The Palms Art Gallery

How The Internet Has Weakened Us

“Nicholas Carr has written the New Silent Spring for the literary mind.” –                              Michael Agger, Slate

 “Witty, ambitious, and immensely readable, The Shallows actually manages to describe the weird, new, artificial world in which we now live.” —                                     Dana Gioia, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

 “This is a lovely story well told – an ode to a quieter, less frenetic time when reading was more than skimming and thought was more than mere recitation.”   —San Francisco Chronicle

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

When Nicholas Carr posed that question in a celebrated Atlantic essay, he tapped into a well of ever growing "family based anxiety" about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read, Feel and think deeply?

Now Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind” — from the alphabet, to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer — Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.

 Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic — a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is the ethic of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption — and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration,  Intuitive Feminine Appreciation and Interpersonal Values that expand emotional understanding  contemplation, and reflection.

One theory of social Construction states that the society that cares most for those who care for its children,"Mothers, Fathers,Teachers, Librarians, and yes Nannies," prospers highest against Disease, Crime and Violence towards women. With this as a guide line we can ask -Is the internet helping us to keep that social goal or swinging us off the road to another destiny.

 Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism,   The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes — Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive — even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.Available at the Hughes Main Library.

 WATERSHIP DOWN

                                 Fluffy Four Legged              Masters Of Wisdom

The Lonely Life And Job Of Being An Adult Swimming Against A Sea Of Morbid Mainstream Infantile Children

WARNING ADULT MATERIAL, ONLY MATURE PEOPLE WILL UNDERSTAND IT

Robert says late in the book that he began it with a sense of lighthearted humor. The humor disappeared from him, and will disappear for the reader, well before the books conclusion.

When the notoriously flamboyant, American basketball player Dennis Rodman recently hit a reporter in the face, President Bill Clinton dismissed it as an act to be expected by a wild and famous eccentric. Yes, why worry? Every American with a TV set knows that Rodman is both famous and a bit stranger than the average neighbor down the street. He lives in a world where standards of behavior are different than the "boring and stiff-mined" society of the past. Rodman often amusing his fans by dressing up in women's clothes and adorning bright yellow die in his otherwise black curls was, however, severely criticized on a national news broadcast by a group of 12 year old school children. Not for the way he looks, but for hitting the reporter.

 To Robert Bly, author of The Sibling Society_a book about "a culture where adults remain children, and where children have no desire to become adults" the mature reaction displayed by these children may seem like some strange irony. Because, unlike the President, who seemingly talked like Rodman's fellow punk, these children acted with the integrity of responsible and discriminating adults. Although there are people, who after being brought up in today's western world of deflated values still have a deep, uncompromising sense of right and wrong, a sense of what Bly calls "vertical values," they may soon be in a minority. According to Bly, an increasing number of us have become "squabbling siblings." We are like the greedy capitalists who tolerate nobody above and have no concern for anybody below. Or like the sullen teenage punks who live in their peer groups, glancing side to side, rather than upward toward their elders for a sense of direction.

As the blended society of the past is becoming obsolete, these squabbling siblings  who can be either kids, adolescents, adults or elders spend time and form values increasingly within their own peer group. However, in spite of these peer groups' isolationism, each group is more and more influenced by adolescent values. According to writer Michael Ventura who received international acclaim after co-authoring the book We've Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse with Jungian psychologist James Hillman adolescence today lasts from early teens to late middle age. If this trend continues, entire future generations may find themselves in a perpetual state of adolescence.

According to Bly, the peer culture has only one kind of vision: a "horizontal gaze," resulting in a flat, one- dimensional, hollow form of culture and consciousness. The family is replaced by the gang down in the dark alley, or the talk-show on TV. A sense of community is replaced by joining the material crowd whose unlimited desires are running up huge credit card bills at the shopping mall. Instead of well crafted art, rich in symbolism and spiritual depth, we have hedonistic surrealism on MTV. Instead of expressing a longing for the good society, we all dream of becoming rich. Instead of cultivating wisdom to map out a greater understanding of the forces of evil, American politicians want to put all the "bad people" in jail and throw away the key.

