Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise has 18 ratings and 5 reviews. David said: There are mostly bland Not illustrated. edition. Excerpt: none can hold.
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- Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise by Lucy Clifford
- Anyhow stories, moral and otherwise
Malcolm Gladwell is the unquestioned master in this regard. Some nonfiction books give the impression of being the dutiful fulfilment of contracts agreed on the basis of skilfully managed proposals. The finished books are like heavily expanded versions of those proposals — which then get boiled back down again with the sale of serial rights.
The only way to experience the book is to read it. Which is exactly what one would say of any worthwhile piece of fiction. The novel is not dead or dying. But at any given time, particular cultural forms come into their own. No sane person would claim that, in the s, advances were made in the composition of string quartets to rival those being made in electronic music. Sometimes, advances are made at the expense of already established forms; other times, the established forms are themselves challenged and reinvigorated by the resulting blowback.
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The difference between fiction and nonfiction is quite reasonably assumed to depend on whether stuff is invented or factually reliable. Now, in some kinds of writing — history, reportage and some species of memoir or true adventure — there is zero room for manoeuvre. Everything must be rigorously fact-checked. The appeal of a book such as Touching the Void is dependent absolutely on Joe Simpson being roped to the rock face of what happened.
In military history, as Beevor commands, no liberties may be taken. As the author of many nonfiction books which are full of invention, I second this wholeheartedly. In my defence I would argue that the contrivances in my nonfiction are so factually trivial that their inclusion takes no skin off even the most inquisitorial nose. The Missing of the Somme begins with mention of a visit to the Natural History Museum with my grandfather — who never set foot in a museum in his life. Most of the story — which had originally appeared in an anthology of fiction — is a faithful transcript of stuff that really happened, but that incident was pinched from an anecdote someone told me about a portable toilet at Glastonbury.
In other words, the issue is one not of accuracy but aesthetics. Exporting this across to literature, style itself can become a form of invention. Travel within the subsection of the Balkans or Yugoslavia? Having won a Pulitzer prize for nonfiction in , it went on to become the source of some controversy when it was revealed that the famous opening paragraph — in which the author awakens in bed to find herself covered in paw prints of blood, after her cat, a fighting tom, has returned from his nocturnal adventures — was a fiction.
This was a shower in a teacup compared with the various storms that have swirled around Ryszard Kapuscinski. Gradually it emerged that this was part of the rhetoric of fiction, that he could not possibly have seen first-hand some of the things he claimed to have witnessed.
For some readers this was a thoroughly disillusioning experience; for others it seemed that his exuberance and imaginative abundance were not always compatible with the obligations and diligence of the reporter. He remains a great writer — just not the kind of great writer he was supposed to be. The essential thing — and this was something I discovered when writing But Beautiful as a series of improvisations — is to arrive at a form singularly appropriate to a particular subject, and to that subject alone. That book was dedicated to John Berger. The documentary studies — of a country doctor in A Fortunate Man , of migrant labour in A Seventh Man — he made with photographer Jean Mohr are unsurpassed in their marriage of image and text.
The shift from the overt modernist complexities of the Booker prize-winning G to the stories of French peasant life was perceived, in some quarters, as a retreat to more traditional forms. Nothing — to use a phrase that may not be appropriate in this context — could be further from the truth.
Berger was 89 on 5 November, bonfire night. He has been setting borders ablaze for almost 60 years, urging us towards the frontier of the possible.
Geoff Dyer received the Windham-Campbell prize for nonfiction. His new book, White Sands , will be published by Canongate in June. Each time a writer begins a book they make a contract with the reader. If the book is a work of fiction the contract is pretty vague, essentially saying: In the contract for my novels I promise to try to show my readers a way of seeing the world in a way I hope they have not seen before.
A contract for a work of nonfiction is a more precise affair. The writer says, I am telling you, and to the best of my ability, what I believe to be true. This is a contract that should not be broken lightly and why I have disagreed with writers of memoir in particular who happily alter facts to suit their narrative purposes. Break the contract and readers no longer know who to trust. I write both fiction and nonfiction — to me they serve different purposes.
On my noticeboard I have pinned the lines: In the 12 years since its publication I have continued to explore the themes of civil war, though almost exclusively in fiction. Fiction allows me to reach for a deeper, less literal kind of truth. However, when a writer comes to a story, whether fiction or nonfiction, they employ many of the same techniques, of narrative, plot, pace, mood and dialogue. This is one reason I think the distinction between fiction and nonfiction prizes is, well, a fiction.
