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Chris Lavergne

4,193 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,193 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“Homer invokes the gods in order to account for the observation that a central form of human excellence must be drawn from without. A god, in Homer’s terminology, is a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking.”
— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining
Tagged: Homer, Theology
“The frames of thought in which the observations are set are often of more significance than the observations themselves.”
— Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric,Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture
“A liberal education today must include reflection on the significance of writing and print, situating these media and all their works in their historically patterned sequences. When we speak of a sequence of media, we do not mean that new media of communications annihilate their antecedents. When men learned to write, they continued to talk. When they learned letterpress printing, they continued both to talk and write: Since they have invented radio and television, they have continued to talk and write and print. But the advent of newer media alters the meaning and relevance of the older. Media overlap, or, as Marshall McLuhan has put it, move through one another as do galaxies of stars, each maintaining its own basic integrity but also bearing the marks of the encounter ever after.”
— Walter Ong, Rhetoric,Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture
Tagged: Communications, Liberal Education, Pattern Recognition As An Academic Discipline
“We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying? Because a picture is worth a thousand words only under special conditions—which commonly include a context of words in which the picture is set.”
— Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: Photography, Walter Ong
“Is the truth best said or perhaps only said in a fiction; that is, in a lie and a falsehood? Perhaps the ghost was no ghost. Perhaps its truth, like the theater itself, was a lie.”
— Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine
Tagged: Truth
“I believe that software, and in fact entire companies, should be run in a way that assumes that the sum of the talent of people outside your walls is greater than the sum of the few you have inside. None of us are as smart as all of us.”
— Matt Mullenweg,
Tagged: Business, WordPress
“This technique is called marginalizing and is still frequently used, especially in organized reactions to media viruses. In order to generate public support for an illogical policy, leaders need to name and demonize an enemy, then whip up an emotional fury against the demon. Anyone remaining against the proposed policy needs to be minimalized, sidelined, or marginalized. This way people who oppose the public relations objectives are made to feel absolutely alone.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture
Tagged: Marginalization
“It is easy to criticize a sensationalist talk show for, say, giving a neo-Nazi a platform to voice hateful rhetoric. But by exposing these sorts of people rather than censoring them, these shows reveal the underlying inconsistencies in their doctrines. Instead of appearing frightening, these people’s platitudes appear as inane as they really are.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture
Tagged: Censorship, Exposure, Media
“The instinct for increased contact is the evolutionary imperative we feel to become something greater than ourselves. Just as atoms combined into molecules, molecules clustered into cells, and cells collected into organisms, we organisms are networking into greater levels of organization.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed
Tagged: Evolution, Media
“It calls to mind the questions posed back in the 1960s by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who had been fascinated by the impact of spectacle and authority on soldiers’ obedience in Nazi Germany. Milgram wanted to know if German war criminals could have been following orders, as they claimed, and not truly complicit in the death camp atrocities. At the very least, he was hoping to discover that Americans would not respond the same way under similar circumstances. He set up the now infamous experiment in which each subject was told by men in white lab coats to deliver increasingly intense electric shocks to a victim who screamed in pain, complained of a heart condition, and begged for the experiment to be halted. More than half of the subjects carried out the orders anyway, slowly increasing the electric shocks to what they believed were lethal voltages. On a structural level— and maybe also an emotional one— reality TV mirrors much of this same dynamic. No, we’re not literally shocking people, but we are enjoying the humiliation and degradation of the participants, from the safe distance of an electronic medium. The question is not how much deadly voltage can we apply, but how shamefully low can we go? Besides, the producers bear the real brunt of responsibility— just as the men in lab coats did in the research experiments.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tagged: Media, Reality TV