technology is sexy

what is meant by that word anyway? (sexy)

i'm reading:



love the overall tone and direction of what she's saying -- i object to many of Ellul's critiques & Postman's logocentric thinking...

BUT she writes about the slippage of meaning in words and how they mask things more than they mean things--

she offers the example of the phrase "user friendly" -- it masks the meaning of friendship far more than it means a machine which is easy to use.

but this word -- sexy.

could a word possibly slip farther from its origin of meaning. and at the same time mean exactly the same thing as it always has.

i use it a lot. I call a lot of things "sexy." i want to continually make people think about their bodies and desire and how their bodies and desire do and don't matter in the virtual world.

metaphors are like terrorist bombs in the hands of hyperbolists.

blogrolling

a while back i had a post where i talked about blogrolling and its connections to institutional life -- social movements -- etc...

bumped into a different metaphor today -- the idea that blogrolling is a kind of a collecting game -- makes great sense to me -- ties into my earlier analysis, and will intrigue a few of you, i'm thinking...

thinking about story

I really enjoyed reading this article -- a story about "a newspaper's commitment to a Truth of Voices, to be set against the Truth of Numbers".

it seems like a lot of really important issues are being raised in this story --

epistemological questions

the primacy of narrative

the threats of metanarrative

the precarious dependence of democracy upon media institutions.

but, best of all, its pretty darn readable...

who ever said that optimism is a virtue?

i say yes to too many obligations.

i make too many friends (i love them all, mind you).

i expect to finish work in less time than i do.

i see the spark of beauty in people who haven't muich more than a spark.

does it sound like i'm a good guy? i'm not. ask my wife. living with an optimist is a special kind of hell.

that should be the name of a song, eh?

rant on "the good old days"

grading, grading, grading (spring break whispers from around the corner, "you're almost there...)...but for now...another paper, another, another.

here is the most commonly recited thesis:

Things used to be better than they are now.

it has lots of different contexts and language, but that's the jist of it....

for some older people...i don't mind so much when they cling to this thesis...i mean, i get it: they fear irrelevance, feel lost and confused by the changes...but a class full of first and second year college students?!

what motivates them to argue for their own irrelevance?

The Psino

I was never sure why I was a psino (silent p); if it was something i had done; something i should be embarrassed about or something that was generally true of everyone.

it was certainly true of everyone that was in my sunday school classes.

Jesus loves me, the psino, for the bible tells me so.

Perhaps "psino" was a theological term describing the comprehensiveness of original sin?

It was a ridiculously long time before I figured out my error.

this, I know.

and i thought of it this weekend when Jaelyn asked me and Lynn very insistently and repetitively:

"What is Cruisey - Violence?"

It took a lot of conversation to realize that this was her take on the crowds maelovelent chant in the JESUS film (which she's been watching) as they chant, "crucify him!"

She'd been walking around muttering the magical dangerous phrase "Cruisey Violence" all day.

peace~