76 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2019
  2. Jan 2018
    1. a man whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of us

      But... he wrote about a book to share some things with... the rest of us.

    2. Granted, it is sometimes difficult to deal with society. Few things will thwart your plans to live deliberately faster than those messy, confounding surprises known as other people

      A persistent rhetorical move in this piece is to draw conclusions about Thoreau the person from "Thoreau" the narrator of Walden. Beyond a few glancing (and often partial and misleading) allusions to biographical fact, there is no evidence at all presented here to support the most confident and sweeping assertions about Thoreau the person.

    3. you could scarcely write a book more appealing to teen-agers

      Really??!

    4. Begin with false premises and you risk reaching false conclusions

      Too rich.

    5. downplays the fact that he routinely hosted other guests as well—sometimes as many as thirty at a time

      Again, he says this directly. In what way is the fact "downplayed." Here's what's downplayed: he hosted the 30 guests for a meeting of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society.

    6. These facts he glosses over in “Walden,”

      What constitutes "glossing over"?

    7. The book is subtitled “Life in the Woods,” and, from those words onward, Thoreau insists that we read it as the story of a voluntary exile from society, an extended confrontation with wilderness and solitude.

      At his request, that subtitle was subsequently struck from the title page, most likely because he wanted to ensure that the book wouldn't be read this way.

    8. a kind of semi-fictional extended meditation featuring a character named Henry David Thoreau

      Not a bad definition of autobiography in general, actually.

    9. His moral clarity about abolition stemmed less from compassion or a commitment to equality than from the fact that slavery so blatantly violated his belief in self-governance.

      What evidence outside Walden underpins this claim?

    10. Thoreau’s actual politics, which were libertarian verging on anarchist

      Is libertarianism really the next stop on the political spectrum from anarchism?

    11. exertion

      Not the same as "employment."

    12. At one moment, Thoreau fulminates against the railroad, “that devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town”; in the next, he claims that he is “refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me.”

      Is it impossible to hold these attitudes in tension? How do most people feel today about technology?

    13. One wonders how he would have learned about the law, the raid, or any of the rest without a newspaper, but never mind.

      Perhaps that should cause one to re-evaluate whether he actually discouraged reading them.

    14. discouraged the reading of newspapers. “I am sure,” he wrote in “Walden,” “that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper,” not least because “nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts.”

      Is it fair to read this quotation as "discouraging the reading of newspapers"?

    15. a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation

      An example of his sense of humor, which, granted, may not be to one's taste. But it's certainly there.

    16. Thoreau regarded humor as he regarded salt, and did without.

      This may be the oddest claim of all here. Understandable if one doesn't like his sense of humor, but he does try - sometimes too hard, in fact - to be funny, particularly through wordplay.

    17. the dangerous intoxicant that is music

      Seems very odd to accuse him of not liking music

    18. Tucked into that sentence is a strange distinction; apparently, some of the things we experience while alive count as life while others do not. In “Walden,” Thoreau made it his business to distinguish between them.

      Is this really such an odd distinction to make?

    19. who saw in loss of life only aesthetic gain, who identified not with the drowned or the bereaved but with the storm?

      One might get that impression from these cherry-picked quotations, but the reality of his reaction looks much different if one reads the entire passage.

  3. Oct 2017
    1. I should not presume to talk so much about myself and my affairs as I shall in this lecture book work book presume to talk so much about myself and my affairs as I shall in this lecture book work book

      How will this compare to a highlight in Version C?

    2. Others have been inquisitive to know curious to learn curious to learn curious to learn curious to learn curious to learn curious to learn curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purpose

      Leaving a note here.

  4. Sep 2017
    1. With digital cash, it is possible to build an electronic economy where the seller can verify that the buyer's credit is good, and transfer the correct amount of money, without the seller knowing who the buyer is.

      Bitcoin

    2. You use the services and contents of the magazine or television network (or online service) to draw a large population of users, who give you detailed information about their demographics, and then you sell access to those users to advertisers

      ... and, what FB does

    3. people aren't all that interested in information on screens, if that is all you have to sell--unless you also offer a way for people to interact with one another

      What Facebook has been able to do.

    1. "Imagine a television that talks to you, enables you to communicate with the kids who go to bed before you get home, and that helps you select a movie."

      You mean Alexa?

    1. Hierarchy in the Usenet sense means not a chain of command but a way of simplifying large complex groups of information by branching them as subcategories of fundamental categories. For example, here is how the rec.auto hierarchy works:

      Note the similarity to how Reddit is organized.

    2. They were surprised at how hungry people were for all kinds of conversations on a worldwide basis, once they caught on to this strange new idea of a conversation in text that floated from campus to campus around the globe.

