Zombie nation: Shutting down

In my previous post I suggested that persons and cultures, our very realities, are narrative in structure. What happens when you interrupt such narratives? Many of us are finding out, thanks to our increasingly ubiquitous and much-beloved digital communication technologies. There follow two especially obvious ways this is happening.

Applying a cell phone to the side of one’s head in public has the effect of disconnecting the brain. In this condition, cellphone users show characteristic signs of aimlessness, milling about … Read more

Beepification

Leary here. I see Collin is worried about where this world is headed. And well he might be. Much of what he says about the iPad is true, but he doesn’t foresee the half of it, or the other snazzy devices coming just around the corner.

Anyway, I was reading some old notes the other day, stuff from way back at the start of my second half-century. I see that one day in Bangkok in 2010 I was riding the Read more