These writers have broken the boundaries of nonfiction to reach for the kind of truth that fiction writers covet. It made no sense. We are entering a post-literate world, where the moving image is king. And more novels than ever before are set in the past. This is largely because the essence of human drama is moral dilemma, an element that our nonjudgmental society today rather lacks. A blend of historical fact and fiction has been used in various forms since narrative began with sagas and epic poems. There is a more market-driven attempt to satisfy the modern desire in a fast-moving world to learn and be entertained at the same time.
In any case, we seem to be experiencing a need for authenticity, even in works of fiction. I have always loved novels set in the past. But however impressive her research and writing, I am left feeling deeply uneasy. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Mar 22, David Macpherson rated it really liked it.
There are mostly bland victorian moal tales here. None of them are bad. They just are the stories. But, there are a few stories in the book that are so stunning, so amazing, so dark and twisted, that I can't help but love this book. There is the Good Mother. Man, that is one amazingly scarey piece. My volume also included Wooden Tony which is also creepy good. I am happy to have stumbled onto this book. Anyhow Stories is an obscure Victorian collection of tales for children now best remembered for "The New Mother", the Freudian fairy tale which inspired Neil Gaiman's novel Coraline.
It's a true instant folk-tale, full of the kind of troubling details that sticks in the imagination li Anyhow Stories is an obscure Victorian collection of tales for children now best remembered for "The New Mother", the Freudian fairy tale which inspired Neil Gaiman's novel Coraline. It's a true instant folk-tale, full of the kind of troubling details that sticks in the imagination like a stone in a shoe.
Unfortunately, none the other pieces in this collection are up to the standard of "The New Mother". There's "Wooden Tony", in which a 'dreamy' boy meets a sinister puppet master, and "The Paper Ship", a surreal poem whose narrator travels to a country of glass-eyed dolls who long to be real. Interestingly, both these pieces appear to have been an influence on Coraline The remainder of the stories and poems are sentimental and easily forgotten. Stories of impoverished but kindhearted families and saintly dead children are told in queasily purple prose: There are always flowers among the grass above him, we think sometimes that perhaps they are his little dreams coming through.
And veined through with sermons on the value of hard work. Interestingly, Clifford's stories are full of characters who feel ill-at-ease in the world, outcast and alienated from everyday human life. In "From Outside the World" a young woman vainly struggles to understand the human condition. But almost none of these stories perform the alchemy necessary to transform human suffering to the stuff of fairy tale, which is why the Anyhow Stories have been almost entirely forgotten. The story "The New Mother" was the inspiration for Neil Gaiman's Coraline and the reason I picked this up, so anybody interested in what made Neil decide to write such an amazing book It is by far creepier and Uncannier than Coraline, leaving most things unresolved.
It embodies many genres, yet can't be labeled, adding to its uncanniness. But it is so creepy that children will probably be traumatiz The story "The New Mother" was the inspiration for Neil Gaiman's Coraline and the reason I picked this up, so anybody interested in what made Neil decide to write such an amazing book But it is so creepy that children will probably be traumatized forever after reading it and near the end the tone of the story changes. The other stories are pretty fun too. Dec 19, Mark rated it really liked it. These two stories, ostensibly written for children, are less strange than genuinely bizarre and chilling.
I've never read anything quite like them Clifford was very close friends with Henry James.
Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise by Lucy Clifford
I believe their correspondence has been published as part of a dissertation. Kenneth Roman rated it liked it May 02, Finally we will look at not only how information technology impacts our moral intuitions but also how it might be changing the very nature of moral reasoning.
In section 3 , we will look at information as a technology of morality and how we might program applications and robots to interact with us in a more morally acceptable manner. We live in a world rich in data and the technology to record and store vast amounts of this data has grown rapidly. As was mentioned above, each of us produces a vast amount of information every day that could be recorded and stored as useful data to be accessed later when needed. But moral conundrums arise when that collection, storage and use of our information is done by third parties without our knowledge or done with only our tacit consent.
The control of information is power. The social institutions that have traditionally exercised this power are things like, religious organizations, universities, libraries, healthcare officials, government agencies, banks and corporations. These entities have access to stored information that gives them a certain amount of power over their customers and constituencies.
Anyhow stories, moral and otherwise
Today each citizen has access to more and more of that stored information without the necessity of utilizing the traditional mediators of that information and therefore a greater individual share of social power see Lessig One of the great values of modern information technology is that it makes the recording of information easy, and in some cases, it is done automatically. Today, a growing number of people enter biometric data such as blood pressure, calorie intake, exercise patterns, etc. This type of data collection could become more automated in the near future.