These superficial sibling values, now beginning to influence the most remote parts of the world, are brutal and terroristic in their attempt to "flatten" our consciousness. As advertising, celebrities, and popular music have become the main transmitters of values, a young person's conscience can no longer "rely on outward authority in its battle against impulse," says Bly. "Having to resist without help from parents or teachers, it has to do it all alone, and so it naturally moves toward a primitive, humorless savagery, well expressed in grunge rock, action movies, and piercing of body parts."

The values of sibling society, as described by Bly, and canonized by the talk-shows on TV, has resulted in a twisted sense of what is important or real: Many people have changed their consciences so they no longer demand us to be good, but rather to be famous. And this fact, that so many people now want to realize pop-artist Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame," even if it means to graphically describe your own promiscuity to 20 million TV- viewers, is indeed quite sobering.



According to writer Michael Ventura, the sibling rebellion probably started when Elvis let his pelvis move to the tunes of rock & roll in the 1950s. James Dean, Jack Kerouac and Marilyn Monroe were all icons of a movement against what Jules Henry called "the Indo-European, Islamic, Hebraic impulse-control system," and which culminated in the unbuttoned, unreined, free-loving culture of the Woodstock generation. But how did that rebellious but optimistic culture, with its unlimited appetite for self-gratification, gradually turn into the self - doubting, dark-hearted and cynical youngsters who now subject their brain cells to be bombarded with grunge music, gangsta rap and violent video games? only to later burn down The Woodstock Festival in an orgy of raped women? Why did it not turn into a spontaneous celebration of higher spiritual values instead? "That is the question we need to answer," says Robert Bly.

For Bly a balanced adult is a person "not governed by what we have called pre-oedipal wishes, the demands for immediate pleasure, comfort and excitement." It is also an adult perception to honour the Native American concept of the "seventh generation," in other words to assess how today's actions will effect the lives of plants, animals and people in the future. It is also "an adult perception to understand that the world belongs primarily to the dead.... They created it, they wrote its literature and its songs, and they are deeply invested in how children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going." Furthermore, both Bly and Ventura thinks it is paramount that an adult preserves his or her intensities (or spiritual energies), "so that he or she has something with which to meet the intensities of the adolescent." And then, with his customary honesty, Bly admits that the adult quality that has been hardest for him to understand is renunciation. Why? Because he is a "greedy person." But the older he gets, the more beautiful that word renunciation sounds. And finally, an adult value or action is not dependent on age. Because in reacting to Dennis Rodman's assault, for example, the President of the richest country on the planet acted like an adolescent brat and the 12-year-old school children like mature grown-ups. This visionary book deserves to be read by many. Bly's gentle warrior wisdom has both penetrated the cultural quagmire we are in and pointed toward the values we need in order to pull ourselves out.

This book will not be a popular book, because children hate being told the facts, and they hate those of us who remind them they can not have more-sugar, hate, sex, violence  demonic art, that they have to eat vegetables and go to bed. but it will be a profoundly important book, maybe the only book that can save us. Those who are able to swim against the social current of the destructive sibling society and forsake instant gratification long enough to absorb the books message will find themselves looking at society the community around them through Roberts new lens. My own experience is that a lot of thoughts and ideas that have been gnawing at my soul and disturbing me, perceptions of which I was only dimly aware, as if I were perceiving them dimly through a thick fog, suddenly emerged with crystal clarity terrifying clarity. My hope is that enough people will read this book, re-vision the way they look at society, reclaim lost traditions, and re-value the gifts of our ancestors the men and women who created our civilization and will find a way to move from a sibling society to a mature, adult society.



