murmur & shout

During the Arab Spring, and even before, the Internet and social services like Twitter and Facebook have been lauded as helping to bring change to the Arab world. This summer, the State Department is going to use the Internet to build more bridges to the region, with a program that will take teenage girls from the Middle East and give them a crash course in Silicon Valley. The program, called TechGirls, will bring approximately 25 Arabic-speaking teenagers with backgrounds in computer programming and robotics to the United States for an intensive month-long tour of high-tech firms.

Awesome.

I’m very fond of my Kindle. For the reasons I’ve outlined above, I think it’s an ingenious little gadget. But in my more hysterically Borgesian moments, I also think that there is something obscene about it, something that defiles and corrupts a reality I don’t want to see defiled and corrupted. It’s a tiny thing, really — smaller, in fact, than my paperback Penguin Classics edition of The Book of Sand. And yet the number of pages it contains is, if not quite “literally infinite,” at least potentially infinite. No page is its first page; no page is its last. If I place it on one of my shelves, if I slip it between, say, two creased and dog-eared volumes of Borges’ stories, it sits there unobtrusively, slimmer than any of the books around it. And yet it has the uncanny, shape-shifting potential to encompass all of them, to embody them all both individually and as a whole. Unsettlingly, it makes all those other books appear suddenly unnecessary, superfluous, seeming to haunt them with the imminent prospect of their own redundancy.

(via werdsmiffery)