There are already applications that use the GPS tracking available in many phones to track the length and duration of a user's walk or run. How long until a smartphone collects a running data stream of your blood pressure throughout the day perhaps tagged with geo-location markers of particularly high or low readings? In one sense this could be immensely powerful data that could lead to much healthier lifestyle choices.
But it could also be a serious breach in privacy if the information got into the wrong hands which would be easily accomplished since third parties have access to information collected on smartphones and online applications. In the next section 1. But here we must address a more subtle privacy breach, the collection and recording of data about a user without his or her knowledge or consent.
When searching on the Internet, browser software records all manner of data about our visits to various websites which can, for example, make webpages load faster next time you visit them. Even the websites themselves use various means to record information when your computer has accessed them and they may leave bits of information on your computer which the site can use the next time you visit. Some websites are able to detect which other sites you have visited or which pages on the website you spend the most time on.
If someone were following you around a library noting down this kind of information you might find it uncomfortable or hostile, but online this kind of behavior takes place behind the scenes and is barely noticed by the casual user. According to some professionals, information technology has all but eliminated the private sphere. Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems famously announced in Helen Nissenbaum observes that,. Clearly, earlier theories of privacy that assumed the inviolability of physical walls no longer apply but as Nissenbaum argues, personal autonomy and intimacy require us to protect privacy nonetheless Nissenbaum This ease of access has the result of also making the relationship one has to one's own data more tenuous because of the uncertainty about the physical location of that data.
If you load all the photographs of your life to a service like Flickr and they were to somehow lose or delete them, this would be a tragic mistake that might not be repairable. Information technology has forced us to rethink a simple notion of privacy into more complex theories that recognize both the benefits and risks of communicating all manner of information. The primary moral values of concern are privacy, ownership, trust and the veracity of the information being communicated.
Who has the final say whether or not some information about a user is communicated or not? Who is allowed to sell your medical records, your financial records, your friend list, your browser history, etc.? If you do not have control over this process, then how can you claim a right to privacy? For instance Alan Westin argued in the very early decades of digital information technology that control of access to one's personal information was the key to maintaining privacy Westin It follows that if we care about privacy, then we should give all the control of access to personal information to the individual.
Most corporate entities resist this notion as information about users has become a primary commodity in the digital world boosting the fortunes of corporations like Google or Facebook. There is a great deal of utility each of us gains from the services of internet search companies. It might actually be a fair exchange that they provide search results for free based on collecting data from individual user behavior that helps them rank the results. This service comes with advertising that is directed at the user based on his or her search history.
That is, each user tacitly agrees to give up some privacy whenever they use the service. If we follow the argument raised above that privacy is equivalent to information control then we do seem to be ceding our privacy away little by little. Herman Tavani and James Moor argue that in some cases giving the user more control of their information may actually result in greater loss of privacy. Their primary argument is that no one can actually control all of the information about oneself that is produced each day. If we focus only on the little bit we can control, we lose site of the vast mountains of data we cannot Tavani and Moor Tavani and Moor argue that privacy must be recognized by the third parties that do control your information and only if those parties have a commitment to protecting user privacy will we actually have any real privacy and towards this end they suggest that we think in terms of restricted access to information rather than strict control of personal information Tavani and Moor Information security is also an important moral value that impacts the communication and access of user information.
If we grant the control of our information to third parties in exchange for the services they provide, then these entities must also be responsible for restricting the access to that information by others who might use it to harm us see Epstein ; Magnani ; Tavani With enough information, a person's entire identity might be stolen and used to facilitate fraud and larceny. The victims of these crimes can have their lives ruined as they try to rebuild such things as their credit rating and bank accounts.
This has led to the design of computer systems that are more difficult to access and the growth of a new industry dedicated to securing computer systems. The difficulty in obtaining complete digital security rests in the fact that security is antithetical to the moral values of sharing and openness that guided many of the early builders of information technology. So it seems that information technology has a strong dissonance created in the competing values of security and openness based on the competing values of the people designing the technologies themselves.
