Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
Enough with the novels, already. Time to spin some haikus, eh?
I admit it: the internet is eating my mind. And here are some related haikus, straight from the poet, by God.
Spring day darkening:
the locust digital swarm
eats my absent mind.
Read on for the essential lowdown on dopamine addiction.
Dipping for Dopamine
Delivery vehicles,
Every damn Like
A dopamine fix.
Proto-cyborg Lament
The battery defunct,
My 5G iPhone is dead.
I am diminished.
Oxymoron… Read more
Not smartphone apps as in ‘applications’ — we’re talking apps as in ‘appendages.’ I.e. you and me. (Have a look at this earlier story for more on Homo app.)
I’ve just come across three-year-old story notes on a remote corner of my hard drive. I have a character on the skytrain considering the merely absent presence of the other passengers. One advantage of living in Bangkok, he has always believed, are the rich opportunities for people-watching. But it has … Read more
The other morning on the BTS Skytrain I found myself bemused at the sight of nearly every one of my fellow passengers in thrall to digital devices. Each was oblivious to all the others as they pawed away at Facebook pages, e-mails, tweets, games, music and phone calls. One young renegade was actually reading a book.
More than bemused, I was struck by the sense I was living in a science-fiction story. But then, resisting the impulse to check … Read more
Sometimes, e.g. when I look around a Skytrain car and see people’s faces lit in the unholy glow of iPad screens (see “Digital bedlam”)—when I notice the wires dangling from people’s heads, the animated conversations with invisible presences on the part of people sporting no visible gadgetry at all, the poke-poking and thumbing of games and messages and searches for the meaning of life—it seems to me that these changes in our behavior have been sudden. Just last … Read more
Vertically walleyed: A new affliction, an occupational hazard for the digitally connected and cool, a neologism of sorts coined right here and right now.
“My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.”
That’s from a great NY Times article by Sherry Turkle, “The Flight from Conversation.” And this advice has expanded my notion of what’s fittin’ and … Read more
In Thailand, the iPad mostly remains a rumor of digital utopia on the other side of the world. But travelers to those distant parts are beginning to arrive back here with their über-gadgets.
And they are harbingers of epidemic social change. These carriers of the current Digital Grail—and soon, I suspect, they’ll include everybody in the world with a few hundred dollars to spend—behave as though they carry new-born children, and they’re prone to dropping these items on the … Read more