My thoughts exactly
January 14, 2008 | 3:34 pm
I’m taking a day off from covering the trial that has consumed my life for the past few weeks to get ready for the spring semester (it snuck up on me — my first class in next Tuesday and, since I’m teaching five this semester, I have quite a bit of syllabus writing to do between now and then).
But I’ve also been doing some interesting reading in between writing course outlines…
Cash of Urban Monarch fame is giving up Netflix.
How do you become one of Netflix’s ‘best customers’? Easy. Don’t watch movies. When I first started using Netflix, I’d probably go through 15 movies a month. Considering I was paying around $19.99 a month, this came out to less than $1.50 per. A great deal, and certainly cheaper than any video store. As time wore on though, my queue got bigger (currently around 180 movies I think) and my propensity to watch the videos I was being sent started to wane. This meant I was sitting on movies for weeks, sometimes (gulp) months at a time.
Netflix didn’t mind. Why? I was still paying the same monthly price, but basically not using the service. Movies were costing me perhaps $5-$9 each at that point. Not cheap. The one benefit here was being put into some category of customer that insured every title I ordered (even new releases, ’short wait’ items, etc) would show up the day after they received a movie I returned. I guess it was their way of saying ‘thank you’ for being an idiot.
I’m down to one film out at a time, and even that makes me think I’m overpaying. I’ve been a member since 2000 and hate to let it go — if I ever decided to sign up again I’d have to rebuild a queue of 500+ films, yet he does make some good points. He gets extra credit for vowing to get a library card and read more.
And a professor says Google is “white bread for the mind:”
Tara Brabazon will urge teachers at all levels of the education system to equip students with the skills they need to interpret and sift through information gleaned from the internet.
She believes that easy access to information has dulled students’ sense of curiosity and is stifling debate. She claims that many undergraduates arrive at university unable to discriminate between anecdotal and unsubstantiated material posted on the internet.
Tags: Interesting/Quirky