Reading Art: Art for Book Lovers is a celebration of an everyday object — the book, represented here in almost three hundred artworks from museums around the world. The image of the reader appears throughout history, in art made long before books as we now know them came into being. In artists' representations of books and reading, we see moments of shared humanity that go beyond culture and time.
In this "book of books," artworks are selected and arranged in a way that emphasizes these connections between different eras and cultures. We see scenes of children learning to read at home or at school, with the book as a focus for relations between the generations. Adults are portrayed (描绘) alone in many settings and poses — absorbed in a volume, deep in thought or lost in a moment of leisure. These scenes may have been painted hundreds of years ago, but they record moments we can all relate to.
Books themselves may be used symbolically in paintings to demonstrate the intellect (才智), wealth or faith of the subject. Before the wide use of the printing press, books were treasured objects and could be works of art in their own right. More recently, as books have become inexpensive or even throwaway, artists have used them as the raw material for artworks — transforming covers, pages or even complete volumes into paintings and sculptures.
Continued developments in communication technologies were once believed to make the printed page outdated. From a 21st-century point of view, the printed book is certainly ancient, but it remains as interactive as any battery-powered e-reader. To serve its function, a book must be activated by a user: the cover opened, the pages parted, the contents reviewed, perhaps notes written down or words underlined. And in contrast to our increasingly networked lives where the information we consume is monitored and tracked, a printed book still offers the chance of a wholly private, "off-line" activity.
In the days before the Internet, critical thinking was the most important skill of informed citizens. But in the digital age, according to Anastasia Kozyreva, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development, and her colleagues, an even more important skill is critical ignoring.
As the researchers point out, we live in an attention economy where content producers on the Internet compete for our attention. They attract us with a lot of emotional and eye-catching stories while providing little useful information, so they can expose us to profit-generating advertisements. Therefore, we are no longer customers but products, and each link we click is a sale of our time and attention. To protect ourselves from this, Kozyreva advocates learning the skill of critical ignoring, in which readers intentionally control their information environment to reduce exposure to false and low-quality information.
According to Kozyreva, critical ignoring comprises three strategies. The first is to design our environments, which involves the removal of low-quality yet hard-to-resist information from around. Successful dieters need to keep unhealthy food out of their homes. Likewise, we need to set up a digital environment where attention-grabbing items are kept out of sight. As with dieting, if one tries to rely on willpower not to click eye-catching "news", he'll surely fail. So, it's better to just keep them out of sight to begin with.
The next is to evaluate the reliability of information, whose purpose is to protect you from false and misleading information. It can be realized by checking the source in the mainstream news agencies which have their reputations for being trustworthy.
The last goes by the phrase "Don't feed the trolls." Trolls are actors who intentionally spread false and hurtful information online to cause harm. It may be appealing to respond to them to set the facts straight, but trolls just care about annoying others rather than facts. So, it's best not to reward their bad behaviour with our attention.
By sharpening our critical ignoring skills in these ways, we can make the most of the Internet while avoiding falling victim to those who try to control our attention, time, and minds.
The iPhone has become a usability nightmare (噩梦). A new one comes with 38 preinstalled (提前装好的) apps, of which you can delete 27. Once you've downloaded your favorite apps, you're now sitting at 46 or more.
Like many companies, Apple has decided that there's no need to build an easy-to-use product when it can use artificial intelligence. If you want to find something in their garbage dump of apps and options, you must use Spotlight, Apple's AI-powered search engine that can find almost everything there.
This "innovation" of artificial intelligence is not the creation of something new but simply companies selling you back basic usability after decades of messy design choices. And these tech firms are charging us more to fix their mistakes and slapping an AI label as a solution.
Alexa and Siri have become replacements for intentional computing. They give commands into voice interfaces (接口) easily but sacrifice "what we can do" to "what Amazon or Apple allows us to do." We have been trained to keep apps and files, while tech companies have failed to provide any easy way to organize them. They have decided that disorganized chaos is fine as long as they can provide an automated search product to sift (筛查) through the mess, something more tech, even if tech created the problem in the first place.
Artificial intelligence-based user interfaces rob the user of choice and empower tech giants to control their decision-making. When one searches for something in Siri or Alexa, Apple and Amazon control the results. Google already provides vastly different search results based on your location, and has redesigned search itself multiple times to trick users into clicking links that benefit Google in some way.
Depressingly, our future is becoming one where we must choose between asking an artificial intelligence for help, or fighting through an ever-increasing amount of poorly designed menus in the hope we might be able to help ourselves. We, as consumers, should demand more from the companies that have turned our digital lives into trillion-dollar enterprises.
There's an enormous amount of personal health information people now feed or tap into digital monitors, health apps, search engines and other online tools. If the same information were provided in your doctor's office, your privacy would be safeguarded. But that's not how the digitized health world works.
Instead, we have an ecosystem of abuse in which health technology companies operate largely outside the law that requires doctors and other medical personnel, hospitals and insurers to protect an individual's health information.
That means technology companies can — and do — dig your digital data for clues about your health status, accessing information like prescriptions you have purchased and other health services you might have sought, and potentially link this information to your name, address, email address and other personally identifying information. The data can then be used by platforms including Facebook and Google to help advertisers target promotions or other communications to you.
