Word: talking
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...soon as you begin to talk, I feel trapped and desperately scan the room for tasks I can do to justify the enormous waste of time that is your talking. I wash dishes, I file receipts, I read news sites, I make little fake suicide faces to my wife Cassandra about how much I want to hang up that cause her to yell "Joel, I need you now" in a really unconvincing way that I've asked her not to do, but I still can't stop making the suicide faces. In desperate times, when I am on my cell...
...Skype requires me to look at you while you're talking, which is totally ridiculous. The only sci-fi show that understood this was Star Trek. Bones and Jim would use their flip phones to talk quickly about beaming or health issues. The only time they'd fire up the videophone was when a Klingon was sitting in a spaceship 20 yards away with guns pointed at them. Even then I think Sulu was checking out Go Fug Yourself. (See the top 10 gadgets...
Interested in talking more about my theory, I used my landline to call Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor of the social studies of science and technology. She told me people are not only uninterested in Skype, we're also not interested in talking on the regular phone. We want to TiVo our lives, avoiding real time by texting or e-mailing people when we feel like it. "Skype, which was the fantasy of our childhood, gets you back to sitting there and being available in that old-fashioned way. Our model of what it was to be present to each...
...psychoanalyst's trick it employed: you're lying on a couch facing the wall, imagining nonjudgmental empathy from someone you can't see. In her book Alone Together, which comes out next year, Turkle writes about a study in which she found that people really like to talk to robots. As soon as you ask people to interact with a computer with artificial intelligence, they start unloading secrets. Robots, it seems, are less likely to take over the earth than they are daytime-television hosting jobs. (See the best travel gadgets...
...While Di Segni has indicated he will speak about the Pius case during the service on Sunday, it is unclear whether Benedict will mention it, or details of his own experience as a teenager in Germany during World War II. In contrast to John Paul's willingness to talk about the war years, Benedict has offered scant recollections of his forced conscription into the Hitler Youth group. "I believe every elderly German has something worth telling Jews, and maybe also asking forgiveness," Pacifici says. (Read: "Benedict's Pope: Should Pius XII Become a Saint...