NETFUTURE is back
Stephen Talbott’s NETFUTURE: Technology and Human Responsibility, the electronic newsletter he has edited since 1995, is back in publication after a fifteen month hiatus. I wondered if it would ever resume publication, and I am very glad that it has.
In Talbott’s words,
NetFuture is an electronic newsletter with postings every two-to-four weeks or so. It looks beyond the generally recognized “risks” of computer use such as privacy violations, unequal access, censorship, and dangerous computer glitches. It seeks especially to address those deep levels at which we half-consciously shape technology and are shaped by it. What is half-conscious can, after all, be made fully conscious, and we can take responsibility for it.
Talbott, who works with The Nature Institute, has a perspective on technology that is somewhat similar to Neil Postman’s, but with a more holistic emphasis. Talbott not only criticizes the effects of technology on human beings but makes a constant effort to explore and articulate what it is about being human that our technocratic society does not know how to recognize or protect.
In the early days of Library Juice I frequently copied sections from new issues of NETFUTURE as they reached me by email. I think it is valuable and somewhat unusual when intelligent critics of technology and its ideologies use the internet to communicate their ideas. I’m very glad Talbott is publishing NETFUTURE again, and I look forward to reading the book that he produced during his hiatus: Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines, which is due to be released this Spring from O’Reilly Media.
Welcome back to the web, NETFUTURE.
One comment on “NETFUTURE is back”
The link between Mind and Social / Environmental-Issues.
The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked. Our Minds cannot be peaceful when attention-spans are down to nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds. Our Minds cannot be peaceful if we destroy Nature.
Industrial Society Destroys Mind and Environment.
Subject : In a fast society slow emotions become extinct.
Subject : A thinking mind cannot feel.
Subject : Scientific/ Industrial/ Financial thinking destroys the planet.
Subject : Environment can never be saved as long as cities exist.
Emotion is what we experience during gaps in our thinking.
If there are no gaps there is no emotion.
Today people are thinking all the time and are mistaking thought (words/ language) for emotion.
When society switches-over from physical work (agriculture) to mental work (scientific/ industrial/ financial/ fast visuals/ fast words ) the speed of thinking keeps on accelerating and the gaps between thinking go on decreasing.
There comes a time when there are almost no gaps.
People become incapable of experiencing/ tolerating gaps.
Emotion ends.
Man becomes machine.
A society that speeds up mentally experiences every mental slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety.
A ( travelling )society that speeds up physically experiences every physical slowing-down as Depression / Anxiety.
A society that entertains itself daily experiences every non-entertaining moment as Depression / Anxiety.
FAST VISUALS /WORDS MAKE SLOW EMOTIONS EXTINCT.
SCIENTIFIC /INDUSTRIAL /FINANCIAL THINKING DESTROYS EMOTIONAL CIRCUITS.
A FAST (LARGE) SOCIETY CANNOT FEEL PAIN / REMORSE / EMPATHY.
A FAST (LARGE) SOCIETY WILL ALWAYS BE CRUEL TO ANIMALS/ TREES/ AIR/ WATER/ LAND AND TO ITSELF.
To read the complete article please follow either of these links :
PlanetSave
EarthNewsWire
sushil_yadav
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