Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hcoyG-Ck3-VwZB7fqpUFXbffoObg

by resdirector • 16 years ago

52 55 16 years ago

google.com

Maascamp• 16 years ago

That is a pretty dishonest headline you're using to summarize this article.

tel2• 16 years ago

It's the headline the article uses as well.

Dilpil• 16 years ago

Indeed. I wonder if the title is intentionally misleading, or if the writers had a different idea in mind when they wrote it?

Indeed, the strong controversy this articles headline will stir up proves Obama's (actual) point quite well.

tokenadult• 16 years ago

That was the original article title, which is preferred under the Hacker News guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

BrandonM• 16 years ago

I don't think a score of -4 is warranted. Although his comment was misdirected ("you're"), it is a pretty awful headline.

badave• 16 years ago

The problem is the original headline. The headline makes it sound like Obama is bemoaning iPads and Xboxes. It's sensational, it grabs your attention, and you wonder why he's bemoaning technology. And then you get to the article, which is actually about Obama bemoaning "the fact that "some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction." Hmmmm.... Text-book irony.

JCThoughtscream2• 16 years ago

While I support most of the man's political stances, Obama's take on the iPad and console culture is perhaps a smidge hypocritical, given that he is, after all, a known Blackberry addict.

pohl2• 16 years ago

Wait...you're saying that it's not possible to believe that "information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," while still using such devices?

If I warn that hammers can smash thumbs, may I still use one without being assailed by charges of hypocrisy?

JCThoughtscream2• 16 years ago

No, but decrying the harms of cigarettes whilst puffing a mouthful's worth at once would certainly garner grounds for such an accusation.

tel2• 16 years ago

It seems his argument is that information inundation lets stupid ideas live longer than they might otherwise, which is actually pretty wise. It's not necessary to pin it on iPods and XBoxes, but the idea that we need to learn healthy ways to survive information bombardment is neither new nor unwieldy.

The historical comparisons are interesting, but I suppose it's one of those questions where technology is available but human nature and morality are lagging.

hugh35• 16 years ago

It seems his argument is that information inundation lets stupid ideas live longer than they might otherwise, which is actually pretty wise

I'm not convinced that Obama can distinguish between "stupid ideas" and "ideas which are contrary to the Obama agenda" though. Of course he's hardly unique among politicians for this, but I do think he's less likely than, say, President Bush, to acknowledge the existence of informed and principled opposition to his policies.

It's interesting that the internet has allowed the political right to get organised in a way that it never really has before. The left-wing political protests of the 1960s had universities as their organizational focus, whereas the right never really had any similar way of getting a protest movement off the ground until the internet.

There's only a few quotes from the actual speech given but bits like this:

"You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter"

sound a little to me like a man bitter that the internet is being used to spread arguments disagreeing with his own.

sachinag• 16 years ago

The birther stuff, in particular, is a great example of nonsense that perpetuates. On a policy level, we were hijacked by the death panel nonsense. Debate the public option and minimum coverage requirements and subsidies - sure - but the death panel stuff is just nonsense designed purely to distort the debate.

If you don't get how having to deal with stuff like that at the expense of substantive debate harms our nation, I don't know what to tell you.

Why their communications team (and remember his chief speechwriter since 2007 is a guy born in 1981[1]) keeps linking this with video games and iPods (which he certainly does know how to use; it's a bizarre line) has to be some sort of polling data. Cause, on its face, it's asinine.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Favreau_(speechwriter)

brown9-22• 16 years ago

And you sound to me like someone who comes to this discussion with some preconceptions of his/her own.

He regularly acknowledges other viewpoints and their validity.

What he is speaking out against is obvious mistruths: birtherism, "Obama is a socialist", death panels, "Obama is a secret Muslim", health care reform gives the government the power to pull the plug on grandma, etc.

ErrantX2• 16 years ago

Excellent; that's some of the most intelligent argument in this area I've seen for a while.

And it is so true. Look st how much time people spend propogating meme's on facebook. Ok so there is always room for us to enjoy banal stuff - but I feel like it is starting to enroach on our lives.

It's like the sivers post from the other day; if only we shared an interesting wikipedia rather than one of those chain emails, conspiracy theories or "questionaires"...

hammerdr2• 16 years ago

This makes me sad.

Despite my political opposition to Obama, I thought that he understood the culture of the "IPod, XBox era." In fact, he leveraged these tools of 'diversion' in his campaign (and did so very effectively).

This seems to be the knee-jerk technophobic speech that politicians would have given in the latter half of the 20th Century. Instead of being afraid and resistant to technology (which, as we have seen, is unstoppable anyway), politicians should be encouraging the public to put these technological advances to good use. See: David Cameron's TED talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ELnyoso6vI).