  Frenchman's Creek

  A Beautiful Woman, An Gourmet Artist Pirate  And a Wind Swept Castle By The Sea

 THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR

THE RUTHLESS AGAINST THE REST OF US

They never get caught, they are incapable of sympathy, they pretend their way through love and friendship and are where ever the power is.  I mean we're talking here about a person who never does anything unless they get ahead doing it. We often read in the papers about some person who went off and did something that you or I could never pull off just because it is so disgusting. we think well that person is a maniac, and that may be true, but the fact is that was not a sociopath, because sociopaths almost never get caught. Real sociopaths become governor, run the daycare center, the church, drive the ice cream truck, or pick you up  at a party, say I will call you tomorrow and disappear, leaving you molested and feeling broken, which if you read this you no longer have to fall for, they want you to feel as empty as they do every day, misery hunts happy company to kill it.  All of this hurts and we must beware, but the fact is you can not avoid it because their life cause is to inflect it. The most prevalent sociopaths today are in politics, they embrace what ever philosophy allows them to take the most from the many, and with out fail 75 percent of them are some of the most charismatic folks you will ever meet, these people gush with light and sweetness and people buy wholesale the very philosophies that distroy their lives and their countries, as Hitler and Rev. Jim Jones did. Both committed mass suicide with the complete compliance of their child like for ever compulsive people pleasing "Group Joiner" follower's. But again this is misleading, because the vast majority of sociopaths shun the lime light, they instead draw little attention to them selves and again almost never get caught.  This disease lends it self to put it self at all levels of society.  The main cause of this desease is often a word you must know to survive your life in any socity--BODERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER. This is a dis order that somewhere almost in every sociopaths makeup is present. There is a total vacuum and failure of EMPATHY in their hearts, and they them selves are the first to see it, usually very young as a child. While their first reaction to this is astonishment, their second is to hide it completely, so they often take on the role of a very caring person early on. They almost by adulthood never say anything wrong, dress nice, speak nice and exceed at all they do, and are very very good looking. They are out of the gates and running at puberty. They are the alpha men and women of legend and re-known. And they often become the ICONS of our society. Not weighted down with empathy they run with very good looks, light weight speed and precision. Some of the best examples of this disease is Vivien Leigh, James Dean, Jim Morrison of the doors, Marlyn Monroe, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon. And many of the beautiful rich, all alpha good looks, ruthless planing and self programed for suicide while sparkling like a Christmas tree. One of the least suspected borderline sociopath's is the Animal Hoarder, These do gooder's are notorious for lapsing into a animal fantasy world where dogs and especially cats replace human's as the most honored species. An encounter with these folks can be very dangerous.  Another warning sign is folks who had a boarder line as a parent, these people are not border lines but will draw you into the lair of one unsuspected.  Sadly many times there is a group that is mistaken for being sociopaths, these are The Empaths, they are those heaven sent folks who seem to know our every pain and hurt, and with profound sympathy and love many times have a natural born ability to help all of mankind, they are many times the out spoken voice that helps a sociaty save it self from it self, Christ, Buddha, Sister Kenny, Ghandi, Martin Luther king, many social workers and healers from all walks of life remind us that we are never happier then the range with which we can love and put the needs of others before our own, when it is appropriate. There is a rebuttal  book called "The Empath Next Door"  which is very fine reading for those who wish to take their personality to the highest plane. Studies done ad-finitum show many times  borderlines/sociopaths are blond, Scandinavia has the the highest amount at sometimes as much as 5o percent of the population along with the corresponding suicide rate to match as well. But in an age where a whole generation has lost thousands of hours of social development to wasteful computer activity resulting in a infantile love of vampire movies and violence as a form of entertainment, in adulthood, borderlines are every where, in every racial flavor. At some point every man, every woman has an encounter with a Sociopath. If you have had a life encounter with a person who turned on you with a viciousness that scared you badly, you most likely have been with a borderline,  Click to-www.squidoo.com/the-sociopath-next-door   This site will give good instruction for healing. THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR shows you how to spot and protect yourself from them with great flare and common sense, Grow Up and stop joining their groups. if you do not have the self love and wisdom to read this book remember then just this one thing-never let a borderline know you have seen them for what they really are, being found out is one of their greatest discomforts and they become most dangerous when cornered with it, in a confrontation tell them everything is your fault and run like the wind, remembering your greatest defense is autonomy, where in we remove every vestige of the lost insecure child from our personality, which gives us the strength to see the world for what it really is, givers, takers and even traders.  Which  are you going to be.                                                                          This Book is available thru the Hughes main library.