Greg Gage: We Aren't All Cyborgs... Yet. TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful "idea worth spreading" every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week's TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post introducing the video, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community. Watch the talk above, read the blog post and tell us your thoughts below. Become part of the conversation! The term "cybernetic organism," or "cyborg" for short, conjures up a futuristic world of science fiction. Perhaps because this was how the term was introduced when sci-fi writers Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline coined it in 1960 to mean a being composed of both biological and artificial parts.
But to Amber Case, the transition of humans to cyborgs is here and now. Just look around. Can these devices that alienate those around us, actually make us more human? Photo by permission of UPMC. Ideas are not set in stone. Lisa Firestone: Is Social Media to Blame for the Rise in Narcissism? Studies are now showing what many of you may have suspected: We are living in an increasingly narcissistic society.
In a world where prime-time television is dominated by a "reality" as false as the Kardashians' lashes, and people sit across dinner tables checking in on Facebook rather than having face-to-face conversations, this may not come as a surprise. Much has been written about the rise of narcissism amongst millennials, the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s, a generation controversially dubbed "Generation Me" by Professor Jean M.
Twenge in 2007. In her most recent work, The Narcissistic Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, Twenge (with W. Perhaps more troubling, a handful of new studies comparing traits and life goals of young people in high school and college today with those of Gen-Xers and baby boomers at the same age, show an increase in extrinsic values rather than intrinsic values. So who's to blame for this generational increase in narcissism? Cell Phones as Meeting Points in a Featureless Landscape - Alan Jacobs. Can we create public spaces that are navigable without cell phones? Would we even want to? Before cell phones, travelers would agree to rendezvous beneath Grand Central's famous clock. (Wikimedia Commons) At The Aporetic, a provocative post raises a vital question: Are our undifferentiated and anonymous public spaces a response to the ubiquity of cell phones -- or is it the other way around?
Have cell phones become ubiquitous in part because of the featurelessness of our public spaces? The post, written by the über-thoughtful uninomial Mike (who notes that he is one of our society's Great Holdouts -- he doesn't have a cell phone), seems to opt for the former, because it is built around the concept of "cell-phone subjectivity": The architecture of the landline era was ordered and hierarchical: arrive here/go there/wait here.
Www.metwashairports.com All very thought-provoking -- but doesn't Mike have the causal direction reversed? Kevin Burra: Responding to the NYT: Rethinking Our Relationship With Technology Through Campus-Wide 'Deactivation Days' Last Wednesday, a piece titled "Last Call for College Bars" appeared in The New York Times Style section, about the effect that social media has had on the dwindling bar scene in college towns across the country. The entryway into the reporter's argument was the interactions that she had with students in Level B, a Cornell college town bar, who were glued to their iPhones, texting friends to coax them to join. Snidely quoting drunkards encountered around collegetown, the reporter paints a bleak portrait of university culture in the digital era. As a student at Cornell who lives down the street from Level B, and one whose academic focus is on the cultural effects of new technologies, I would like to take some time to respond.
Many news sources reacted to "Last Call" by pointing out -- first in Ivy Gate, then in Cornell's Daily Sun, Jezebel, New York Magazine, Business Insider, and others -- that the interviewees gave fake names, and that the piece was therefore bad journalism. Digital diplomacy: Virtual relations. Crowdfunding video games: Money to play with. A Robot With a Delicate Touch.