e-College

Here is another biting comment on the way the Internet is isolating people's lives and leaving them as soulless husks. Stanley Fish is reviewing a couple of books on the new trend of digital education, of people getting their college experience online. Fish does not think much of this piece of evolution.

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As I made my way through these two books, one moment stood out for its chilling clarity. Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, argues in the course of a response to Bowen that with the help of the digital media, “we can release ourselves from the shackles that we have gotten used to in the context of in-class teaching.” This turns out to mean that we can be released from the distracting bother of interacting with actual people. In this way, she claims, we can be in tune with our students’ preferences. “Eighteen-year-olds,” Koller tells us, “actually prefer to text each other rather than to talk to each other on the phone or even get together for coffee.” That is, even a phone conversation is too humanly intimate for this generation.

Reading this, I found myself thinking of a small movie I saw when it came out in the middle ’90s. The movie is titled “Denise Calls Up” and its conceit is that a bunch of supposedly close friends never meet; they know one another only through electronic media. Physical encounters are threatened, but never occur. Everyone pledges to come to a party, but no one shows up. There is a pregnancy, but the father is a sperm donor whose only contact with the mother is through the phone call of the title. See how isolating and empty modern life has become is the acidly comic message of the director. Isn’t that great and can we please have more of it is the messianic message of Daphne Koller. O brave new world.

-- Stanley Fish at The New York Times

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Water Bill

We had a little squall in paradise. Pop got the water bill. After all the watering through July and August - the elephant ears getting three big drinks a day, the watering of the lawn every week and with richer water pressure in the front yard - Pop is aghast at the bill.

And it must be my fault. I tell him, "It's not 'me', it's 'we'." He says, "I only shower." He eventually comes around and seems to understand that I am not wildly losing myself in water orgies, but it is not pretty getting to that point.

What's worse, when I have a closer look at the bill myself, I see that we are only talking about thirty dollars. True, it is about double the usual bill, but it seems to me so cravenly stupid to cause such a disturbance for thirty dollars, especially when you consider the way he throws money around like it's confetti and every day is New Year's. But this is who he is, and this is what he thinks of me.

Lo (1,8) Humbert's Divorce

Hummy’s homey married life comes to a crisis when he gets a little windfall in his finances, when, in Mr. Appel’s words, “the proverbial rich American uncle” dies and leaves him a little inheritance. There is a condition on the bequest. Hummy must move to America, and this is not objectionable to him. Valeria, on the other hand, has no wish to leave. In fact, she has another man in her life. Although Hummy was not exactly in love, he is enraged to learn of this adultery. It must have upset him even more that the other man is a Russian emigre, and merely a taxi driver.

This excerpt comes after the Humberts have had their dramatic spat and after all three talk it out. Hummy suggests that Valeria just pack up her stuff and leave immediately, and this is the plan they are following. The Humberts were not doing so well that they had a huge estate to divide. Just pack a suitcase and put a few things in a box and it is done.

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