Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Anthropology/History

Reading Amusing Ourselves to Death also makes me want to study anthropology very badly.

"We are in great haste to constuct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate."  -Henry David Thoreau 

"Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control the contingencies in thier lives.  What people knew about had an action-value.  In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost..."

We have so much information and so little action that we are cursed with elephantine impotence.

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