Tag Archives: elitism

Qualified to speak

By Mike | April 1, 2008

Reading today’s New York Times report about the increasing selectivity of America’s top colleges and universities, I was struck by the fact that not only was the author a Harvard alumnus, but so were the authors of the three books used as references in the article. It was a perspective from the selective group critiquing […]

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Technology’s outgroup

By Mike | March 30, 2008

The media regularly assert that the “younger generation” will comprise technical savants, fluidly emailing while watching YouTube while chatting with friends (on the phone and through IM, which increasingly overlap) while designing flying cars and nanobots. The claim boils down to the simple conclusion that new technologies are by the young and for the young, and only the young can understand it - cue the clichéd joke parents make about needing their four-year-old to program the VCR (that is so 80’s). Sure technology is rarely self-explanatory (’PC LOAD LETTER‘…). But that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained.

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