BBC NEWS | Talk about Newsnight | The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen

.... newspaper circulations will decline, with more journalists' jobs being at risk. The quality of writing on the web will decline sharply as broadsheet newspapers are forced...

Yet Danielle Steel has a career...


Are gadgets, and the Internet, actually addictive? - CNN.com

Oh another wing to be added to the DSM which I'm cynically suggesting should be replaced by "alive = sick"  for the majority of social complexes. There's no social ill by which the molders of society can't sell you a pill to avoid after selling you the addiction in the first place

the debate over whether technology addiction, and especially Internet addiction, is a real mental disorder. At its annual conference last month, members of the American Medical Association considered a proposal to label excessive video and online game playing as an addiction, but decided to table it until further study.

I wonder if there's a malady of the addiction to classifying people? I've just recently finished a book by Daniel Gilbert    While you can extract a lot from this distilled account from a talk he gave at the TED conference his book on the subject Stumbling on Happiness this is one of those books which many would like to dismiss due to the rather unflattering portrayal of us as not knowing our own minds and what makes us happy. Pretty much given for anyone with a tad of introspection but it's worth a quick read / listen.   The part that interests me is that people's recollection of their satisfaction levels  greatly vary to what they reported at the time and in a way which they believe their  cultural group would expect to hear.   The part that really interested me , and it's addressed in the video, linked above, is the usefulness of this uncertainty with relation to our economy and progress.

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