Go visit AAAS for their news release on my recent panel at the 33rd Annual AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy.
New Media Pioneers Convey the 'Cool' of Science
[27 May 2008]
Speaking at the 2008 AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy in Washington, D.C., the speakers showed off online islands with virtual telescopes, blogs that network millions of science aficionados around the world, and media empires that include dozens of blogs and glossy publications that reveal the beauty and sexiness of science and technology.
My entire talk is now now available here and you can also follow along with the accompanying slides and listen to other presentations at the forum website.
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An enthusiastic and interesting talk. How many people were in the audience?
I have been reading Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason. It is a sobering book in that it amply demonstrates that the lack of understanding of science, in fact the true distrust of science that is so common in America, has deep historical roots.
She begins that history with the speech given by Emerson to the Phi Beta Kappa society at Harvard in 1837, a speech that has been called a declaration of intellectual independence. The opposition to science, in fact to intellectualism in general, has never relented. There is a preference for beliefs over facts that still exists and will probably continue to exist.
How, then, would a device such as having an avatar, something created that only separates and masks, lead us to a time when we are comfortable dealing with the world as it is? When might such attractions become part of what Jacoby call the Culture of Distraction?