Thursday, June 17, 2010
Media So Many RSS Feeds, So Little Time
Posted by Mark Asch on Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 12:26 PM
- I wish I still had this t-shirt.
In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard used Borges's "On Exactitude in Science" as a metaphor for a world duplicated and rendered meaningless by media technology; a more optimistic way of using the Borges parable is that, if the map of the world is exactly as big as the world itself—if all information is a click away—we're no more capable of processing it all, but we're at least better equipped to understand what we're missing. Which is frustrating in the all the ways Neyfakh's interviewees articulate, but also humbling in a productive and even enlarging way.
Towards the end of the article, Neyfakh describes an iPhone app which lets you send longer articles to your phone and read them on, say, the subway, or anywhere else where you have leisure time and can focus on turning the pages instead of clicking between open tabs. That's great! It really helps you focus, sitting down to read a finite physical object. I wonder why we didn't think of this sooner.
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