Comments on: ”Weak Ties” http://chrislott.org/story/weak-ties/ Musings on education, techology, and life.. Sun, 04 Jul 2010 16:19:02 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: AP http://chrislott.org/story/weak-ties/comment-page-1/#comment-158 AP Thu, 15 Jan 2004 10:10:53 +0000 http://www.chrislott.org/?p=356#comment-158 This is a good post. There is a whole class of people who make a living on computers while at the same time feeling ambivalent about computers, and they should be first into the public square. Actually, I preferred a previous line of yours, "The Aching Luddite"- a good title for a weblog.<br /> <br /> Whats needed most of all is a way, a canon, to deal with the smallness the internet engenders into mass society. The best nonfiction book of last year, Curtis White's "The Middle Mind"(Called “Cogent, acute, beautiful, merciless, and true” by the beloved David Foster Wallace) was a good start in forming this kind of outlook and a good twin to Morris Berman's "The Twilight of American Culture." A good developing way to go about this would be in building an internet canon: not just mindless cyberpunk, but books which help the critical mind cope in the internet age. I would suggest these titles:<br /> <br /> Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood<br /> Idlewild by Nick Sagan<br /> The Human Stain by Phillip Roth<br /> After Dachau by Daniel Quinn<br /> The Egg Code by Mike Heppner<br /> <br /> This is just fiction since non-fiction would not be so easy to make into a canon. <br /> <br /> <br /> This is a good post. There is a whole class of people who make a living on computers while at the same time feeling ambivalent about computers, and they should be first into the public square. Actually, I preferred a previous line of yours, “The Aching Luddite”- a good title for a weblog.

Whats needed most of all is a way, a canon, to deal with the smallness the internet engenders into mass society. The best nonfiction book of last year, Curtis White’s “The Middle Mind”(Called “Cogent, acute, beautiful, merciless, and true” by the beloved David Foster Wallace) was a good start in forming this kind of outlook and a good twin to Morris Berman’s “The Twilight of American Culture.” A good developing way to go about this would be in building an internet canon: not just mindless cyberpunk, but books which help the critical mind cope in the internet age. I would suggest these titles:

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Idlewild by Nick Sagan
The Human Stain by Phillip Roth
After Dachau by Daniel Quinn
The Egg Code by Mike Heppner

This is just fiction since non-fiction would not be so easy to make into a canon.

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