THIS IS WATER : EDUCATION IS SIMPLE AWARENESS

David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College has long been a holy text for me; something I turn to when I need to be reminded that learning  is so much more than the ability to memorize and  regurgitate  facts.

As DFW states, “the real value of education has nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness”.

It’s good to see that this will now be reaching a wider audience , albeit in an abridged form, thanks to California-based video company The Glossary.

TOP TEN AWESOME APPS FOR i-PADS

On reflection, the title of this post is likely to attract the wrong demographic, but I always was a sucker for alliteration!

I should just issue a warning to screen-agers and other techno-savvy persons that what follows is not a cutting edge list of links or game recommendations but merely a note to self of ten dependable, easy to use and (mostly) free Apps I have come to know and trust.

1. Good Reader ($4.99) – This is my numero uno by a large margin. I read a lot of PDF files/books and prior to discovering this little beauty, I had to rely on a wi-fi connection and keep re-accessing the same document over and over. With this App you can save files in a form that allows you to manage, read and annotate offline. Transferring stuff is dead easy, either direct from websites or via file sharing sites like Dropbox.

2. Zite (Free) – Zite finds articles from various websites and organizes them into categories of your choosing. The more you use it, the more it gets to know what you like. I know there are alternatives that allow you to build your own personalised ‘magazine’ (e.g. Paper.li and Flipboard) but I currently prefer Zite as it does the virtual legwork for me.

ONE NATION UNDER A FORMAT

In November 2010, Zadie Smith wrote about the movie Social Network for the New York Review of Books.

This was not just a review, but a brilliant critique of the whole communicative, ‘let’s share everything’ propaganda machine which Facebook epitomizes.

Reading it again, makes me think how on the nose she was. Here’s an extract:

“With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos”.

You can read the whole article here.

CELEBRATING RECORD STORE DAY

‘Io compro in un negozio dischi perché’… (I buy from record stores because…) – a poster and shopping bag designed for Casa del Disco  by local musician, Mattia Zani.

The statistics given in Last Shop Standing,  the official movie of this year’s Record Store Day speak volumes.

In the 1980s there were over 2,200 UK independent record shops but by 2009 there were only 269.

In some respects it is remarkable that any stores survive given the fact that music is now almost universally consumed via downloads or on streaming sites.

MAGIC SPOON FOR WEIGHT WATCHERS

In common with too many teenagers, my daughter is obsessed with a mortal fear of putting on weight. This defies all logic as she is as skinny as a rake but a reflection of the beanpole supermodels that are still erroneously held up as icons of female perfection. This explains why she has put the spoon shown in this photo on her wish list: