Turkish Protests Documented through Instagram

Lerner, D 1958, The passing of traditional society: modernizing Middle East, Free Press of Glencoe, New York. Daniel Lerner is one of the key proponents of the modernisation theory, which says that the rest of the world should follow the Western concept of modernity to achieve development. Attached to this modernity is a distinctive personality. To be a modern individual, one must be able to empathise with others. Lerner argues those who cannot see themselves in the shoes of others will not develop. The mass media according to Lerner plays crucial role in the modernisation process. He notes, “As people are more exposed to media, the greater is their capability to imagine themselves as strange persons in strange situations, places and time than did people in any previous historical epoch (p. 52)”. To date, this book remains a key text in the modernisation discourse. The modernisation paradigm, however, has been hugely criticised especially in the postmodern era where there is an emphasis for societies to construct their own realities and roadmaps to development.

When was super depressed, I wasn’t working—I was always too depressed. Hemingway did his best work when he didn’t drink, then he drank himself to death and blew his head off with a shotgun. Someone asked John Cheever, “What’d you learn from Hemingway?” and he said “I learned not to blow my head off with a shotgun.” I remember going to the Michigan poetry festival, meeting Etheridge Knight there and Robert Creeley. Creeley was so drunk—he was reading and he only had one eye, of course, and had to hold his book like two inches from his face using his one good eye. But you look at somebody like George Saunders—I think he’s the best short story writer in English alive—that’s somebody who tries very hard to live a sane, alert life.

You’re present when you’re not drinking a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every day. It’s probably better for your writing career, you know? I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist.