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乔纳·莱勒（Jonah Lehrer） （又名“神经科学博客圈的男孩王”）有一个温和而 绅士反驳 至 扎迪·史密斯 文章 这近乎对 Facebook 现象的道德恐慌。早在 2000 年，我就记得听到文学评论家对史密斯的作品赞不绝口。 洁白的牙齿。我是个书呆子，当我读小说时，它往往是“推理小说”。但我决定去看看 洁白的牙齿。没关系，虽然我不明白有什么大惊小怪的。但后来我怀疑我缺乏一些认知模块来欣赏“文学小说”。有趣的是，在接下来的几年里，一些认识我的人将我比作小说中的角色马吉德。无论如何，为了回应史密斯的过度恐慌，我要指出三件事：
1) Facebook 没什么大不了的
2）更广泛的技术弧线，Facebook 只是其中的一小部分 is 一件大事（又名 透明社会）。如果史密斯想变得惊慌失措，她应该写下 PIPL or Spokeo
3）对信息技术强加给人类的扭曲的担忧可以追溯到字母表的发明，字母表使读写能力民主化，超越了抄写员的阶层，并且据称将使记忆变得过时（印刷机实际上是记忆技术的丧钟） ）
关于最后一点， 许多古代信件作者的行为就好像他们在 Facebook 墙上发帖一样。 杰出人物的私人信件的撰写是为了被复制和传播，有时甚至被大声朗读。写回忆录和日记的部分目的是为了提高声誉，并为后代保留回忆。这也是这些信件的原因之一 昆图斯·奥勒留·西马科斯 显然很无聊。一切新的都是旧的。有点。
（从重新发布 探索/ GNXP 经作者或代表的许可）
关注@razibkhan 
还有一个替代方案，就是不要使用它。
我大约每月检查一次。
I don’t really see why she cares that you can’t list your favorite “plants” on Facebook. Her case against Facebook is seems to me elitist and irrelevant to its actual function. She’s just signaling that she is more sophisticated than college students who are looking to hook-up, or dopy middle-aged women trying to reconnect with old boyfriends.
This is a standard lament from high minded people: regular social intercourse is banal, people should be more interesting, more intelligent.
Don’t worry about not digging Zadie Smith’ writing. In fact, don’t worry about not “getting” literary fiction generally. The literary fiction thing is overblown, if not actually a bit of a con job and a hoax. Lit fict of the type we have today isn’t some organic extension of the great literature of the past, it’s a creation of post-WWII academia, the creative-writing industry, government funding, and elite-education snobbery. It’s a completely weird hot-house flower. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it vanish from the cultural scene entirely in the next couple of decades.
re: smith. 洁白的牙齿 was OK. but some of the critics were having orgasms on air just thinking about it. the issue isn’t that i thought it was an unreadable work. it wasn’t. just didn’t see what was climax worthy.
Zadie Smith 的文章非常精彩。 白牙显然是第一部小说——结局很糟糕（转基因小鼠？！？）。 但她的非小说类散文聪明、敏感且非常人性化。
是的，马吉德不会得到人的部分。 但你不只是 Magid，你也是来自 Brick Lane 的 Karim 和 Chanu，可悲的是，他们都是人类。
好的，读论文。 太棒了，也太粗糙了。 需要更多的抛光。 史密斯写过、想过很多关于小说的内容，以及它与人的关系。 这篇文章很好地延伸了这一思路。 相比之下，莱勒认为媒体并不重要。 自麦克卢汉指出以来，这显然是错误的。
（但是 Razib 的这个评论，“如果 Smith 想要惊慌失措，她应该写关于 Pipl 或 Spokeo 的文章”——认真的？）
摘自文章：“但是这个年轻人有些不对劲：他的眼神交流不连贯； 他似乎不理解常用的短语或语言的歧义； 他直言不讳，到了冒犯的地步，迂腐到了好斗的地步。 （“Final 俱乐部，”Mark 纠正 Erica 说，因为他们讨论的是哈佛独有的实体，“不是 Final 俱乐部。”）”
But then I suspect I lack some cognitive module which allows for the appreciation of “literary fiction.”
