> [WS:] It looks like another 'solomonic wisdom' of oh so fucking brave
> digital age going down the drain.
>
> And while we are at this, here is another 'pedestrian' truth (you do not
> have to listen, Ian) - the time spent on managing electronic gizmos that
> keep the wiz-kids connected to fifty seven 'cool' places at the same time
> is
> the time not spent at honing the social skills of interacting with other
> people, which according to psychology 101 is a far greater predictor of
> success than IQ. But hey, it is better to be fucked up than uncool in
> this
> new brave world.
>
> Wojtek
Dude, uncool is equated with fuct up on gadgets in this new world (and then, anti-gadget needs-based homebrew tech becomes an even higher level of cool because it's counter-consumption, but how long before that becomes, um, commodified in Thomas Frank's sense). Just look at boingboing.net. A good chunk of these people are congenitally innocent of not only social theory but social skills period, as you say, and they're elevating that to geekchic culturally and formalizing it in network theory (with no small irony there) and producing stuff like Y. Benkler's Wealth of Networks and Tapscott's derivative (open source!) work. (And, on networks, consider BB: four or five people as gatekeepers of a blog, all of whom have comparatively superior networking and social skills, it seems, supervising the narrative of their predilictions, curiosities and quiddities (it has no other purpose) and reaping some pretty sweet rewards as 2M people a day tune in to read about ephemera. Sounds like good old hierarchy to me). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20070328/481a892d/attachment.htm>