Tag: Society

Posted on

Reason #1,546,328 “Why I Love the Internet”

I’ve commented before about the availability of really high-quality reads on the internet–for free, no less.

There are things like Project Gutenberg, where one can freely read or download for offline reading any of thousands of public domain works–literally a lifetime of reading if one wishes.

Then there is “MIT OpenCourseWare [which] makes the course materials that are used in the … all MIT’s undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge…” FREE courses. From MIT. Wonderful!

And I’ve also mentioned before that one can read many of the books available from the Chicago University Press for free online, books like The Founders’ Constitution which retails for $475 (and can be bought for anywhere from $80 for a not so good used copy all the way up to retail). For free, though… online. (And once again, I HIGHLY recommend The Founders’ Constitution for all American citizens and citizen wannabes. Highly recommended. Very highly. Seriously.)

Other books available there as well, such as biographies (a great book on Fred Hoyle, for example), history, and more, much more.

And then there are singular finds sprinkled all over the web. One such is find number 1,546,328 (approx. :-)): Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset, an amazingly prescient work written in 1930 (from lectures/essays dating earlier). Consider this extremely short excerpt from Ortega y Gasset’s introduction to the work:

The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: “to be different is to be indecent.” The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this “everybody” is not “everybody.” “Everybody” was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialised minorities. Nowadays, “everybody” is the mass alone. Here we have the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features.

“…the brutality of its features” indeed.

May I seriously commend this book to your attention? Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset may be a dense read for those not enamored of the rather pedantic tone it sometimes assumes, and Ortega y Gasset’s view of the accomplishments of the common man may shock contemporary American sensibilities, but in this day and age where the democratic urges the Founders rightly feared are wreaking havoc on our society as a whole, it’s a very important read.

And it’s available for free on the web. Amazing. Dontcha just love the internet?

Trackposted to Maggie’s Notebook, Shadowscope, The Pink Flamingo, The Amboy Times, Democrat=Socialist, , CORSARI D’ITALIA, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Posted on

“…ready to dump our schools…”

From Robert Cringely:

…we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.

And about time! Cringely’s of my generation (well a little younger) and makes his point well about the chasm between technology use by different generations. While I may sometimes chuckle and wrying shake my head when my octogenarian father describes his (do note: successful) struggles to master his computer and make it a useful part of his lifestyle, my children, I’m sure, chuckle to themselves and wryly shake their heads at my abandonment of my cell phone and lack of any desire whatsoever to “text”.

But Cringely goes beyond the obvious divide in different generations’ integration of new technologies as genuinely useful parts of their lives and notes a specific impact of the effect on education.

These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn’t the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.

Speaking about the shift from knowing stuff to Googling stuff–yeh, who hasn’t “put down” that eBook to do a quick search on “Albegensian” or whatever? *heh* I picked that because I already knew a bunch about that word’s historical implications from “old guy” stuff rattling around in my head… and still did a search on the term some months ago. Google is sometimes better than memory, you know–Cringely notes:

This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained – a view that doesn’t work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we’re getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.

Read the whole thing for a twist you might not see coming… 😉

h.t. Jerry Pournelle’s Mail. Drop by. Read. And wish Dr. Pournelle well.

THIS is an open trackbacks post. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

If you have a linkfest/open trackback post to promote OR if you simply want to promote a post via the linkfests/open trackback posts others are offering, GO TO LINKFEST HAVEN DELUXE! Just CLICK the link above or the graphic immediately below.

Linkfest Haven, the Blogger's Oasis

If you want to host your own linkfests but have not yet done so, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance. The FAQ there is very helpful in understanding linkfests/open trackbacks.