"For many people -- particularly anyone over the age of 30 -- the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme -- the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world.

...

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update -- each individual bit of social information -- is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like 'a type of E.S.P.,' as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life."
-Brave New World of Digital Intimacy-

Labels: Quotes, Technology

"The ancient Aristotelian idea of friendship is that friends bring out the best in each other. Friends might have common backgrounds, similar affinities, like interests, but at its highest level friendship is about the formation and elevation of good character. Friendship that brings out corrupt or otherwise bad ends is, ipso facto, not true friendship.

Real friends, good friends in the Aristotelian sense, confer benefits on one another; or as Aristotle put it, 'It is more characteristic of a friend to do well by another than to be well done by, and to confer benefits is characteristic of the good man and of virtue.' In fact, one of the reasons for having friends, Aristotle believed, was to have people for whom to do good. That is why even the perfectly happy man needed friends, and why without them he was incomplete."
-Joseph Epstein, Friendship-

Labels: Quotes

"Over the past 18 years, an entire generation of Asian Americans has come of age. And while the world that they've inherited has been radically transformed, the dialogue we're engaged in around what it means to be Asian American has remained frozen in place -- obsessed with issues and ideas that aren't just out of sync with the next generation's interests and priorities, but completely out of touch with their reality.

My generation bristled at any implication of foreignness -- we were Asian American, accent on the second word, and we wanted to create a hard distinction between our native culture and identity and that of our overseas ancestors. We took defiant pride in our ability to speak fluently without a trace of ethnic taint. And we were so deeply wounded by the thoughtless schoolyard chants of childhood that any media image that isn't dominant and heroic and handsome still feels to us like a punch in the gut, a reminder of finger-slanted eyes and bucked-out teeth.

This current generation, on the other hand, has flipped the polarity of our identity. They're Asian American -- American being a given, an understanding, while Asianness is their source of distinction and, more often than not, pride."
-Jeff Yang, The Ides of May-

Labels: Quotes

"If you couldn't neatly place yourself in any of the (generations), then you're probably a Cusper. 1943-1947, 1962-1967 and 1976-1985 are each considered transition times. Many people born during these cusp periods identify with the generations on either side. Often, Cuspers feel like they belong to neither and belong to both. They are generationally bilingual. They can act as translators and ambassadors between the generations."
-John Losey-

Labels: Quotes

"It is said that we are all three different people: the person we think we are (the one we have invented), the person other people think we are (the impression we make) and the person we think other people think we are (the one we fret about).

You could say it would be a lifetime's quest to reconcile this battling trinity into a seamless whole. Maybe, but for the time being I am convinced that, in Kurt Vonnegut's words: you are what you pretend to be."
-The Gentle Art of Selling Yourself-

Labels: Quotes

"On the way to Las Vegas, Stephenson, an energetic, peppery-haired man in his early forties, gave me a quick course in the economics of his business. Of the fifty million dollars customers paid for tickets last year, he said, Hollywood Theater kept only twenty-three million; most of the rest went to the distributors.

But, he continued, since it cost $31.2 million to pay the operating costs of the theater, his company would have lost $8.2 million if it were limited to the movie-exhibition business.

Like all theater owners, though, he has a second business: snack foods, in which the profit margin is well over eighty per cent. Last year, Hollywood Theater made a profit of $22.4 million on the sale of $26.7 million from its concession stands. 'Every element in the lobby,' Stephenson told me, 'is designed to focus the attention of the customer on its menu boards.'

...

Soft drinks are an important part of the movie business. All the seats in Stephenson's new theater, and most other multiplexes, are now equipped with their own cup holders, a feature that theater executives consider one of the most ground-breaking innovations in movie-theater history. With cup holders, customers can not only handle drinks more easily in combination with other snacks but can store their drinks while returning to the concession stand for more food.

As we walked around, a theater executive, who was assessing different popcorn-topping oil, said that salt was the secret to financial success since it drives customers back to the concession stand for drinks--where they buy more popcorn."
-The Hollywood Economist-

Labels: Movies, Quotes

"The truth is women love to compete with other women. Women want to win men over. They want to be chosen by a man who could have any girl he wants. No woman of caliber wants to win a man by default. She wants her man to be a prize, a good catch, someone she can be proud of.

When you tell a woman that her significant other is handsome or intelligent, she'll likely beam with self satisfaction. In complimenting her man, you've complimented her. You have told her, in so many words, that she is capable of attracting a quality mate. The women who rail against this usually have a low self esteem and thus avoid competition because they fear they'll always fail....or they're ugly. You pick."
-Violent Acres-

Labels: Quotes

"Today, the art of the magazine cover has been vanquished by celebrity worship and bad taste. Designers are simply fulfilling the dictates of their industry, not unlike the paint person on an auto assembly line.

Innovation, creative expression, or even cleverness has been mostly abandoned. Artistic considerations are limited to how much retouching the celebrity headshot requires in Photoshop and how many headlines can be crammed in before the cover looks too 'busy.'

The result: A world in which it's difficult to tell the difference between Playboy and Harper's Bazaar without cracking them open."
-The Decline of Western Magazine Design-

Labels: Quotes

"What Goldman was saying was a version of something that has long been argued about art: that there is no way of getting beyond one's own impressions to arrive at some larger, objective truth. There are no rules to art, only the infinite variety of subjective experience. 'Beauty is no quality in things themselves,' the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote. 'It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.' Hume might as well have said that nobody knows anything.

But Hume had a Scottish counterpart, Lord Kames, and Lord Kames was equally convinced that traits like beauty, sublimity, and grandeur were indeed reducible to a rational system of rules and precepts. He devised principles of congruity, propriety, and perspicuity: an elevated subject, for instance, must be expressed in elevated language; sound and signification should be in concordance; a woman was most attractive when in distress; depicted misfortunes must never occur by chance.

He genuinely thought that the superiority of Virgil's hexameters to Horace's could be demonstrated with Euclidean precision, and for every Hume, it seems, there has always been a Kames -- someone arguing that if nobody knows anything it is only because nobody's looking hard enough."
-Malcolm Gladwell, The Formula-

Labels: Quotes