WEB-TOED TRAVELERS DON’T DUCK TO ANYONE

I found this interesting. From the “Baltimore Sun”, Michael Himowitz reports on some interesting research about how much web users do and do not know about current issues in American life, compared to regular readers of papers and the heavily illiterate listeners to talk radio. With backing from the Pew Charitable Trust and in conjunction with the University of Michigan, researchers conducted an in depth telephone survey of Internet users. One overarching finding emerged.

“We were actually a bit surprised,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “Especially with the broadband users, who tend to be more sophisticated [or wealthy or more able to waste money on broadband or more addicted to Internet use].... Before we started, we were prepared to say that there’s a start of a bad trend going on here, but we were surprised to find the opposite, that what’s going on is good for democracy.... It comes down to this: People who use the Internet know more and get more than people who do not.”


COULD THIS BE BUSH-LEAGUE?

Alvin Kernan in “In Plato’s Cave”, though not meaning to, uncovered some of the trouble we’re having in America just now.

Kernan writes that, “... the great satirists of Western tradition did not merely attack the particular failings of their own time but chronicled a universal destructive energy—Pope styled it ‘Dulness’ and described it as ‘laborious, heavy, busy, bold and blind.’ Dulness perverts nature, manufactures bizarre and grotesque worlds, and moves toward a futile conclusion in which, instead of the air being cleared as in tragedy and comedy, waste and confusion reign and nothing is solved.... satire always move[s] toward a breakdown of sense and order in which ‘universal darkness covers all.’ ”

Looked at through the eyes of the great Alexander Pope, this world created by the bushman regime is a figure for satire from which a “universal darkness” poofs out like a smelly, yellow-gray bean curd fart. Bush and his administration couldn’t be more “laborious, heavy, busy, bold and blind”.


DECONSTRUCTION APPEARS IN KERNAN’S WORLD

Although isn’t even “deconstructionism” a passé term today in the world of American illiteracy?

“The authors of the great works of literature were stripped of their literary property and reduced to the status of ‘scriptors’ who did not create their works but merely exploited the stock of ideas common to their languages and cultures. Heidegger’s ‘language writes, not the author’ became standard doctrine, though language was itself now empty of any truth. Roland Barthes delivered the coup de grace in a famous article, ‘The Death of the Author,’ where he wrote that, far from being the creative genius that literature had made him, the author was only a historical idea ‘formulated by and appropriate to the social beliefs of democratic, capitalistic society with its emphasis on the individual.’ Terry Eagleton summed it all up by saying that literature is not truth, or even fiction, but ‘ideology,’ one of the means ‘by which certain social groups exercise and maintain power over others.’” (p. 192)
_____________________________________________________

"Children of the poor should work for some part of the day when they reach the age of three." —John Locke (conservative)