Click here to see a video collaboration between Richard Powers and the artists at Ninth Letter Journal created in order to celebrate Galatea 2.2.
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Jennifer Glaser, Assistant Professor, English and Comparative Literature, University of Cincinnati
Blog Archive
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2008
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October
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- Toni Morrison, Margaret Garner, and Beloved
- History and "Papa Doc" Duvalier in The Dew-Breaker
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- Junot Diaz Interview about Genre
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- Introducing Junot Diaz and the American Novel Beyo...
- Forum for posting comments on Coover reading
- Ninth Letter and Galatea 2.2
- The Author is Dead; Long Live the Machine
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- Pygmalion and Galatea
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2 comments:
Though I cannot find the article now (I can only find a ton of Internet addiction support groups (paradoxically on the net)) I read an article a couple years back about a chemical release induced by the internet. The amount of information that a user can access on the internet, no matter how arbitrary or random it is, is information and (to simplify) our brains like information (as Powers discusses at the beginning of Galatea 2.2). Information stimulates the mind and is inherently addictive, (the human mind seeks to expand itself) and the internet provides the brain with almost infinite stimulation regardless of how pointless that information is. There are other factors too such as the immediacy, but I am at work and should probably be 'working.'
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Even the terminology of the internet ("users" for instance) suggests a dependency on the internet (though maybe that is stretching it...)
That's a really interesting point. It's amazing to realize not only that the internet enacts all sorts of addictions in us, but also that it changes the very way that we think and understand ourselves.
David Foster Wallace, a writer we'll be reading later in the quarter, talked a lot about how television, the internet, and other media function not only to feed addiction, but also to make us feel less lonely because it involves us in an imaginary community. We will hopefully talk more about this...Great insights, Madison.
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