Interviews - Sherry Turkle | Digital Nation | FRONTLINE There seems to be a mass of cheerleaders out there who are celebrating this digital revolution, particularly in education. I think that we live in techno-enthusiastic times. We celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made. “Many students were trained that a good presentation is a PowerPoint -- bam-bam. In the area of education, it calms people to think that technology will be a salvation. I see part of my role in this conversation as giving nostalgia a good name. You can't put something in its place unless you really have a set of values that you're working from. What is this moment we're in? We are at a point where the fact that something is simulated does not, for this generation, make it second best, and that leads to some problems. This is really the first generation that grew up with simulation to the point that they see simulation as a virtue and have a very hard time identifying where reality slips away from simulation, often in subtle ways.
The Smiley Book of Colors By Maria Popova When Freud came to believe he was going to die between the ages of 61 and 62, and subsequently began seeing the two numbers everywhere he looked, which only intensifying the urgency of his superstition, he came to observe the value of selective attention in focusing the unconscious. But what if we engineered this selective attention purposefully and aligned it with our emotional and mental well-being? That’s exactly what photographer, children’s author, and educator Ruth Kaiser did in 2008, when she began seeing smiley faces everywhere she turned. For the past four years, she has been collecting and sharing photographs “found” everyday smileys in the Spontaneous Smiley Project — an exercise in self-induced feel-goodness, inviting others to upload their own photos and donating $1 for each uploaded photo to Operation Smile, which provides free surgeries to children born with cleft lip and cleft palate. Skeptical, still?
Introducing "enclothed cognition" - how what we wear affects how we think Whether donning a suit for an interview or a sexy outfit for a date, it's obvious that most of us are well aware of the power of clothing to affect how other people perceive us. But what about the power of our clothes to affect our own thoughts? Relevant to this question is the growing "embodied cognition" literature showing that the position and state of our bodies can affect our thoughts - for example, cleaning their hands makes people feel morally purer . In a new study Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky propose that clothes can have similar effects on our thoughts - a phenomenon they call "enclothed cognition". In contrast to embodied cognition effects which are fairly direct, the researchers think enclothed cognition effects will depend on two conditions - first, the symbolic meaning of the clothing and second, the actual wearing of the clothes. To test this idea, the researchers focused on the power of white coats, synonymous with scientists and their attention to detail.
One Person Sharpens Another - Room for Debate The growing trend for American adults to live alone is one I can understand. After all, it means never having to negotiate over who cleans the bathroom or at what temperature to keep the bedroom. But is living alone healthier? To answer that question, let’s backtrack a bit and talk about how, as a society, we evolve. Sharing all of life with another person is difficult – but it matures us. The trend toward living alone and even living together without a marriage commitment is a drifting change, based on our desire for immediate comfort and happiness. Sharing all of life with another person is difficult – but it matures us. The alternative is to retreat into our own world, where we are so absorbed with personal comfort that we can't be bothered to hear the concerns of another person or be inconvenienced to consider someone else's needs. Just as our bodies were made for exercise, our souls were made for relationship.
The Bomb and the General: A Vintage Semiotic Children's Book by Umberto Eco by Maria Popova How symbols become symbols, or what keeping atoms in harmony has to do with language acquisition. Novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco once said that the list is the origin of culture. But his fascination with lists and organization grew out of his longtime love affair with semiotics, the study of signs and symbols as an anthropological sensemaking mechanism for the world. In 1966, Eco published The Bomb and the General — a children’s book that, unlike the “open texts” of his adult novels with their infinite interpretations, followed the “closed text” format of the picture book genre to deliver a cautionary tale of the Atomic Age wrapped in a clear message of peace, environmentalism, and tolerance. This particular page presents a lovely wink at Brian Cox’s The Quantum Universe, featured here earlier today: Mom is made of atoms. The Bomb and the General is a fine addition to these little-known but fantastic children’s books by famous authors of adult literature.