You me both my man!
nice to have the arbiter on the importance of smith’s ouvre drop by 😉
I can’t believe I read that whole essay. Okay, I agree with her on some things, mostly that Facebook makes it easy to be lazy with our friendships (that’s an issue I deal with personally, since I’m prone to bouts of agoraphobia and it’s hard to maintain friendships when you can’t leave your apartment), and I do get ooked out about the idea of my profile being public. But, whatever, it’s a choice to use Facebook and it’s a choice what to put on it or how public to make it.
Then again, the social pressure to use Facebook is overwhelming, and I’m guilty of this. I keep telling my dad to get a Facebook. My dad and I have never been very close (divorced at a young age), and we’re both very socially awkward, so I thought Facebook would be a good way for us to keep in closer touch, as well as for him to stay in touch with his family (who I only really talk to on FB because they live far away and I don’t know them that well). He told me he’d like that, but he didn’t want to have to deal with all the friend requests from people he used to know. I found that very interesting. He thinks FB is a time waster, and he wouldn’t mind using it just for family, but even as a non-user he knows that he will get friend requests from people in his past, and that if he doesn’t add them it’ll be an awkward Thing, but he does add them it will take away from his enjoyment of the product.
My dad and I are a lot alike in that we both dislike People, but I guess I’m better at tuning out what doesn’t interest me (I’m probably also a bit more considerate of other people’s feelings).
on the issue of literary fiction, let me clarify that i often find the stuff readable. i get the general points, and can follow the characterizations. but i really don’t see the rationale for the out of control reactions critics sometimes have. i’m talking about the gushing, etc. as an analogy, i once encountered a teenage boy who gushed over ender’s game. i read the book, in one sitting, and i realized why he gushed. it’s not a “great” work of literature, but the appeal to a teenage boy was pretty clear to me (as a teenage boy then for sure). i’m just trying to say that taking middle-aged literary critics as their word i really can’t see what the fuss is over singular books in terms of the substance.
Razib, you just need to find a book that resonates with you. May I suggest “The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs”?
我只是想说，以中年文学批评家的话来说，我真的看不出在实质内容上对单一书籍有什么大惊小怪的。
大多数时尚与美学无关，而是社交展示。文学小说目前非常流行。
拉齐布，像往常一样说得好。我们以前有过这样的谈话。事实上，有一次我作为使用新技术的 1.0 一代人发表了很多演讲，您非常友善地链接了我对此事的看法。
当然，史密斯女士是一个高雅的势利小人。她自己靠名人（所有文学小说明星都是如此）——葡萄酒和奶酪品种而茁壮成长，并瞧不起所有在网络空间中与他人交往的可悲的社会格格不入的人。对于那些看不起“互联网”的人来说，常见的陷阱是他们没有意识到你可以两者兼得。你可以享受文学小说，安静地编织，欣赏卡拉瓦乔，欣赏搏击俱乐部，并且仍然使用 Facebook。这里不存在零和社交游戏，除非这是一个人的选择。技术不会让你做任何事情。你可以用技术做你想做的事。
My daughter openly admits she uses Facebook to track people, spy on them if you will, nothing else. There’s no way she regards 100+ people as friends.
For her half-dozen close friends who are living elsewhere, she uses MSN and Skype, email for photos and stuff.
For her close friends here, she tracks them down on campus by mobile phone and ummm, look I know this is going to sound weird, but she tracks them down and talks to them face to face. They eat lunch together. Sometimes they even hug each other, except when they’ve been handling human body parts in the wet lab. Talk about primitive.
They don’t do wine and cheese though. Fish dumplings and soy milk. Nice bit of dried cuttlefish, maybe. Moan about how they can’t get any pig’s intestines, jellyfish or sea slugs to eat in this primitive backwater.
No, my observation of my daughter and her friends is that they’re all doing fine in terms of human relationships, better than I and my friends did. But we were boys, so maybe that’s apples and pears. But my wife didn’t keep her childhood friends the way my daughter has, they scattered to the four winds and she lost track of them because writing letters in longhand is a pain, and a poor way to keep knowing someone.
