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Light On Light Through

You'll hear a little of this and lot of that on Light On Light Through - my reviews of great television series and movies, my interviews with authors and creative media people and their interviews of me, my media theory and political commentary, thoughts about my favorite cars and food and space travel, discussions of my music, and a few of my readings from my science fiction stories. In the first years, starting in 2006, I put up a new episode at least once a month.  More recently, it became more or less often than once a month, usually less often.  But in the Summer of 2020, I began getting more in the mood to podcast, and on 17 October 2023, I began publishing a new episode of the podcast every Tuesday at 12:01 pm -- a minute after Noon (New York time).  - Paul Levinson 

24 October 2021: Interview about Light On Light Through podcast

26 December 2023: Chuck Todd interviews Paul Levinson about Alternate Realities on The Chuck Toddcast  

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  2. Twitter, Pownce, and iPhone: The Good Thing They Do

Twitter, Pownce, and iPhone: The Good Thing They Do

Jul 31, 2007

Sounds like maybe a sequel to Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Lynne Truss's delightful, best-selling book about proper punctuation - check it out, there's a picture of a panda on the cover...), but I was thinking about how just about every new and hot application on the Web these days (Twitter and Pownce), not to mention breakthrough hardware (iPhone) are enabling us to act on our impulse to communicate.

Twitter and Pownce let us tell our friends exactly what we are doing, or what we will be doing, or have just done - and we can similarly follow what our friends (or followers, fans) are up to.  Anyone can get on Twitter.  You have to be invited to get on Pownce (I somehow made it on) - it's a very sleek, cool, useful system, created by some of the people who made Digg.

The iPhone, of course, lets you talk, write, and access anything on the Internet any time, anywhere you please.   I predicted as much in my doctoral dissertation back in 1979, but I still find this breathtaking.

Not everyone's a fan of this increasing immediacy.  Some people agree with Lewis Mumford, who back in 1934 (in Technics and Civilization - no panda on cover) complained that radio news, unlike newspapers, did not give us time to think and reflect.  He was not to happy with telephones back then, either.

Well, fortunately, things did not go the way Mumford would have liked.  We have many more outlets for immediate communication now than in 1934.

And I count that as a good thing.  In fact, I'd go so far as to say that one of the signal characteristics and accomplishments of our humanity is to communicate whenever we please, to anyone, anywhere - as I'm doing right now at almost 3 in the morning with this blog, which I hope you enjoy...