6 Comments
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Christopher Gow's avatar

"slog through the morass of 'it depends'" is such an accurate description of practical ethics

Josh Brake's avatar

Indeed. Anyone who thinks these kind of things are cut and dry is probably not looking carefully enough.

Rob Nelson's avatar

Thanks, Josh, as always for helping me continue to think about the ways using these tools matter. Its seems to me that many people are working with the live questions that arise out of "it depends," most of which involve how. The matrix is a nice frame, so looking forward to seeing a v2 if it develops.

Your quote from Paul Graham at the end brought me up short as I have been spending much of the past year thinking about secondary orality and what it means to be living in a period of transition from a global culture dominated by writing technologies introduced with the scroll to one of digital flows of image and speech introduced with the infinite scroll. The frame of "the write and the write-nots" nicely illustrates the imperiousness of book-minded people, what Walter Ong called, literacy's tendency "to arrogate to itself supreme power by taking itself as normative for human expression and thought."

As a book-minded person, I'm looking for frames of acceptance treat literacy as one mode of thinking, and try to imagine others including those just coming into being as we use these new cultural technologies to think.

Dale's avatar

Josh, I wan semi-anxiously awaiting the next installments in this series of postings. Did I miss them somewhere?

I am new to sub-stack

Josh Brake's avatar

Nope, you didn’t miss the next installment, I am just woefully tardy on getting it published! Hopefully I’ll find time to crank it out and post it later this week.

Joseph Thibault's avatar

Strikes me that we've been doing this to PowerPoints for years, especially for businesses and startups. Ofthen I have been given a very specific and sometimes prescribed flow and number of slides in a slide deck.