This conflict in values has been debated by philosophers. While many of the hackers interviewed by Levy argue that hacking is not as dangerous as it seems and that it is mostly about gaining knowledge of how systems work, Eugene Spafford counters that no computer break-in is entirely harmless and that the harm precludes the possibility of ethical hacking except in the most extreme cases Spafford Mark Manion and Abby Goodrum agree that hacktivism could be a special case of ethical hacking but warn that it should proceed in accordance to the moral norms set by the acts of civil disobedience that marked the twentieth century or risk being classified as online terrorism Manion and Goodrum What information technology adds to these long standing moral debates is the nearly effortless access to information that others might want to control such as intellectual property, dangerous information and pornography Floridi , along with the anonymity of both the user and those providing access to the information Nissenbaum ; Sullins For example, even though cases of bullying and stalking occur regularly, the anonymous and remote actions of cyber-bullying and cyberstalking make these behaviors much easier and the perpetrator less likely to be caught.
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Arguably, this makes these unethical behaviors on cyberspace more likely that the design of cyberspace itself tacitly promotes unethical behavior Adams ; Grodzinsky and Tavani Since the very design capabilities of information technology influence the lives of their users, the moral commitments of the designers of these technologies may dictate the course society will take and our commitments to certain moral values Brey ; Bynum ; Ess ; Johnson ; Magnani ; Moor ; Spinello ; Sullins Assuming we are justified in granting access to some store of information that we may be in control of, there is a duty to ensure that that information is useful and accurate.
If you use a number of different search engines to try to find some bit of information, each of these searches will vary from one another. This shows that not all searches are equal and it matters which search provider you use. All searches are filtered to some degree in order to ensure that the information the search provider believes is most important to the user is listed first. A great deal of trust is placed in this filtering process and the actual formulas used by search providers are closely held trade secrets.
The hope is that these decisions are morally justifiable but it is difficult to know. If we are told a link will take us to one location on the web yet when we click it we are taken to some other place, the user may feel that this is a breach of trust. Again the anonymity and ease of use that information technology provides can facilitate deceitful practices. Pettit suggests that this should cause us to reevaluate the role that moral values such as trust and reliance play in a world of information technology.
Lastly in this section we must address the impact that the access to information has on social justice. Information technology was largely developed in the Western industrial societies during the twentieth century. But even today the benefits of this technology have not spread evenly around the world and to all socioeconomic demographics. Certain societies and social classes have little to no access to the information easily available to those in more well off and in developed nations, and some of those who have some access have that access heavily censored by their own governments.
John Weckert also notes that cultural differences in giving and taking offence play a role in the design of more egalitarian information technologies Weckert In addition to storing and communicating information, many information technologies automate the organizing of information as well as synthesizing or mechanically authoring or acting on new information. Norbert Wiener first developed a theory of automated information synthesis which he called Cybernetics Wiener []. Wiener realized that a machine could be designed to gather information about the world, derive logical conclusions about that information which would imply certain actions, which the machine could then implement, all without any direct input form a human agent.
Wiener quickly saw that if his vision of cybernetics was realized, there would be tremendous moral concerns raised by such machines which he outlined in his book the Human Use of Human Beings Wiener Wiener argued that, while this sort of technology could have drastic moral impacts, it was still possible to be proactive and guide the technology in ways that would increase the moral reasoning capabilities of both humans and machines Bynum Machines make decisions that have moral impacts.
One of the authors left on a vacation and when he arrived overseas his credit card stopped working, perplexed, he called the bank and learned that an automatic anti-theft program had decided that there was a high probability that the charges he was trying to make were from someone stealing his card and that in order to protect him the machine had denied his credit card transactions. Here we have a situation where a piece of information technology was making decisions about the probability of nefarious activity happening that resulted in a small amount of harm to the person that it was trying to help.
Increasingly, machines make important life changing financial decisions about people without much oversight from human agents. Whether or not you will be given a credit card, mortgage loan, the price you will have to pay for insurance, etc. For instance if you apply for a credit card the machine will look for certain data points, like your salary, your credit record, the economic condition of the area you're in, etc.
The machine can typically learn as well to make better judgments given the results of earlier decisions it has made. Machine learning and prediction is based on complex logic and mathematics see for example Russell and Norvig , this complexity may result in slightly humorous examples of mistaken prediction as told above, or it might interpret the data of someone's friends and acquaintances, his or her recent purchases, and other social data which might result in the mistaken classification of that person as a potential terrorist, thus altering that person's life in a powerfully negative way Sullins It all depends on the design of the learning and prediction algorithm, something that is typically kept secret.
Several of the issues raised above result from the moral paradox of Information technologies. Many users want information to be quickly accessible and easy to use and desire that it should come at as low a cost as possible, preferably free. But users also want important and sensitive information to be secure, stable and reliable.
Maximizing our value of quick and low cost minimizes our ability to provide secure and high quality information and the reverse is true also. Thus the designers of information technologies are constantly faced with making uncomfortable compromises. The early web pioneer Stewart Brand sums this up well in his famous quote:.