      How has the evolution of online communities been shaped by the fact that the "product" of the earliest communities, the thing they "grew," was conversation? Correspondingly, what role has conversation played in the development of geolocated communities? How are utopian visions and speech connected to one another?

    3. single collective brain may

      Compare H.G. Wells' idea of a "world brain".

    1. Another Net visionary by the name of Brewster Kahle conceived of a powerful text-finder that will literally hunt through hundreds of databases and libraries on the Net for text that contains specific information. The tool, developed jointly by Kahle and Dow Jones, Thinking Machines, Apple Computer, and KPMC Peat Marwick, is freely available to Net users as WAIS--Wide Area Information Servers

      Brewster Kahle is also the founder of the Internet Archive.

    2. If they control the conduits for information, the fiber-optic networks and high-speed routers, and they also compete to provide commercial services through that conduit, what effect will that have on their smaller competitors?

      The essence of the net-neutrality question.

    3. in a publicly available document known as an RFC (Request for Comment)
    4. the hacker ethic was that computer tools ought to be free.
  5. Aug 2017
    1. pointed me to Benedict Anderson's work Imagined Communities, a study of nation-building that focuses on the ideological labor involved

      Whether geographic or virtual, a community is not just a collection of people but an imaginative construct shared by those who see themselves as belonging to the group. An important question to ask in any project for Into the Woods, then, is how the members of any group under study conceive their communal enterprise. Just how have they imagined themselves into existence as a community? And what are the historical and ongoing challenges to the imaginative construct they've created?

    2. In traditional communities, people have a strongly shared mental model of the sense of place--the room or village or city where their interactions occur. In virtual communities, the sense of place requires an individual act of imagination. The different mental models people have of the electronic agora complicates the question of why people seem to want to build societies mediated by computer screens. A question like that leads inexorably to the old fundamental questions of what forces hold any society together. The roots of these questions extend farther than the social upheavals triggered by modern communications technologies

      This nicely articulates the necessary starting point for any comparison of place-based and virtual communities, as well as the common set of questions raised by both.

    3. 16 percent of the people contribute 80 percent of the words

      Conversations in cyberspace are a long tail phenomenon. The same is true of Wikipedia contributions.

      See also the Pareto Principle aka, the 80-20 rule.

    4. We kept concluding that simple, corny, all-powerful love was the only way to make a community work when it is diverse, thus guaranteeing friction, and at the same time committed to free expression, which can and does get out of hand

      If community is to be diverse and open to free expression, it must be powered by love.

    5. Deadheads can spot each other on the road via the semiotics of window decals and bumper stickers, or on the streets via tie-dyed uniforms, but Deadheads didn't have a place.

      Intetesting that the deadheads, as described here, represent a "virtual community" outside the equation of "virtual" with "cyberspace." What other "virtual communities" can we think of that "don't have a place" - that is, neither a physical nor an online place?

    6. online salon

      How does our understanding of an online space change depending on the metaphor being used to characterize it? Is a salon the same as a community?

    7. The Farm veterans had tried for more than a decade to create a self-sufficient colony in Tennessee. At the Farm's height, more than one thousand people worked together to try to create their own agricultural society. It still exists and is still surprisingly self-sufficient

      You can watch a film about The Fam, American Commune, on Amazon.

    8. both hoped the WELL would become a vehicle for social change

      From its beginnings, "virtual community" meant, for some, an intervention in the "real world." Where is the dividing line?

    9. Brilliant had been part of the Prankster-affiliated commune, the Hog Farm

      The origins and growth of online community are deeply intertwined here with 60's-era 'real-life' utopian thinking and experiments.

    1. Hosts have the power to scribble other people's words, but that power is severely constrained by the knowledge that the act is likely to be followed by weeks of acrimonious and repetitive debate.

      How does this kind of power and the decisions associated with it relate to questions of power and authority in physical utopian communities? Something to think about as we read Utopian Drive.

    2. Is addiction the proper lens for evaluating the violinist's or actor's behavior? Probably not. But nobody who has let her meal grow cold and her family grow concerned while she keeps typing furiously on a keyboard in full hot-blooded debate with a group of invisible people in faraway places can dismiss the dark side of online enthusiasm

    3. This is love in action

      As a possible definition of community, What does "love in action" capture? What does it leave out?

    4. The sense of communion I've experienced on the WELL

      In general, what is the role of "communion" in creating a sense of community?

    5. Perhaps cyberspace is one of the informal public places where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall

      The essential hope of virtual community, in a nutshell, is this.

    6. My friends and I sometimes believe we are part of the future that Licklider dreamed about, and we often can attest to the truth of his prediction that "life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity." I still believe that, but I also know that life online has been unhappy at times, intensely so in some circumstances, because of words I've read on a screen. Participating in a virtual community has not solved all of life's problems for me, but it has served as an aid, a comfort, and an inspiration at times; at other times, it has been like an endless, ugly, long-simmering family brawl.