He highlights a significant point in his speech, as tel says. Being able to deal with all of the information is something that we need to cope with. However, placing the blame on the tools is not the way to go.

silentOpen• 16 years ago

He's not placing the blame on the tools any more than you or I would bemoan the hours 'lost' to Hacker News. It's a longer view, step back.

We do need to come to grips with the social changes that are occurring and the implications of our present and future digital lives. Our man-made environment isn't the problem, it's our evolutionary memory combined with the phenomenal acceleration of information technology.

hammerdr2• 16 years ago

I disagree because of this one line in his speech:

"none of which I know how to work"

which reads like the classic politician's way of distancing him- or herself from the technology (and have heard from technophobic politicians--http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/11/mccain-admits-he-do...). Whether its true or not isn't really the point (do we seriously believe Obama wouldn't know what to do with a iPad, iPhone or iPod?), the point is that it was in his speech. I could be completely off base here (and I surely hope that I am!), but this is a decidedly late 20th century speech in my interpretation.

thaumaturgy2• 16 years ago

I'm unsurprised that the readers here latched right on to the tools mentioned in the article, and entirely missed the point of his statements:

> ...politicians should be encouraging the public to put these technological advances to good use.

This is exactly his point. He used a few devices to hi-lite the difference between information-as-entertainment, and information-as-a-tool. This in no way makes him hypocritical for being constantly connected to a Blackberry; he's using the device in exactly the way that he's urging young graduates to use going forward. (It may make him a little hypocritical for his campaign machine, though.)

I think he's right. I think he's being proven right all the time by sites like Reddit, which were supposed to democratize the news, except that instead they repeatedly become a megaphone for internet tough guy squads and get hyped over issues where they don't have all the facts. Or like HackerNews, where daring to mention some high-tech devices causes everyone to completely miss the actual point of an argument.

MWinther• 16 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with the implication that said devices are to blame for this sort of thing. A lot of this problem is just as, or if not even more prevalent in old media. One could argue that more convenient Internet access helps solving the problem by allowing people to do fact-checking for themselves. I know I look up points of contention on wikipedia via my phone in a way that just wasn't possible a couple of years ago.

indrax• 16 years ago

>"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work..."

What the hell? This sounds like Bush.

What happened to the guy who was in love with his blackberry?

davidhperry• 16 years ago

My guess is that he's feigning some ignorance in order to identify with 'regular folks.'

hugh35• 16 years ago

Really? It sounds to me more like the classic snobbery routine of pretending not to understand the things liked by the masses.

I, for instance, am still pretending not to know who Justin Bieber is.

jsz02• 16 years ago

A BlackBerry is primarily a communications tool. I don't think we should be too concerned that the President doesn't know how to play video games.

d3vvnull• 16 years ago

A blackberry isn't a toy. I have at least three of the items mentioned on the list (which are toys), and I use none of them for actual productive work. Though I do have a telnet terminal app on the iPod. Still all of the devices he mentions were not designed for productive enterprises, but for diversions. And diversions have a way of being big time wasters if you're not balanced. Not today Halo 3!

kevbin3• 16 years ago

What's the distinction between productive work and play? between a toy and a tool? Even if you think the distinction isn't purely subjective, you have to consider that every tool starts out as a toy, that a lot of tools are way more fun to play with than (what gets marketed as) toys, that playing can be extremely productive and that being productive can be really entertaining.

tokipin4• 16 years ago

what the heck. are people really this dense? it's an obvious joke. just wait for the video to come out

sp332• 16 years ago

Dude, sarcasm. Read it again with the word I given a lot of sarcastic emphasis.

marilyn• 16 years ago

Obama's arguments here remind me of Noam Chomsky's thoughts on sports:

Sports keeps people from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in sports [as opposed to political and social issues].

So much chatter to distract us from the important issues of the day.

hugh35• 16 years ago

For Noam Chomsky, like other radical leftists, the idea that the working class is deceived and distracted is part of an anti-cognitive-dissonance package to explain why the supposedly-oppressed masses fail to share his political opinions.

Obama isn't nearly as extreme as Chomsky politically, but come from the same sort of intellectual heritage.

patio112• 16 years ago

Thus the corollary: when the Revolution comes, the workers will need to be lead by those who are intellectually capable of leading them, and academic Marxists will take their rightful place in the cosmos as rulers of all they surv... first among equals.

This has basically been the totalitarian promise for a couple of centuries now.

ebiester2• 16 years ago

The issue is that, with sports, people at least have a chance of being on the winning side.

Cheering for the sane public transportation team, in most cities, is like cheering for the Cubs. You know you're never going to win.

cynicalkane• 16 years ago

With sports, people at least have a chance of being on the winning side...

...cheering for the Cubs. You know you're never going to win

What you seem to be saying is that the Cubs aren't proper sports players... not that I disagree...

thaumaturgy2• 16 years ago

Here is the text of his speech: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/05/ob...

Let's read that before spending a bunch of effort debating only a single sentence of it.

(It didn't take me long to find. It is the speech he planned to give, not a transcript, so there may be some minor differences in the actual address.)

brandonkm• 16 years ago

I'm especially surprised at where the discussion of this speech is focused. It seems that people aren't focusing on the context or the core message.

He's speaking at a HBCU to a largely if not all black graduating class. This isn't Stanford or MIT. I know theres a blind spot to the inequality African American students face and that this is a sensitive issue, but I don't think telling African American students who are graduating college to be wary of a lot of the distractions these days such as xbox and twitter is a bad thing.

I could go on for a bit about why, but Obama lays out the statistics for you...

American students are ranked about 10th overall compared to top-performing countries. African Americans, however, are ranked behind more than twenty nations, lower than nearly every other developed country.

I would say that Obama is inspiring a generation of African Americans to work harder and strive for more because inequality is still pervasive throughout American society and education is the key to overcoming this. Why is it so hard to miss this message?

kevbin3• 16 years ago

The President's speech is the educational industrial complex's standard paen to itself. It is uttered at appropriate "levelling-up" ceremonies by certified members of the cabal to customers seeking justification of their expenditures and validation of the status they have obtained. It's the appropriate boilerplate to deliver to customers at this point in their buying experience, but it doesn't say too much about the President's views.

If I read his speech on my iPad, does that make it a distraction, a diversion, or entertainment in the President's rubric? Am I being entertained or emancipated? It depends on who's doing the consumption and to what end.

Am I being overwhelmed with an unmanageable deluge of information? That's the argument the church made against the Luther Bible and the printing press. Information wise, we've always been capable of overwhelming ourselves by scanning a landscape, listening at the shore, or staring into the night's sky. Is reading a novel educational or entertaining? Does it depend on the nature of the novel? Is there a quantitative basis for that classification, like the number of neurons rewired by ingesting the novel? or the improved efficacy or performance of the system after ingestion?

Distractions, amusements and entertainments are the means by which our minds extend themselves to qualitative and quantitative changes in the information landscape: in information space, we evolve through play. Playing with information yields further information, knowledge, and maybe some wisdom. Sometimes play spills to the physical realm as artifacts or shared experience. Differentiating between "education" and "entertainment", "entertainment" and "art", or ranking things in terms of "usefulness" is post hoc analysis geared to reinforce the status quo, its information taxonomy, and its hierarchy of cultural value—an increasingly unmaintainable fiction, the acknowledgement of which would invalidate the blessing being conferred on this cohort of lemmings by the establishment through the President's words.

brihas• 16 years ago

Here is a video of the speech: http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/president-o...

metamemetics• 16 years ago

Quite Huxleyan of him. This paragraph by Neil Postman is worth cross-referencing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_wit...

icey• 16 years ago

HN would be so much more enjoyable without all of the politics. At least on reddit it can be filtered out.

alexqgb• 16 years ago

This speech should not be taken seriously - not because Obama (a) has no idea how to play X Box, or (b) spends all day on his Blackberry, but because his administration has thrown its full weight behind the most toxic aspects of ACTA. Even the name of the treaty is a fraud. So why is he supporting it so aggressively?

In this speech, Obama says the world is experiencing a moment of "breathtaking change", and goes on to say "we can't stop these changes... but we can adapt to them."

How? By exporting laws that call for $1.92 million fines in response to 24 privately downloaded .mp3s? By allowing the USTA to bully Canada over 'laxity' when the IP laws in question are stricter than our own? (http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4997/125/). By threatening Indonesia with the same kind of psychotic economic violence in 'retaliation' for their government's formal support of Open Source? (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/23/openso...).

If this is "adaptation", what was the Opium War? A humanitarian relief mission?

I promise you, iPads and X-Boxes are not the problem.

jsz02• 16 years ago

The reaction thus far to the President's comments seem to prove his point. Instead of focusing on any of the more challenging assertions many people latch onto the one easily consumable statement about iPads and Xboxs and ignore the bigger points. Imagine if people devoted the mental resources they use on debating minor details of technology, sports, entertainment, etc to real world issues? Imagine if they ran for office? It would change the world.

Obama bemoans 'diversions' of IPod, Xbox era

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