[repos]

"The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day."

To say this is a modern construct is false. People may not have been following Jennifer Aniston, but they were doing whatever the equivalent was at the time. As with any generation, there will be your rare innovators as well as your 'average chumps.'

[Rebus]

Great points about the information flood of banality - not just 'facts', but factoids, op-ed pretending to be fact - that has reduced the depth of public discourse to that of a 3-day puddle. And thereby made our society far more prone to twisting in the wind of every blow-hard shock-jock and politician willing to hammer their talking points to death (IF that politician is the recipient of Murdoch press support, of course, otherwise, talking points vanish into the ether).

Far more prone to acceding to corporate fascism (witness the slide of the USA and UK in this direction) dressed up as 'the all-knowing Market'. God is dead (which was Nietzsche's question, not finding by the way), long live The Market!

Uncomfortable, unsettling, mold-breaking ideas - AND a passionate discussion of them in their wake, placing them in context, searching out their salience, noting their blind-spots, etc - and popular curiosity and interest in the writers and thinkers who produce them, are life-blood to a civilization.

Ideas are still at large and very much alive in many non-anglophone countries. is this the saving grace of NOT being native speakers of the the English that rules the internet?

I'm interested in seeing information technology become idea technology. Any ideas about that?

Meanwhile, the internet reminds me of nothing so much as one of those bowls you have somewhere around the house into which miscellaneous oddities accrue over time, none of which will ever be used, but it seemed good at the time to put them somewhere... You know what I mean?

I mean a constant 'feed' of junk...Exhausting indeed, to host it anywhere in your actual head. And so much is coming in that memory is buckling under the strain and having to be downloaded to Google, which just further strip-mines the mind in its effort to retain the component parts that build genuine, socially valuable knowledge.