      To what extent is the substitution of "common interests" for "the accident of proximity" at the heart of all utopian communities?

    1. We temporarily have access to a tool that could bring conviviality and understanding into our lives and might help revitalize the public sphere. The same tool, improperly controlled and wielded, could become an instrument of tyranny.

      The heart of the matter.

  6. Apr 2016
    1. This feature can be a useful provocation to explore the countervailing values of openness and privacy in the classroom, on the Web, and in democracy generally

      This might be a good location to add a reference to #TateGate, as suggested by @jstew511.

  7. Dec 2015
    1. black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it.

      Connect with Douglass.

    2. They resorted to “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black

      Etymonline on "blockbuster": "big bomb (4,000 pounds or larger, according to some sources), 1942, from block (n.) in the "built-up city square" sense. Entertainment sense is attested from 1957. U.S. sense of "real estate broker who sells a house to a black family on an all-white neighborhood," thus sparking an exodus, is from 1955."

  8. Oct 2015
    1. He said there really isn’t any going back — software in cars is responsible not just for driver comforts like in-dash navigation, but also for critical safety and performance systems, many of which improve the car’s environmental footprint.

      Skeptic's voice implied. "But couldn't we just go back to the way things were?"

    2. Look at how the VW cheating was uncovered.

      Evidence for what he says.

    3. But to do that, we’ll need more technology, not less

      But the evidence that might at first seem to support what they say actually supports what he says.

    4. Cars today are lousy with code that can’t be inspected, opening the way for scary hackings and cheats and also the unforeseen complications

      More evidence that gives what they say some plausibility.

    5. The real lesson in VW’s scandal — in which the automaker installed “defeat devices” that showed the cars emitting lower emissions in lab tests than they actually did — is not that our cars are stuffed with too much technology. Instead, the lesson is that there isn’t enough tech in vehicles.

      I say neatly incorporates a repetition of what they say.

    6. Remember when our rides weren’t controlled by secret, corrupt software — when your father’s Oldsmobile was solidly mechanical and so simple in its operation that even a government regulator could understand it?

      Why what they say is plausible.

    7. could be forgiven for reacting to the Volkswagen scandal by yearning for the halcyon era of dumb cars

      Hypothetical they say.

    1. And for those trying to play gotcha by pointing out that some of what she said differed from ideas that prevailed when her husband was president

      Skeptic's voice

    2. How can this be?

      Skeptic's voice.

    3. But they found, if anything, a positive effect

      Again, clear transition.

    4. But the case

      Clear transitions indicate the switch from what they say to what he says.

    5. You still see commentators who haven’t kept up

      Return to they say before providing evidence for what he says.

    6. the conventional wisdom

      Returning to what they say with each bit of evidence to support what he says.

    7. myself included

      Using his own previous view as what they say

    8. used to think of the labor market as being pretty much like the market for anything else

      This argument is what gave what they say some plausibility at one time.

    9. And a key implication of that new understanding is that public policy can do a lot to help workers without bringing down the wrath of the invisible hand

      I say that government (through public policy) can provide a solution to the problem of stagnant wages.

    10. They believe that Ronald Reagan proved that government is the problem, not the solution

      They say that government is the problem, not the solution.

  9. Sep 2015
    1. During the open review of this essay, a related point was raised about individual student response to a text and how students may “feel their personal reading is being overtaken by others who got there and left comments first.”[35] I believe both of these valid issues of negotiating student agency in social annotation should be part of further research into ways that we will teach digital reading and writing practices

      I've run into this objection about agency from colleagues who are skeptical about the value of annotation.

    2. as they publicly publish a comment and as they negotiate between an “authentic self” and the complex subjectivity of digital performance

      Of course, as Anthony Grafton has demonstrated, "performance" is the typical mode of annotation, so this tension is not restricted to — though it may be highlighted by — the digital environment.

    3. Play itself is a form of critical inquiry

      Annotation as play; play as critical inquiry

    4. a format in which the often unexpected links between digital objects would be at least as significant as the objects on their own: a use of digital pedagogy for critical engagement and “difficult thinking”[16] rather than for a re-creation of close-reading practices

      How to facilitate a kind of digital annotation that avoids replicating traditional close-reading practices.

    5. How would engaging in discussion in a multimodal public forum impact student agency with regard to an authoritative text? Part of my purpose in conducting this experiment was to understand more about how digital writing practices might facilitate annotation as a form of “student protest,” a component of Ira Shor’s “empowered” classroom model in which students are explicitly given the freedom to challenge the substance of the course curriculum, and to critically examine Strunk and White’s kind of “standard knowledge through which the status quo tries to promote and protect its position,”

      Annotation as student protest and empowerment.