Happy Day! Foe is blogging again. It's a good one too. She shows us Sherry Turkle's daughter talking about a turtle brought all the way from the Galapagos to sit in a glass box in the middle of a museum exhibit, and how it could have been replaced by a robot since the turtle's "aliveness" was not essential to the exhibit. Replace "aliveness" with "aura" and this is is a great example of what Walter Benjamin was talking about in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

If you scroll up and down the page and read the questions posed above and below Sherry Turkle, you'll see one by Daniel Gilbert (Psychologist, Harvard University) who says that the idea that there is such a thing as a dangerous idea is the *only* dangerous idea. Not only is it too pat an answer to the question ("What is your most dangerous idea"), I completely disagree. He says:

The reason those people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, etc. is because of someone else's idea, which has clearly become dangerous, even lethal. It just happens to be the idea that's accrued the power at that time, or is held by a stronger person, and not a weaker person. A few innocent people, few, powerless, and weak, get hung on crosses for having promulgated certain dangerous ideas, dangerous to the People In Power (PIP) who are many, powerful and strong. The next thing you know, those selfsame dangerous ideas are sitting pretty as 'generally accepted' ideas held by the PIPs themselves, which are then responsible for Crusades, Inquisitions and George W. Bush.

Scroll up a little farther on the page at Edge.org and you'll see a man I agree with, another Daniel, a Daniel come to judgment, yea, a Daniel! this time, Daniel Dennett, who begins his blurb, "Ideas can be dangerous." And he's quite right too, when he says there aren't enough minds to house the population explosion of memes.

With that in mind, I'll be stopping this blog post right....now.

X

LINK | 8:16 PM | TB

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .