reflections on online/offline presence

[jrtom]

New Scientist:
"Living online: The end of privacy?"

Has links to a few other items (not all necessarily worth the read), including the following SF:

Bruce Sterling, short-short SF story: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google"
(I suspect that Bruce had nothing to do with that title; the story really doesn't have a lot to do with Google.)

Presented as a countervailing vision to the above by someone on /., we have this (rather less short) story by Vernor Vinge: Synthetic Serendipity

Comments

[lightning-rose.livejournal.com]

The "best minds" line comes from Allen Ginsberg's poem, "Howl":

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308

For some reason my brain doesn't parse poetry, my mind goes blank and my eyes roll up into my head, with "Howl" being one of the few exceptions, perhaps because it's also the best run on sentence, like, ever.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

I didn't know the specific origin of the "best minds" phrase, although I knew that it was a reference. The "Google" part was what bugged me--Google wasn't the first search engine and it won't be the last (although it's certainly among the best for most things at the moment).

I tend to have a similar reaction to most poetry. :)