SearchEngineLand reports on the results of a Pew/Internet survey, concentrating on what people tend to search for on the web. Approximately half of internet users have done ego searches, looking for themselves, checking out their online presence.
Self-validation seems to be an increasingly necessary act as we move further into the 21st century. We’ve known for [...]
Four Corporations Win Bad Product Awards
This year’s winners are:
* Coca-Cola - for continuing the international marketing of its bottled water, Dasani, despite admitting it comes from the same sources as local tap water.
* Kellogg’s - for the worldwide use of cartoon-type characters and product tie-ins aimed at children, despite high levels of sugar and salt [...]
At the Same Time is a collection of posthumous writings by Susan Sontag. Jeremy Harding at The Nation, finishes his review like this:
It is an act of worship at the shrine of literature and an admission that the kind of writing she most admires may be a dying art, stifled by “our debauched culture,” which “invites us to simplify reality, to despise wisdom.” The picture she paints is extraordinarily bleak. Far from widening our horizons, the spread of information technology has shrunk our “ethical” world to the size of a mouse hole, while the grandeur of “modernity”–which she’d earlier identified as Al Qaeda’s principal target–has been hollowed out by consumerism, voyeurism, “fantasies of eros and violence” and “demagogic appeals to cultural democracy that accompany…the ever-tightening grip of plutocratic capitalism.” If fiction has a duty to “enlarge and complicate,” she can’t see it surviving for much longer. And a world without literature–”criticism of one’s own reality”–is sure to lose what’s left of its moral bearings.
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