Old Yew, which graspest at the stones

a man whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of us

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

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

Begin with false premises and you risk reaching false conclusions

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

These facts he glosses over in “Walden,”

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.

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

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.

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

exertion

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.”

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

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.”

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

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

the dangerous intoxicant that is music

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

"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."

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:

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.

single collective brain may

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

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?

in a publicly available document known as an RFC (Request for Comment)

the hacker ethic was that computer tools ought to be free.

pointed me to Benedict Anderson's work Imagined Communities, a study of nation-building that focuses on the ideological labor involved

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

16 percent of the people contribute 80 percent of the words

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

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.

online salon

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

both hoped the WELL would become a vehicle for social change

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

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.

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

This is love in action

The sense of communion I've experienced on the WELL

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

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.

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.

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

black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it.

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

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.

Look at how the VW cheating was uncovered.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

How can this be?

But they found, if anything, a positive effect

But the case

You still see commentators who haven’t kept up

the conventional wisdom

myself included

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

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

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

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

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

Play itself is a form of critical inquiry

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 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,”