Steven Johnson quoted by Malcolm Gladwell in a review of Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good for You (The New Yorker 16.05.05) which Gladwell calls at one point, "wonderfully entertaining".Steven Johnson:Malcolm Gladwell:
"But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion-you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you... This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they're powerless to change their circumstances."
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"He's joking, of course, but only in part. The point is that books and video games represent two very different kinds of learning. When you read a biology textbook, the content of what you read is what matters. Reading is a form of explicit learning. When you play a video game, the value is in how it makes you think."
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It's also wonderfully entertaining the way a kind of debate can happen around television as it is in potential while the participants completely ignore television as it is in practice. Especially given the vital role television's played in the synthetic election of Bush and the Zionist campaign against Arabia.
But then that's kind of the point. The same anonymous untouchable cohort that's sacrificing white trash and brown folk in its cynical violence against the Islamic world is running television as it is now, so you'd expect there to be a certain amount of horseshit when the subject came up.
How many of the innocent dead in the holocaust of Fallujah went down to the twitch-conditioned kill-reflexes of some twenty year-old gameboy? Speaking of video games and the wonderful skills they bestow.
And let's not talk about what they don't bestow. Let's not talk about how much closer books are to the primal familiar storytelling experience that's been so thoroughly hijacked the idea of your grandmother trying to tell you a story she heard from her grandmother is cringefully embarrassing to most children, who are in turn watching four hours of commercial-symbiot TV programming every day.
When Gladwell reads a biology textbook he's not even on the same planet as I am when I read Milton's poetry, and there's never going to be a virtual reality program that can touch that experience.
Subhumans will always be trying to justify their existence by denying the existence of what's above them.
