the President's rubric? Am I being entertained or emancipated? It depends on who's doing the consumption and to what end.
Am I being overwhelmed with an unmanageable deluge of information? That's the argument the church made against the Luther Bible and the printing press. Information wise, we've always been capable of overwhelming ourselves by scanning a landscape, listening at the shore, or staring into the night's sky. Is reading a novel educational or entertaining? Does it depend on the nature of the novel? Is there a quantitative basis for that classification, like the number of neurons rewired by ingesting the novel? or the improved efficacy or performance of the system after ingestion?
Distractions, amusements and entertainments are the means by which our minds extend themselves to qualitative and quantitative changes in the information landscape: in information space, we evolve through play. Playing with information yields further information, knowledge, and maybe some wisdom. Sometimes play spills to the physical realm as artifacts or shared experience. Differentiating between "education" and "entertainment", "entertainment" and "art", or ranking things in terms of "usefulness" is post hoc analysis geared to reinforce the status quo, its information taxonomy, and its hierarchy of cultural value—an increasingly unmaintainable fiction, the acknowledgement of which would invalidate the blessing being conferred on this cohort of lemmings by the establishment through the President's words.
Sports keeps people from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in sports [as opposed to political and social issues].
So much chatter to distract us from the important issues of the day.
Obama isn't nearly as extreme as Chomsky politically, but come from the same sort of intellectual heritage.
This has basically been the totalitarian promise for a couple of centuries now.
A fitting end, too bad so many innocents have to die or suffer in the process.
Cheering for the sane public transportation team, in most cities, is like cheering for the Cubs. You know you're never going to win.
...cheering for the Cubs. You know you're never going to win
What you seem to be saying is that the Cubs aren't proper sports players... not that I disagree...
Despite my political opposition to Obama, I thought that he understood the culture of the "IPod, XBox era." In fact, he leveraged these tools of 'diversion' in his campaign (and did so very effectively).
This seems to be the knee-jerk technophobic speech that politicians would have given in the latter half of the 20th Century. Instead of being afraid and resistant to technology (which, as we have seen, is unstoppable anyway), politicians should be encouraging the public to put these technological advances to good use. See: David Cameron's TED talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ELnyoso6vI).
He highlights a significant point in his speech, as tel says. Being able to deal with all of the information is something that we need to cope with. However, placing the blame on the tools is not the way to go.
We do need to come to grips with the social changes that are occurring and the implications of our present and future digital lives. Our man-made environment isn't the problem, it's our evolutionary memory combined with the phenomenal acceleration of information technology.
"none of which I know how to work"
which reads like the classic politician's way of distancing him- or herself from the technology (and have heard from technophobic politicians--http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/11/mccain-admits-he-do...). Whether its true or not isn't really the point (do we seriously believe Obama wouldn't know what to do with a iPad, iPhone or iPod?), the point is that it was in his speech. I could be completely off base here (and I surely hope that I am!), but this is a decidedly late 20th century speech in my interpretation.
I think he is just being innocently self-deprecating.
> ...politicians should be encouraging the public to put these technological advances to good use.
This is exactly his point. He used a few devices to hi-lite the difference between information-as-entertainment, and information-as-a-tool. This in no way makes him hypocritical for being constantly connected to a Blackberry; he's using the device in exactly the way that he's urging young graduates to use going forward. (It may make him a little hypocritical for his campaign machine, though.)
I think he's right. I think he's being proven right all the time by sites like Reddit, which were supposed to democratize the news, except that instead they repeatedly become a megaphone for internet tough guy squads and get hyped over issues where they don't have all the facts. Or like HackerNews, where daring to mention some high-tech devices causes everyone to completely miss the actual point of an argument.
In this speech, Obama says the world is experiencing a moment of "breathtaking change", and goes on to say "we can't stop these changes... but we can adapt to them."
How? By exporting laws that call for $1.92 million fines in response to 24 privately downloaded .mp3s? By allowing the USTA to bully Canada over 'laxity' when the IP laws in question are stricter than our own? (http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4997/125/). By threatening Indonesia with the same kind of psychotic economic violence in 'retaliation' for their government's formal support of Open Source? (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/23/openso...).
If this is "adaptation", what was the Opium War? A humanitarian relief mission?
I promise you, iPads and X-Boxes are not the problem.
And it is so true. Look st how much time people spend propogating meme's on facebook. Ok so there is always room for us to enjoy banal stuff - but I feel like it is starting to enroach on our lives.
It's like the sivers post from the other day; if only we shared an interesting wikipedia rather than one of those chain emails, conspiracy theories or "questionaires"...
If I warn that hammers can smash thumbs, may I still use one without being assailed by charges of hypocrisy?
Indeed, the strong controversy this articles headline will stir up proves Obama's (actual) point quite well.
What the hell? This sounds like Bush.
What happened to the guy who was in love with his blackberry?
I, for instance, am still pretending not to know who Justin Bieber is.
Band saw. Pesticide. Tractor. Hunting rifle. Jackhammer.
By any meaningful definition of "toy" and "starts out", not every tool starts out as a toy. Alternatively, if you are using definitions of "toy" and "starts out" that are ridiculously overbroad: at a high enough level of abstraction, everything looks exactly the same as everything else. A worldview that is useful is preferable to one that is elegant.
Pesticides might not be toys, but I bet the chemists and biologists who develop them have spent a good deal of time screwing around with the underlying constituents. I recently rented a rotary hammer to perform a particular task, but spent a good amount of time afterward playing with it to see what I could jackhammer into oblivion. At what point did it stop being a tool and become a toy? I learned a good deal about the operation of the hammer and improved my technique, does that mean I wasn't playing but was getting educated? Maybe our preconceptions about work, play, and education aren't really clear or useful?
What's the useful distinction between "toy" and "tool"? Is there a bright line between toolness and toyness? Or a continuum that depends on attitude, context, and use? I'd argue the latter is a more useful and meaningful perspective for those of us who do not directly depend on our "tools" for day-to-day survival. I'd guess that most hunters are not subsistence hunters and employ their hunting rifles recreationally, during leisure time, doesn't this make them more "toy-like" than "tool-like"? Recreational ornamental horticulturalists produce nothing of "value" (in the narrow sense of receiving remuneration); does this make their use of pesticides toy-like? Is a Schrebergarten a toy garden in the same way a Tonka is a toy truck? If you eat vegetables from the Schrebergarten or use the Tonka to dolly a load, are they still toys?
The original commenter distinguished between toys (e.g., iPad) and non-toys (e.g., Blackberry). I don't see that as a useful distinction: one man's tool is another man's toy (even tractors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhKfTFdtmCk). The President claims a distinction between information as distraction, diversion, or entertainment vs. empowerment. I don't see that clear line: one man's marathon Tecmo Super Bowl session is another's all nighter studying B.F. Skinner. Who is to say which is a distraction which is a better use of that time? Were people who watched hundreds of hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer distracted, diverted or empowered? If they got tenure from it does that change the answer?