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Taste

One of my pet hates is the idea of 'opinion'. Opinion went from being a quite minor, useful idea to something much more sinister, and sinister not least because the bastardisation of the idea all gets carried out under the banner of incredibly noble principles. You'd be an idiot to deny that people have different opinions about things. No problem there. I guess most basically that means they don't agree on things - what music is good, what food is good, etc. If you want to use the word opinion to describe this basic fact, that people don't agree on things, then it's not a big deal. However things have progressed. Opinion has become a much bigger idea than that. Because added to "that's just my opinion" is now "it's all just a matter of opinion". Whoa there. Opinion is now not just one person's view on something, but something a lot stronger - things that people have opinions about have no value in themselves, except their great...
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The Morality of a Speed Bump. Latour.

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Introducing Bruno Latour. Over the past 20+ years Latour has been carefully and thrillingly re-designing the entire landscape of our lives, and increasingly people are noticing what he's been up to. It really is no exaggeration to say that the world as Latour sees it is remarkable, and very little of the ways we commonly understand things survives unscathed. Not that he in any way imposes a new order on things, or concocts vast fantastic scifi-type fantasies. And he doesn't have a critical bone in his body, so he's not out there debunking things either - he sees critique as a tired, misguided activity. On the contrary his genius (and this is probably what defines all genius) is to show us what we're already doing but don't even notice.  Rather than attempt some encyclopaedic biography and bibliography, I'll first list probably his most fundamental changes to the way we think about things, and then use one example to show a bit of the flavour of his work. As back...
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The Medium is the Message - Part 2

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I suspect the readership is flat-lining here. Ah well, it was only ever for myself. A good place to start with McLuhan is his most famous phrase - "The Medium is the Message". Many at the time and since interpreted this to mean that McLuhan was saying that all communication was nonsense and you should drop any attempt at meaning. So outrageously stupid educational installations were commissioned, with flashing lights and speakers and whatever else, which supposedly would automatically educate kids if they stood in front of them and played etc. This isn't what McLuhan meant at all. The medium is the message because the distinction between a message and the communication of that message is a false one. There is no such thing as a neutral channel or communication technology that simply transfers a separate message more or less faithfully. The standard theory is shown in the image above, which I nicked from Wikipedia. There's a pre-existing sender and receiver, and some ...
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