As I sit here in an airport after having shared an obscenely personal patdown with a bunch of other already committed travelers who have to, you know, simply accept it, I read and agree with Brian Lamb, who writes, "I see a number of other trends that strike me as far more threatening to the shared values of self-described open educators... Like the profoundly undemocratic process that is working to establish a shockingly awful global copyright scheme... the diminishment of the qualities that made Web 2.0 so genuinely interesting and innovative... endangered by the return of corporate-driven platform-based computing (hello mobile web) and a disturbingly passive and self-absorbed online culture.... the rise of digital sweatshops and content farms, which will both threaten and demand a response from a global intellectual culture... [and] the absence of a meaningful critical thinking apparatus in mass public discourse."
The customs official said to me, in all apparent sincerity, that I should "be safe" while flying to Las Vegas today, and it is my responsibility (as I feel hands touch me in places I'd only ever heard of) to actually believe. Which is why my leather computer case "isn't a computer case", why my iPod (according to today's Globe and Mail) may or may not be allowed (and they won't tell us which), and why it is a danger to the state that I carry a copy of Tolstoy onto the airplane with me, and why the gentleman following me had to either eat his cookies right away or lose them. I need to find (and express) an answer to this - it is rooted (as you see in the newsletter than follows) in the state of education, but it is also rooted in our mindless, mind-numbing compliance with this increasing unreal reality.
If we, the people, do not begin to exercise our power, our rights, and our responsibilities, then we will lose this society we worked so hard to build, and history will record that freedom and democracy work well only in theory, but when actually given to a society, succumb to a mindless uneducated drivel of passivity.
The customs official said to me, in all apparent sincerity, that I should "be safe" while flying to Las Vegas today, and it is my responsibility (as I feel hands touch me in places I'd only ever heard of) to actually believe. Which is why my leather computer case "isn't a computer case", why my iPod (according to today's Globe and Mail) may or may not be allowed (and they won't tell us which), and why it is a danger to the state that I carry a copy of Tolstoy onto the airplane with me, and why the gentleman following me had to either eat his cookies right away or lose them. I need to find (and express) an answer to this - it is rooted (as you see in the newsletter than follows) in the state of education, but it is also rooted in our mindless, mind-numbing compliance with this increasing unreal reality.
If we, the people, do not begin to exercise our power, our rights, and our responsibilities, then we will lose this society we worked so hard to build, and history will record that freedom and democracy work well only in theory, but when actually given to a society, succumb to a mindless uneducated drivel of passivity.
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