Archive

Kathleen Hall Jamieson on Elusive Objectivity

The dan­ger is that we are tak­ing the agen­da that is being set by those who are the polit­i­cal play­ers, and by check­ing with­in it ignor­ing the things that are con­se­quen­tial that we ought to be debat­ing, that to some extent exist in anoth­er world which is a world about what is desir­able and good, and what the trade-offs actu­al­ly are and how we should arbi­trate those track trade-offs. 

Defying Faith

The chal­lenge for the Church and for the the­olo­gians was to say okay, per­haps that’s what is writ­ten. But for exam­ple if you con­sid­er that God has deliv­ered the Creation in sev­en days, know­ing that nowa­days Amazon can deliv­er every­thing on Earth overnight, it means that Jeff Bezos has defeat­ed God? Or does it mean some­thing dif­fer­ent? And I think it means prob­a­bly some­thing different.

The Conversation #39 — Richard Saul Wurman

Conversation has been con­sis­tent­ly a mod­el in my head of being human. For quite a while I’ve spo­ken about how we’re not taught at any time in our life how to ask a ques­tion, and how to talk on the phone. And most peo­ple think they know how to ask a ques­tion, and they know how to talk on the phone. And yet I found that 98% of ques­tions are either bad ques­tions or speech­es. And most phone calls are terrible.

The Conversation #36 — Ethan Zuckerman

We are in the midst of a shift in how we encounter infor­ma­tion. And we’re wrestling with three par­a­digms at the same time. The old­est of these par­a­digms, for for most of us, is edit­ed media. … You have a pow­er­ful gate­keep­er, the news­pa­per edi­tor, who says, Here are things you need to pay atten­tion to today. Give this a small amount of your time, and you will be rough­ly up to date with what you need to know.” 

The Conversation #31 — Claire Evans

I think if there are peo­ple who are able to take a step back­wards, take that prover­bial zoom out, and real­ize that every­body’s kind of doing the same thing in dif­fer­ent ways, and be able to step from one per­spec­tive to the oth­er and ask dif­fer­ent kinds of ques­tions based on where they are at any giv­en moment time, then it just becomes a game. I think it becomes joy­ful and engag­ing. I mean, I’m not inter­est­ed in find­ing the answer to any­thing. I don’t think there is the answer to anything.

The Conversation #25 — Frances Whitehead

Some of my artist friends think what I’m doing isn’t art, and I’ve giv­en up on art. It’ll take care of itself. You know. I mean it’s always been there, it will always be there, and we always know that new art nev­er looks like art at first, ever. So why should this be any dif­fer­ent? We just have to trust the process. And I would say that must be true for every oth­er discipline.

The Conversation #11 — Lisa Petrides

Obviously there’s human rights that have to do with water and air and safe­ty and shel­ter, but I think edu­ca­tion is right there with it because it real­ly is a pub­lic good. I have such a hard time with peo­ple who say, for exam­ple, who don’t have chil­dren and say, Well why should I pay those tax­es. I don’t have any­body in the schools. It’s not ben­e­fit­ting me.” And I think how can you pos­si­bly say that? Those are the peo­ple that are ser­vic­ing you, whether they’re ser­vic­ing your roads or your super­mar­ket or your med­ical offices.

The Importance of Innovation and Thinking Different

Whenever you are the first and dif­fer­ent and unique, you can­not be wrong. You will win. And these three com­mands are the com­mands of my com­pa­ny. Of course we make watch­es, but we don’t care about watch­es. We espe­cial­ly don’t care because nobody buys a watch to read what time it is.

Collusion episode 1: Seeds

In this episode, we’ll take a broad under­stand­ing of the term tech­nol­o­gy” and look at how processed and tech­niques have affect­ed the way in which soci­etal ben­e­fits from cer­tain types of seeds have spread across the world, from indige­nous knowl­edges, to biotech­nol­o­gy, and patent­ing and pri­va­ti­za­tion of seeds.