A podge of hodges, a jumble. It's from a French word for "sauce," which came from two words meaning to make merry by gorging oneself, and one of those words was from Dutch for "to open one's mouth wide." So...yeah, a weird mishmash of stuff.
DemolitionChimneysCollisionShadows and dustDouble killFlawless victoryBoom goes the dynamite?
Over the weekend, we were reading a bit of Alastair Roberts. It's an easy way to feel out of your depth but also get wiser. Roberts had a terrific compilation of his writing about social media and its effects on politics, society, and youth. It's long, dense stuff, but it's worth the effort. Here's a small sample of Roberts' concluding thoughts:
Perhaps the very core of all of my concerns about the Internet is that the medium undermines such self-differentiation, by breaking down the forms of natural differentiation that naturally exist in our daily lives. The result has been that of rendering us ever more vulnerable to the dominion of instinct, reaction, appetite, and passion over virtues forged through limitation, constraint, delayed gratification, submission to formation and discipline, and the struggle of deep communal belonging. While it doesn’t force us to be undifferentiated and reactive, it undermines a great many of the conditions that both make it possible for us not to be and which develop self-differentiated character within us.
Recognizing that the character of our current social and political crises is powerfully shaped by this lack of self-differentiation (on both individual and broader social levels) helps us to perceive that the solution necessarily requires a renegotiation of our relationship with our media. This renegotiation must aspire beyond mere individual and communal discipline to structural reformation of our online social media, to the formation of media that enable us to recover some of the healthy differentiation that we have lost, the ‘friction’ and the limits that can create healthy and enriching bounds for our lives and identities.
As we said, not comfort food, but something far better. Go read it.
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