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All articles by Sam Vaknin, Ph.d. -
Despite all the fashionable theories of marriage, the narratives
and the feminists, the reasons to engage in marriage largely remain
the same. True, there have been role reversals and new stereotypes
have cropped up. But the biological, physiological and biochemical
facts were less amenable to modern criticisms of culture. Men are
still men and women are still women in more than one respect.
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Four metaphors come to mind when we consider the Internet
"philosophically":
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The State of the Net
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However far modern science and technology have fallen short of
their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one
lesson: Nothing is impossible.
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http://www.enfish.com/
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http://www.everymail.com/
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www.allwatchers.com and www.allreaders.com are web sites in the
sense that a file is downloaded to the user's browser when he or
she surfs to these addresses. But that's where the similarity ends.
These web pages are front-ends, gates to underlying databases. The
databases contain records regarding the plots, themes, characters
and other features of, respectively, movies and books. Every
user-query generates a unique web page whose contents are
determined by the query parameters. The number of singular pages
thus capable of being generated is mind boggling. Search engines
operate on the same principle - vary the search parameters slightly
and totally new pages are generated. It is a dynamic,
user-responsive and chimerical sort of web.
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http://www.ideavirus.com
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A debate is raging in e-publishing circles: should content be
encrypted and protected (the Barnes and Noble or Digital goods
model) - or should it be distributed freely and thus serve as a
form of viral marketing (Seth Godin's "ideavirus")? Publishers fear
that freely distributed and cost-free "cracked" e-books will
cannibalize print books to oblivion.
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THE CURRENT WORRIES
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