One of my daughter’s friends has known her since she was 3, and said she wants her as a bridesmaid at her wedding, and intends to keep her as a friend until she dies. They’re currently living 4,000 miles apart, but that’s small village stuff.
How can someone be “based between New York City and Queen’s Park, London” anyway? Where does Ms Smith live, somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic?
Where I live, whenever a child is hit by a car and killed on a street, which is unfortunately an all too common occurrence, someone will put a small memorial wooden cross on the verge, and keep putting fresh flowers around the cross every day, sometimes ribbons and balloons, and this goes on for years. For all I know, it might go on forever. At one intersection, there are two little crosses side by side – a double hit. People stop by and write dumb little messages on the footpath, draw little hearts and stuff, and the council graffiti-removers leave the messages there.
And the message writers do realize that the kids are dead, Ms Smith.
On lit fict, I wouldn’t go as far as to call it a hoax, I went through a phase of reading Japanese writers who write in English, and got it, and liked it. That stuff definitely qualifies, I’m certain of it. I can recommend some of it. References to white foxes and such can get a bit obscure, it doesn’t mean what a modern native English speaker might think it means, but you can figure it out.
Of the Chinese equivalent, some definitely borders on it, although a lot seems more genre stuff to me. It’s OK, nothing wrong, good, entertaining, funny and informative, but it doesn’t qualify as having ‘literary merit’, just fun stuff to read – Orientals have never been mysterious and inscrutable, jut culturally different. But the most recent that I read definitely qualified, it was a serious piece of good writing, while also being hilariously funny, and giving deep first-person insight into modern day Burma.
I used to read a lot of the late Patrick White, who in my worthless opinion is the best of the Australian writers, but I haven’t read much Australian stuff lately.
I read a lot of Vladimir Nabokov in my youth. He was not a waste of time. Franz Kafka was no slouch either.
Ms Smith’s stuff is OK, but I wouldn’t rave about it. Like Michelle, I can’t believe I read that whole essay, it was a chore, hard work to get all her ‘in’ oblique references, and unpleasant to read because the whole way through my brain was rejecting what she was saying, and a waste of time. I suspect she is a pseudo-intellectual fraud. I might be doing her a disservice, but that essay is all dreamed up impressions based on zero data and analysis and bugger all proper research, written with the intention of impressing the reader with the writer’s wonderfulness, and I have read much better writers.
I know kids, my daughter’s contemporaries, who used to lock themselves in their rooms for days at a time and play World Of Warcraft, and it was their only topic of conversation. One I got to know pretty well, he was a nice bright Chinese American kid who was helpful to my daughter logistically in exchange for her coaching him in math, but they couldn’t be friends in any real sense, because they had nothing to talk about outside of mathematics – she thought WOW and game-playing in general was dumb and a waste of time, he thought it was the only thing worth anything. But I also know for a certainty that among their group, he was in a small minority. He was not normative.
I think Ms Smith has been insulting, has greatly missed the point, and is being dismissive of a lot of people more intelligent than she is who can do much more difficult stuff than she can that is of much more direct utility to humanity. They might write in SMS-language, but they can do real stuff in real time in the real world that benefits people in a tangible way. She writes anxious-sounding intellectually-superior bullshit that benefits no one, and it’s not even entertaining and escapist.
I just broke a long-held pledge to myself and joined Facebook, against my daughter’s advice, partly because I want to use it for professional purposes, engineers do use Facebook for networking for work purposes, for tracking professional colleagues, and to advertise their availability and services, but also prompted by Ms Smith – if she thinks it’s that bad, there must be something good about it. And if she’s insulting people, I wish to join the ranks of the insulted.
The personal computer came into being during my lifetime, at university I was writing Fortran IV programs for mainframe computers that filled a whole room(anyone remember those stacks of punch cards, and then your ‘mates’ would surreptitiously shuffle your cards? bastardos), having to book time on the computer a week in advance, doing land surveying calculations using 7 figure logarithmic tables (anyone remember them?) and engineering design calculations using a slide rule (anyone remember them?) or a Hewlett Packard pocket electronic calculator (which were banned from exam rooms), and my daughter was born into a household that was already online, and she was being taught to spell by Reader Rabbit by age 3 and hogging my desktop by the time she was 7 (to the extent that I had to buy her a machine that was better than mine and give her her own Internet connection, just so I could get access to my own computer), but I have realized that we are both 2.0 people – I was computer-literate long before she was born, and by the age of 4, she and I both were. By about age 11, we achieved parity. My wife finally made it this year – my daughter has finally succeeded in teaching her mum how to use a PC without having to read the instruction manual.
