Talking 'bout my l-l-linkspam
Will other members of My Generation kindly shut up with the running around going WOEZ and flagellating themselves? I'm getting v tired of this monolithic picture of what Our Generation was like, and feel there is an implied arrogance in the assumption that we failed to find the cure for cancer, a solution to world hunger, and bring about lasting global peace as With All Our Advantages we should have done. Jeez. Also, is it just moi, or are the most vociferous voices Blaming Themselves For Being Boomers and Failing To Fulfill The Glorious Promises white, presumably straight, blokes? Because at least in this piece in today's Observer, the women are much more about, okay, not perfect yet, but you can keep and shove the 50s, srsly.
And is it being 'spoilt', to have had, briefly and for arbitrary and contingent reasons of chronology, certain advantages which, actually, one feels everyone ought to have? Plus, okay, it was still possible to get a foothold on the bottom of the housing ladder, but at least in my case, once I had done so I had to exercise the strictest economy for several years afterwards, which I am pretty sure was not a unique instance. We were not, all of us, all the time, wallowing in self-indulgence and wasting our substance in riotous living.
(And realise that we appear to be living in the Parable of the Prodigal Parents...)
I don't know if they are people who try not to use Teh Evul Intahnetz, or whether they are those kind of people who know what corrupts other people but remain untainted by it themselves, but I am also fed up with people going WOEZ about What the Internet Is Doing 2 UR BRAYNZ.
A new book claims the amount of time we spend on the internet is changing the very structure of our brains - damaging our ability to think and to learn
Yay for Prof Andrew Burn who points out that the malleability of the mind is a feature, not a bug (apart from the massive generalisation about 'the middle-aged blogosphere-addict', hem-hem):
Equating the internet with distraction and shallowness, he tells me, is a fundamental mistake, possibly bound up with Carr's age (he is 50). "He's restricting what he says to the type of activities that the middle-aged blogosphere-addict typically engages in," says Professor Burn. "Is there anything in his book about online role-playing games?"
....
And what of all these worries about the transformation of the human brain? "Temporary synaptic rewiring happens whenever anybody learns anything," he says. "I'm learning a musical instrument at the moment, and I can feel my synapses rewiring themselves, but it's just a biological mechanism. And it seems to me that to say that some neural pathways are good and some are bad - well, how can you possibly say that? It could be a good thing: people are becoming adaptive, and more supple in their search for information." Carr, he reckons, is guilty of a "slippage into an almost evolutionary argument", and he's not having it at all.
He's also not impressed by the way Carr contrasts the allegedly snowballing stupidity of the internet age with the altogether more cerebral phase of human progress when we all read books. "What if the book is Mein Kampf? What if it's Jeffrey Archer? Or Barbara Cartland? Am I not better off playing a well-constructed online game, or reading Aristotle's poetics online? I really don't see why books should particularly promote worthwhile thought, unless they're worthwhile books. And the same applies to what's on the internet."
And as I have doubtless remarked on previous occasion, we have heard those jeremiads about 'frenzy' and reduced attention span, and so forth, o so many times before.
Though I will concede, I am rather drawn to Lucy Mangan's plea for the virtues of boredom, though I'm not sure this is necessarily wholly eradicated by all the distractions available to the young today.
Virgin's new 'Rockstar Service' offers ordinary holidaymakers the chance to act like a celebrity. Where better to start than Las Vegas?
A rather different perspective on Kenneth Williams: I was Kenneth Williams' pen pal: 'He replied to all my letters, often by return of post. It still surprises me'
The importance of being an audience.
Children's sight at risk as parents and schools shun eye tests:
New research estimates that a million children have an undetected vision problem, while almost 70% of schools do not have eye screening in what was described as "an absolute public health disgrace" by Bob Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Optometrists. "There are problems which can be corrected in young people's eyes and yet it's a buried issue, an unknown issue, that children are losing out on a good education because they can't see."
So much for the glasses iz stylish claim.
Female doctors fail to break through the glass ceiling.
Lady Gaga's sexual revolution sees female stars reach for the leather. But is it o so empowering and female-focussed to invoke the dominatrix and the performatively lesbian in s-m gear? Izzit?
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