The dividing line between cyberspace and ‘the real world’ vanished last week
Lost in Space
By MAUREEN DOWD, NYT
When James Gleick was my editor on the City Desk of The Times, he would often stare into space.
This was no mere daydreaming. Every time he stared, a clever idea bloomed. After leaving The Times, he founded one of the first Internet service providers. He made chaos theory so celebrated it inspired Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.” He wrote science and technology books acclaimed for making the theoretical sexy, including “The Information,” a history from cuneiforms to coding about the thing we want most and have the most of, the thing that defines us, and the thing that brings pleasure and predicament in equal measure.
Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody’s talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.
Jim is at work now on a book about the history of time travel, though he doesn’t believe in it. (Take that, H.G. Wells and Doctor Who.)
I was taken with a piece he wrote this week for New York magazine about how the Boston Marathon bombings exposed a new phase in our experience of what David Foster Wallace called Total Noise: “the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective.”
(More here.)
When James Gleick was my editor on the City Desk of The Times, he would often stare into space.
This was no mere daydreaming. Every time he stared, a clever idea bloomed. After leaving The Times, he founded one of the first Internet service providers. He made chaos theory so celebrated it inspired Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.” He wrote science and technology books acclaimed for making the theoretical sexy, including “The Information,” a history from cuneiforms to coding about the thing we want most and have the most of, the thing that defines us, and the thing that brings pleasure and predicament in equal measure.
Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody’s talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.
Jim is at work now on a book about the history of time travel, though he doesn’t believe in it. (Take that, H.G. Wells and Doctor Who.)
I was taken with a piece he wrote this week for New York magazine about how the Boston Marathon bombings exposed a new phase in our experience of what David Foster Wallace called Total Noise: “the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective.”
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
1 Comments:
Ms. Dowd’s article can be summed up in fewer words: “The NYT has competition in the arena of getting ‘facts’ wrong, cherry picking data and jumping to incorrect conclusions.”
Post a Comment
<< Home