[R]ather than being a definition retrieval system or associative datastore, their interactive function is to create a gameworld for the reader. This is part of the wonder of these books – they took a pre-existing set of interface conventions designed for utilitarian search tasks and mapped a new activity onto it. They were effectively a new kind of software application for the oldest information-display platform we have.
Christian Swinehart – One Book, Many Readings
Zombieism is not so much a state of being as a set of practices and cultural scripts. It is not that one is a zombie but that one does being a zombie such that zombieism is created and enacted through interaction. Even if one is “objectively” a mindless animated corpse, one cannot really be said to be fulfilling one’s cultural role as a zombie unless one shuffles across the landscape in search of brains.
Gabriel Rossman – Towards a sociology of living death
The past’s power comes from experience, the lessons it dares us to dismiss on the grounds that maybe things will be different this time. The future’s power is born of experiment, and the endless grudge match between fear and hope.
Time Magazine – What College Students Don’t Know
[W]ie immer bei Politik ist die Bürokratie das Instrument, mit dem das Desiderat zur Ausführung – und zum Entgleisen gebracht werden kann.
Niklas Luhmann – Das Deutsch der Geschlechter
Mit dem Fußball ist deshalb die Frage verbunden, ob nicht er es sei, der die in Lebensstile und Szenen auseinanderstrebende spätmoderne Gesellschaft zusammenhalte?
Jochen Bonz – Fußball – soziales Band der spätmodernen Gesellschaft? Beobachtungen an zwei Habitus der Fußballbegeisterung.
Dogs, it seems, are Aristotelians, but with their own doggy teleology. Their goals are not only radically different from ours; they are often invisible to us. To get a better view, Horowitz proposes that we humans get down intellectually on all fours and start sniffing.
Cathleen Schine – Inside of a Dog – What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
Lucha libre is thus constructed around the public secret of the fixed ending. Yet the secret of the fixed ending is only one of a number of back secrets, of stories told and stories hidden, of secrets revealed to conceal still others. The secrecy of the fix stands for a series of dissimulations, for the mystery that animates the genre.
Heather Levi – The World of Lucha Libre – Trade secrets and revelations