mediated-experience

Court controversy, even scandal. It is better to be attacked, even slandered, than ignored. All professions are ruled by this law, and all professionals must have a bit of the showman about them.

gnawing shit was better than creating nothing at all, which was to be the fate, as far as Benacerraf could see, of most of Kevin's generation, as they lay in their VR-beds and pushed increasingly stale, second-hand information around the net.

To Hadamard, the net had been just a big conduit of bullshit; everyone was better off without it.

Perhaps, she thought gloomily, this is more than some kind of generation gap. Perhaps the species has reached a bifurcation. One branch reaching for other worlds, the other receding into an online sea, swimming in great mindless shoals, twitching and turning in unison. Beautiful, but empty.

Evil flowed through electric wires to make people lazy.

the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get.

Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot? And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven?

"The big question people ask isn't 'What's the nature of existence?'" the mouth says. "The big question people ask is 'What's that from?'"

Today, many of us choose to live in a form of pseudo-reality governed by algorithmically-enabled individual experiences. Much of what passes for authentic experience today is vicarious and virtual.

The problem is our collective complacence in assuming that change brings improvement.

we now spend as much time consuming the experiences of others as we do having experiences of our own.

In embracing the technologies that mediate so much of our experience, we have certainly made our lives more comfortable and convenient, but it has come at a cost.

Areas of life that used to be off-limits to technological mediation and manipulation are now saturated by it.

Our experiences of pleasure, hands-on skills, self-reliance, relationships, and connection to nature are all threatened by mediating technology.

many people now bring their devices with them into the bathroom as company. In pursuing these kinds of mediated experiences so zealously, we undermine our own humanity.

Has the primacy of the face and body as humans' most powerful communication tool ended? And if so, how do our interactions change when a skill evolution fitted us for—face-to-face communication—gives way to mediated forms of interaction?

our growing preference for mediated forms of communication impacts our ability to assess the trustworthiness of others.

Researchers who study computer-mediated communication have found that when we communicate via text or email and our bodily signals are muted, we alter our behavior to adapt to our new tools.

they found that men and women in the online conversations asked fewer questions about the other person and referred to themselves more frequently than the couples meeting face-to-face.

I tried to sit in a position where there wasn't a speely directly in front of me. Still, every time the feed popped from one image to another, my eye jumped to it. I was like an ape in a tree, looking at whatever moved fastest in my environment.

I pick up today's Post that hangs from a Smithly Watson glass magazine rack and scan the gossip columns, then my eye catches a story about recent sightings of these creatures that seem to be part bird, part rodent—essentially pigeons with the heads and tails of rats—found deep in the center of Harlem and now making their way steadily toward midtown. A grainy photograph of one of these things accompanies the article, but experts, the Post assures us, are fairly certain this new breed is a hoax. As usual this fails to soothe my fear, and it fills me with a nameless dread that someone out there has wasted the energy and time to think this up: to fake a photograph (and do a half-assed job at that, the thing looks like a fucking Big Mac) and send the photograph in to the Post, then for the Post to decide to run the story (meetings, debates, last-minute temptations to cancel the whole thing?), to print the photograph, to have someone write about the photo and interview the experts, finally to run this story in today's edition and have it discussed over hundreds of thousands of lunches in the city this afternoon. I close the paper and lie back, exhausted.

So we wouldn't run out of things to talk about over lunch, I tried to read a trendy new short-story collection called Wok that I bought at Barnes & Noble last night and whose young author was recently profiled in the Fast Track section of New York magazine, but every story started off with the line "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie" and I had to put this slim volume back into my bookshelf and drink a J&B on the rocks, followed by two Xanax, to recover from the effort.

In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought."

"That's their problem," Arnold said. "We can't make them experience wonder."

He couldn't be traced; he'd left his terminal back at the house, something he had taken to doing increasingly often recently, even though it was a dangerous, irresponsible thing to do, to be apart from the Hub's information network, effectively cut off from the rest of the Culture.

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and everything else in the Culture. With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need.

"Remind me," Jubal told her, "to write an article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses can be traced to the unhealthy habit of wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers. Title is 'Gossip Unlimited'—no, make that 'Gossip Gone Wild.' "

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything."

And even then, kids who had grown up with Sparky still showed an interest in product tie-ins and in collecting memorabilia and old episodes. Sparky had filed that away for future consideration: surely there was a way to profit from this almost instant nostalgia when the teens grew into adults and had more money to spend.

if he can get you to believe Moab was nuked by spending a million bucks, just imagine what the Russians and the big Internet companies are doing to your mind every day with much larger budgets.

"Oh, god, please don't read the Wikipedia entry," Enoch said, showing more emotion than when he had been literally crucified. "I have an edit overlay that filters out most of the garbage," said Julian, mildly offended that Enoch had taken him for the kind of person who would actually take Wikipedia at face value. "But, Julian, I am sitting right next to you and so you don't have to consult an online source."

This single click requires almost no effort on your part, but to the user being tagged, the resulting notification creates a socially satisfying sense that you were thinking about them. As Harris argues, these companies didn't invest the massive resources necessary to perfect this auto-tagging feature because it was somehow crucial to their social network's usefulness. They instead made this investment so they could significantly increase the amount of addictive nuggets of social approval that their apps could deliver to their users.

The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.

compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.

She showed him there was more to food than hamburgers, steaks, potato chips, tacos, and fried chicken. She never ate anything that was advertised on television, yet her diet was a thousand times more varied than his. "Look around you," she told him one night, in a Russian restaurant she assured him was better than any to be found in Moscow. "These are the people who own the companies that make the food you've been eating all your life. They pay the chemists who formulate the glop-of-the-month, they hire the advertising agencies who manufacture a demand for it, and they bank the money the proles pay for it. They do everything with it but eat it." "Is there really something wrong with it?" She shrugged. "Some of it used to cause problems, like cancer. Most of it's not very nutritious. They watched for carcinogens, but that's because a consumer with cancer eats less. As for nutrition, the more air the better. My rule of thumb is if they have to flog the stuff on television it has to be bad."

"Those high-priced designers work according to ancient laws," she told him. "They all work more or less together—though they don't plan it that way. I've decided that trite ideas are born simultaneously in mediocre minds. A fashion designer or a television writer or a studio executive cannot really be said to possess a mind at all. They're hive mentalities; they eat the sewage that floats on the surface of the mass culture, digest it, and then get creative diarrhea—all at once. The turds look and smell exactly alike, and we call them this year's fashions, hit shows, books, and movies. The key to dressing is to look at what everyone else is wearing then avoid it. Find a creative person who had never thought of designing clothes, and ask her to come up with something."

"Zev says the shows on Earth are better than anything she's ever seen. We could make new ones and bring them to the universe. Maybe if the television shows are good enough, people wouldn't be so interested in watching real-life people kill each other," she said.