Catechesis: December 2009 Archives

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

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Blah blah Internets blah blah easily distracted changing the way we think ooo linky to Amazon blah blah hold on let's read this more carefully (emphasis added):

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

...In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”

Cf. Leisure: The Basis of Culture acedia, any one of the swarms of ignorant pundits out there.

Just lovely:

Joseph in his very self, being a man, was a gift to Blessed Virgin. Against the rougher background of his manliness, the delicate, shimmering beauty of her holy femininity glowed with more luster. His was the hand that steadied her step over rocky ground. His the powerful arms that wrestled loads from their beasts and heavy furniture into place in their home. His the deep and reassuring voice that bid her a good night and his the protective gaze under which she slept.


Did Jesus need Joseph? Not in an absolute sense, for perfectly complete in both his humanity and divinity, with a Mother who is the Seat of Wisdom, Jesus could have grown into a psychologically healthy man without Joseph. But what an inestimable gift this man, this foster father, was to Jesus. To Jesus, infant, laid to sleep upon Joseph’s broad, muscular chest. To Jesus at one, tossed giggling into the air. To Jesus at three, playing with wood scraps. To Jesus, 6, prospecting the countryside for likely trees. To Jesus, 9, bent over the plane, while Joseph, smelling of sweat and sawdust, trains his movement. To Jesus, 12, at the other end of the saw, sinews straining to match Joseph lunge for lunge and pull for pull.


Di Fattura Caslinga: Pansy's Etsy Shop
The Sleepy Mommy Shoppe: Stuff we Like
(Disclaimer: We aren't being compensated to like this stuff.
Any loose change in referral fees goes to the Feed Pansy's Ravenous Teens Fund.)


Pansy and Peony: The Two Sleepy Mommies



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