“It’s the technology,” the roofer said. “They don’t know how to deal with a human being. They stand there with that text shrug”—he hunched his shoulders, bent his head down, moved from side to side, looking anywhere but at me—“and they go, ‘Ah, ah, um, um,’ and they just mumble. They can’t talk any more.” This inadequacy with physical space and direct interaction was an affliction of the educated, he said—“the more educated, the worse.” His poorer black customers in Bedford-Stuyvesant had no such problem, and he was much happier working on their roofs, but the recession had slowed things down there and these days he was forced to deal almost entirely with the cognitively damaged educated and professional classes.

“They hire someone—this has happened several times—so they don’t have to talk to me,” he went on, growing more animated and reddening with amazement. “It’s like they’re afraid of me! So they hire a guy who’s more comfortable dealing with a masculine-type person. I stand there and talk to the customer, and the customer doesn’t talk to me or look at me, he talks to the intermediary, and the intermediary talks to me. It’s the yuppie buffer.” He wasn’t slurring gay men—he described these customers as mainly “metrosexuals”—nor was the problem all yuppies, some of whom had been his customers for years. It was a new group who had moved from Manhattan in the past few years, and who could not detach themselves from their communications devices long enough to look someone in the eye or notice the source of a leak. This was a completely new phenomenon in the roofer’s world: a mass upper class that was so immersed in symbolic and digital cerebration that it had become incapable of carrying out the most ordinary functions—had become, in effect, like small children with Asperger’s symptoms. It was a ruling class that, out of sheer over-civilization, was quickly losing the ability to hold onto its power.

The view from a roofer's recession, by George Packer. New York Times

Selling Your Own Advertising Campaign as News

CNN has tried to spin its disproportionate coverage of this “Twitter duel” as relevant to the growing importance of “new media” in breaking down barriers between celebrities and the public. Yet this obscures the real story: namely, the amazing ease with which traditional news outlets can create “news” that is useful to their marketing purposes, and then use “new media” platforms (and other networks’ gullible coverage of the pseudo-event) to spread their advertising gimmick “virally.” Indeed, with unnerving efficiency, CNN staged an event that put its brand-name front and center (i.e., “Kutcher vs. CNN”); hyped this as news-worthy on its network and website; recruited a famous dupe to ensure that its content was pumped throughout the blogosphere and reported in the MSM; and - in its most shameless act yet - broadcast “Kutcher supporters” wearing CNN-branded “Kutcher hands CNN its lunch in Twitter feud” t-shirts, which, naturally, are available for $15 apiece on CNN’s website!

In turn, CNN’s bold fabrication of the news suggests that “new media” isn’t necessarily “democratizing” the flow of information. Rather, insofar as the MSM is still responsible for determining what counts as news, “new media” platforms have provided traditional media outlets with enhanced capabilities for packaging - and broadly disseminating - their own advertising campaigns as “news.”

Eric Trager, "CNN Invents the News" Contentions 4.18.2009

Coffee - "Drink of God's Glory"

The design ...

... The Coffee Mug.

The great NYU Kimmel Food Court Occupation comes to a bloodless end. (Or “how NOT to spend your college tuition”)

Last week a group of "student-empowering, social-justice-minded" students and assorted ragamuffins and rabblerousers from neighboring colleges (many affiliated with TakeBackNYU) had the stunningly-brilliant idea of barricading themselves in a food court in New York University's Kimmell Center, "in a historic effort to bring pressure on NYU for its administrative and ethical failings regarding transparency, democracy and protection of human rights."