Could we think of this change in terms of a political shift as well? I mean, look at the passion with which 18th and 19th century thinkers and citizens liberated themselves from the masses on the principles of individual rights and individual liberty.

What are the political battles that we are currently waging? Or, more importantly, how are we currently waging them? I think that this shift in self-perception may have made positive contributions to the spread of ideas and the ease of political debate…. but then I go to YouTube and read the mind-numbing slop that is posted on videos and wonder why some people should be afforded an opinion at all.

To take a different viewpoint, I am currently teaching 5th grade, and my students must have everything validated and ‘approved’ by me in order for them to consider it worthwhile… but this may not signal a shift in self-perception, maybe just a lack of motivation. Why go through the trouble of forming an opinion if no one is going to hear it? Why spend the energy writing a poem if it isn’t going to win a 500 dollar savings bond from some poetry contest? I wonder if this has always been the struggle of teachers trying to motivate their students and whether or not things have actually changed…

just some thoughts on a saturday morning…

Dave Kimbell, St. A’s ‘09

“Isn’t there a strange blurring between what would traditionally have been deemed the interior realm of the private and the exterior realm of the public”

Doesn’t this presuppose a Cartesian Theater, where the once non-transparent walls are becoming transparent? Surely we need to steer clear of this analogy and language.

Also, it sounds as if ‘ego theory’ is presupposed, i.e. that personal identities are monolithic countable things; in contrast to Hume-ian ‘bundle theory’ that views a mind as a mosaic of constituent experiences and parts at the personal and sub-personal levels.

Your points seem to speak mostly from and to those who hold the idea of a real central meaner, and while this may or may not be a correct position, what would be the description of the effects of Facebook for those that hold an decentralized bundle concept of mind in the traditions of Hume-Ryle-Dennett et al (and Buddha)?