Ms Smith is welcome to her wine and cheese (I might envy her the cheese, depending on what it is, but I live in a land where drinkable wine is cheaper than Coca Cola) and her mid-Atlantic lifestyle (too bloody cold and wet), but I won’t be paying attention to any more of her opinionating any time soon. Or her books. She has had as much of my money as she is going to get. The world is full of great, smart, honest,highly educated, competent people who are much more worthy recipients.
And Razib is free, prolific, informed, data-driven, and instantaneous. You can’t get better than that. And he has the value-add of some high class and entertaining commenters, not including moi.
扎迪·史密斯 (Zadie Smith) 得知 Facebook 是由一位年轻的白人男性书呆子发明的，这让他感到不安。
Sandgroper 和我应该在 Facebook 上成为“朋友” 🙂
但说实话，他说的是完全正确的。今天的年轻一代，包括我成年的孩子，与他们的“现实生活”朋友保持联系的时间比我与学校和大学朋友保持联系的时间更长、效率更高。他们非常善于交际，而不是史密斯女士描述的那种目光呆滞的科技僵尸。
电子邮件/短信/博客/FB 跟踪“书呆子”非常擅长的另一件事是在短时间内组织一场音乐会或聚会。我来自政治抗议的嬉皮时代。过去，我们要在烟雾缭绕的黑暗房间里花费数小时甚至数天的时间才能组织一次静坐或焚烧公共汽车。当成人的追求让我们分散到世界各地后，我们就失去了联系。对于远距离保持联系而言，长途电话和繁琐的邮件并不能解决问题，当今的即时通信工具也是如此。感谢FB，我找到了许多失散已久的朋友，并在多年后与他们愉快地取得了联系。有什么不喜欢的，只要它只是另一种沟通方式，并且不干扰阅读（不一定是扎迪·史密斯）、做饭，是的，与城里的血肉朋友一起出去玩？
Ruchira – well now we can! You would find me disappointingly blank at the moment though.
You make a valuable point – Facebook is an excellent way to find people you have lost and want to find again. (So far I have found a few people I don’t want to find again, but that’s my choice.)
When my daughter was small, there were two young Filipinas who used to baby-sit her. They became extremely fond of her, and she of them, and she still remembers some of the Tagalog they taught her. One subsequently returned to Manila (which is a huge trackless slum/maze), the other migrated to Italy, we moved home multiple times and changed phone numbers, and totally lost contact.
This year they both tracked her down on Facebook. My daughter was like “Um, you’re not going to believe this, but guess who just found me on Facebook?” When we knew these girls they were both computer-illiterate. We don’t expect to be able to see the one in Italy any time soon, although we can work on that, but she will be reunited with the other one very soon, which is going to be good for laughs, because she is now a foot taller than the baby sitter and could pick her up in her arms with ease and swing her around in the air, the way the baby sitter used to do with her. And she probably will 🙂
On the organizational thing, that’s exactly one of the things I use email for, not burning buses, but planning/organizing the logistics of work stuff with groups of work associates, exchanging useful information needed quickly, etc. One friend/associate got throat cancer and had to go to another country for radiation treatment (successful), and was trying to keep running his consultancy on a daily basis remotely by email. He and I were emailing each other in real time every night after I got home from work – not only did that give him some moral support and comfort during a very difficult time for him, but I was also able to be his informal agent on the ground and solve problems and remove road blocks for him so that his company didn’t go bankrupt in his physical absence and he didn’t get sued for breach of contract.
Last night he became my first friend on Facebook.
拉齐布，如果你不介意的话，这是 相关链接 我对 Facebook 的看法以及为什么我不同意 Zadie Smith 的“道德恐慌”。