It's a gaping hole in health privacy protections that comes from the privacy law, which protects interactions between patients, medical professionals and insurers but does not, in most cases, protect patient health data that is recorded on new technologies.
Closing the patient privacy gap can- and should -be a priority for lawmakers The consequences of digital exposure for those seeking reproductive services have drawn significant concern and attention. These worries are reasonable. But reproductive care is only one area of health services where private patient information is digitally disclosed.
Therefore, lawmakers must take action to protect the privacy of people who are now online for all manners of personal, professional and other reasons. Until then, a narrowly targeted approach that protects health privacy may be politically easier to come into effect. The explosion of digital health technology and the dramatic increase in its use in the past few years require it greatly.
Technology seems to discourage slow reading. Reading on screens tires eyes easily. So online writing is more skimmable than print. The neuroscientist Mary Walt argued this "new norm" of skim reading is producing "an invisible, dramatic transformation" in how readers process words. And brains now favor rapid absorption of information, rather than skills developed by deeper reading, like critical analysis.
We shouldn't overplay this danger. All readers skim. Skimming is the skill we acquire as we learn to read more skillfully. And fears about declining attention spans have proved to be false alarms. "Some critics worry about attention span and see very short stories as signs of cultural decline," The American author Selvin wrote. "But nobody ever said poems were evidence of short attention spans."
Yet the Internet has certainly changed the way we read. First, it means there's more to read, because more people than ever are writing. And digital writing means rapid release and response. Once published, online articles start forming a comment string underneath. Such mode of writing and reading can be interactive and fun, but is probably lacking in profound reflection.
Perhaps we should slow down. Reading is constantly promoted as a source of personal achievement. But this advocacy emphasizes "enthusiastic" or "eager" reading — neither suggest slow absorption. To a slow reader, a piece of writing can only be fully understood by immersing oneself in their slow comprehension of words. The slow reader is like a swimmer who stops counting the number of pool laps he's done and just enjoys how his body feels and moves in water.
The human need for this kind of deep reading is too determined for any new technology to destroy. We often assume technological change can't be stopped, so older media are kicked out by newer, more virtual forms. In practice, older technologies can coexist with new ones. The Kindle hasn't killed off printed books any more than cars killed off bicycles. We still want to enjoy slowly-formed ideas and carefully-chosen words. Even in a fast-moving age, there is time for slow reading.
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Imagine a school where students are taught by the best teachers in every subject, regardless of locations. Imagine a school where children can go on safe field trips to the Amazon rainforest or Everest base camp. Well, such schools are already being built: in virtual reality(VR).
Last month, Optima Academy Online (OAO) was launched in Florida and started to deliver courses for elementary, middle and high schools and 170 full-time students from all over the state signed up. They used VR headsets for about three hours a day for formal lessons and then do course work independently with digital check-ins.
It is worth watching how such educational experiments develop. Used properly, the VR technology can help students to access learning resources and be connected with fellow students and teachers all over the world. But if employed poorly, it will have the opposite effect and turn a digital inequality into an educational one.
There is growing evidence to suggest that it is happening. In Mexico, according to a survey, only 24% of 15-year-old students in poor schools have access to home computers for schoolwork compared with 87% in rich ones. As reported in another study, some students in northern England have been forced to travel around on the Greater Manchester train network or camp out around McDonald's to access free WiFi because they cannot do their schoolwork at home.
"VR technologies will be widely used in education. The only questions are: for what purpose and at what speed?" says Beeban Kidron, a member of the UK's Digital Futures Commission. "The trouble is that they are too often seen as a shiny new toy that will solve all problems and save money rather than being viewed as a means to enrich learning."
The inescapable truth is that there is nothing that can replace teachers educating students in safe schools—ideally, with access to well-designed technological platforms. Leaving children in their bedrooms with just VR headsets and no physical social interaction with other kids will fill-many of them—and their parents—with horror.
Nowadays, the world is slowly becoming a high-tech society and we are now surrounded by technology. Facebook and Twitter are innovative tools; text messaging is still a somewhat existing phenomenon and even e-mail is only a flashing spot on the screen when compared with our long history of snail mail. Now we adopt these tools to the point of essentialness, and only rarely consider how we are more fundamentally affected by them.
Social media, texting and e-mail all make it much easier to communicate, gather and pass information, but they also present some dangers. By removing any real human engagement, they enable us to develop our abnormal self-love without the risk of disapproval or criticism. To use a theatrical metaphor（隐喻）, these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we can each create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets, status updates and texts. This unreal state of unconcern can become addictive as we separate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are imperfect, powerless and insignificant. In essence, we have been provided not only the means to be more free, but also to become new, to create and project a more perfect self to the world. As we become more reliant on these tools, they become more a part of our daily routine, and so we become more restricted in this fantasy.
So it is that we live in a cold era, where names and faces represent two different levels of closeness, where working relationships occur only through the magic of email and where love can start or end by text message. An environment such as this reduces interpersonal relationships to mere digital exchanges.
Would a celebrity have been so daring to do something dishonorable if he had had to do it in person? Doubtful. It seems he might have been lost in a fantasy world that ultimately convinced himself into believing the digital self could obey different rules and regulations, as if he could continually push the limits of what's acceptable without facing the consequences of "real life."