In fall , at the first Hackers' Conference, I said in one discussion session: The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. Since these competing moral values are essentially impossible to reconcile, they are likely to continue to be at the heart of moral debates in the use and design of information technologies for the foreseeable future.
In the section above, the focus was on the moral impacts of information technologies on the individual user. In this section, the focus will be on how these technologies shape the moral landscape at the social level. This change has meant that a growing number of people have begun to spend significant portions of their lives online with other users experiencing an unprecedentedly new kind of lifestyle.
Social networking is an important part of many people's lives now where massive numbers of people congregate on sites like Facebook and interact with friends old and new, real and virtual. The Internet offers the immersive experience of interacting with others in virtual worlds where environments constructed from information. Just now emerging onto the scene are technologies that will allow us to merge the real and the virtual. Each of these technologies comes with their own suite of new moral challenges some of which will be discussed below.
There are a number of moral values that these sites call into question. Shannon Vallor has reflected on how sites like Facebook change or even challenge our notion of friendship. Her analysis is based on the Aristotelian theory of friendship see entry on Aristotle's Ethics. Aristotle argued that humans realize a good and true life though virtuous friendships.
Vallor also has a similar analysis of other Aristotelian virtues such as patience, honesty and empathy as they are fostered in online media Vallor There are, of course, privacy issues that abound in the use of social media. James Parrish following Mason recommends four policies that a user of social media should follow to ensure proper ethical concern for other's privacy:.
These systems are not typically designed to protect individual privacy, but since these services are typically free there is a strong economic drive for the service providers to harvest at least some information about their user's activities on the site in order to sell that information to advertisers for directed marketing. The first moral impact one encounters when contemplating online games is the tendency for these games to portray violence. There are many news stories that claim a cause and effect relationship between violence in computer games and real violence.
The claim that violence in video games has a causal connection to actual violence has been strongly critiqued by the social scientist Christopher J. However, Mark Coeckelbergh argues that since this relationship is tenuous at best and that the real issue at hand is the effect these games have on one's moral character Coeckelbergh But Coeckelbergh goes on to claim that computer games can be designed to facilitate virtues like empathetic and cosmopolitan moral development so he is not arguing against all games just those where the violence inhibits moral growth Coeckelbergh Marcus Schulzke holds a different opinion, suggesting that the violence in computer games is morally defensible.
While virtual violence may seem palatable to some, Morgan Luck seeks a moral theory that might be able to allow the acceptance of virtual murder but that will not extend to other immoral acts such as pedophilia. Christopher Bartel is less worried about the distinction Luck attempts to draw; Bartel argues that virtual pedophilia is real child pornography, which is already morally reprehensible and illegal across the globe.
While violence is easy to see in online games, there is a much more substantial moral value at play and that is the politics of virtual worlds. Ludlow and Wallace chronicle how the players in massive online worlds have begun to form groups and guilds that often confound the designers of the game and are at times in conflict with those that make the game. Their contention is that designers rarely realize that they are creating a space where people intended to live large portions of their lives and engage in real economic and social activity and thus the designers have the moral duties somewhat equivalent to those who may write a political constitution Ludlow and Wallace According to Purcell , there is little commitment to democracy or egalitarianism in online games and this needs to change if more and more of us are going to spend time living in these virtual worlds.
A persistent concern about the use of computers and especially computer games is that this could result in anti-social behavior and isolation. Yet studies might not support these hypotheses Gibba, et al. With the advent of massively multiplayer games as well as video games designed for families the social isolation hypothesis is even harder to believe. These games do, however, raise gender equality issues.
James Ivory used online reviews of games to complete a study that shows that male characters outnumber female characters in games and those female images that are in games tend to be overly sexualized Ivory Soukup suggests that gameplay in these virtual worlds is most often based on gameplay that is oriented to masculine styles of play thus potentially alienating women players.
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And those women that do participate in game play at the highest level play roles in gaming culture that are very different from those the largely heterosexual white male gamers, often leveraging their sexuality to gain acceptance Taylor et al. McMahon and Ronnie Cohen have studied how gender plays a role in the making of ethical decisions in the virtual online world, with women more likely to judge a questionable act as unethical then men Marcus Johansson suggests that we may be able to mitigate virtual immorality by punishing virtual crimes with virtual penalties in order to foster more ethical virtual communities Johansson The media has raised moral concerns about the way that childhood has been altered by the use of information technology see for example Jones