(no subject)
Catherine Bennett muses on whether environmentalism might be considered a religion. While obviously it is a good thing that individuals think about the environmental footprints they are leaving, this is so one of those things where the worst sins are not being committed on the individual level, and it shouldn't be just about feeling cosy about one's own meritorious behaviour (particularly among people who are in the privileged position of being able to make the necessary choices).
The circumstances of this list of ways to save money are deeply creepy, but surely some of them are just commonsense ideas that shouldn't need losing one's job to be practising? Others, chance would be a fine thing: from my experience of, and comments by friends in, the USA (and, indeed, significant parts of UK), the recommendation to 'use public transport' - it is to laugh bitterly: wot public transport?
Zoe Williams comments that There is an Eeyore-ish undercurrent to the reports that computers are bad for our literacy:
The overall thesis, then, is that computer access generally does no good for people's literacy and precision. Computers almost never turn out to have done a good turn to anybody. Take any trend of the past 15 years - from child abuse through to this putative illiteracy - and it will coincide with the growth of the internet. Factor in here that negative curves get into the news just on anecdotal evidence whereas positive changes need substantial statistical back-up before they have any meaning.
I can't imagine anything worse than newspapers full of people who just have a feeling that things are getting better and better, but can't put their finger on it. But how, exactly, did bad news come about this status, where the opinions of a tiny, statistically irrelevant sample are accepted with the rueful credulousness they'd receive if they were fact? There is an Eeyore undercurrent to all this, wherein we know that technological advances have meant greater sociological shifts in the past 15 years than there were in the 15 before that.
Unwilling to accept that these shifts might be both positive and negative or, more unsettling, might not even be measurable for a decade, we present a very fertile bed of pessimism for any seed of evidence that might be lobbed at us, never mind that it might turn out not to be evidence at all, merely groundwort (or worrywart).
....
Julia Strong from the NLT... hazards that the internet has actually improved literacy.
First, email addresses have to be rendered precisely to have any meaning, so the young are, if anything, more rigorous than ever. Second, the web has introduced reading into all kinds of activities - dating, shopping, gambling - that previously would have required very little reading and no spelling at all.
Though seeing some of the bizarre misspellings that somehow manage to end up getting hits on my website, I am just a wee bit sceptical about the latter point.
Today's ODNB Life of the Day, the fascinating May Sinclair, more of whose novels I would have read had they not become so hard to obtain.