[Information anxiety is] produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand. It is the black hole between data and knowledge, and what happens when information doesn't tell us what we want or need to know.
The poet or the filmmaker or the musician must not avert his eyes. We should not be sitting in the library and study it as academic subject... Paul I think you've started watching Wrestlemania... because you must not avert your eyes. This what is coming at us. This is what a collective, anonymous body of majority wants to see on television.
SCRABBLE is compelling enough, but playing it in Esperanto, for those of a certain cast of mind, is even more addictive. The invented language’s tidy roots and suffixes are well suited to wordplay. A recent game in London featured words like acajeto (a little bit of dirt) and artamehoj (echoes of the love of art). Over its 120-year history Esperanto may have failed in its original mission to bring world peace via mutual intelligibility, but it remains both an engaging intellectual exercise and a route to a ready-made social life.
“A language isn’t something you learn so much as something you join,” says Arika Okrent, author of a book on artificial argots. Few people will bother to learn a language on abstract or idealistic grounds, she says. Esperanto gives them a reason to get started, because of the culture that has grown up around it.It also covers Klingon (no surprise).
During the long hours of the return flight I couln't help but reflect on what an odd place Israel is, located on that fuzzy border between the first and third worlds. In the United States, people typically aren't so rude to you, but then they also don't steer you to their friends in the bowels of the Central Post Office [to retrieve a mailed new passport hours before a flight departs].
But maybe the indifference to civility is part of a more genral indiference to bureaucracy, to the nameless, faceless rules of a system; after all, politeness means treating people all the same, while impoliteness requires tailoring one's responses to each person in his own way. And so maybe incivility is what it actually takes to respect you as an individual. And so maybe, just maybe, that's what it realy means to be polite.
"So there we are, a Google search away, for all to see in places and company we should not have been in, the unwitting backdrop of other people’s documentaries.
"The only remaining choice is whether or not to inject our own perspective, with our own media, into this never-ending stream of narratives, to preserve whatever control remains in presenting our own image. The wise will still share things about themselves in 2009. But they will become hyper-sensitive about sharing collateral information about others, in the hope that reciprocity and a new etiquette will eventually limit everybody's vulnerability, including their own. "