Reflections on artificial intelligence, technology, the internet, social media, and digital culture. These essays explore how technological change is reshaping education, creativity, communication, and everyday life. Also writing about hosting a personal webpage for over thirty years. www.rjgeib.com
My webpage is 29 years old and counting. October 1996 was when it first went live. I accept no advertising on my website, and I spend zero time and energy trying to promote it. It is a labor of love, not profit – nothing more, nothing less. I write on it for myself, and I … Read more
Yesterday I was at home after work and found myself on the verge of finishing Charlie Sheen’s recent autobiography. I don’t regret reading his book, although towards the end I was heartily sick and tired of his tales of damaging drug abuse, salacious porn/sex, and multiple failed marriages. (I imagine Sheen was tired of it, … Read more
Struggle is the way. Difficulty is not a problem but the point. One struggles and one grows. It is an active process, not a passive one. One needs to wrestle with a thorny problem. School should be where one learns to do this. Cheating has always been a problem in school. The Pandemic and remote … Read more
It was quite a show on Sunday February 9, 2025, or so I heard: Kendrick Lamar performed in the cultural center stage of the Super Bowl halftime show at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana, decrying his supposed bitter rival Drake; I know this because I read about it in the news. I did … Read more
It is a strange thing. My blog statistics have shown a strange development lately: most of my blog “hits” are originating from the People’s Republic of China. Why is that? I have no idea. I really don’t. I never really know what is going on with respect to how visitors arrive to my webpage. True, … Read more
“Daddy, she is a social media influencer! Wow! She has millions of followers!” In 4th grade my daughter told me this, making a person with millions of followers on social media out to look like the second coming of Jesus. A social media influencer! Wow. I was not impressed. My daughter made this Internet “celebrity” … Read more
It is both a weakness and a strength that I am not always the most attuned to the opinions that others have of me. In college, in retrospect, there were times young women were coming on to me and I was just too dumb to recognize it. They would almost have to throw themselves at … Read more
Is this blog of mine a diary of sorts? An online space where I can process what happens to me? A place to work out the psychic and emotional issues of my day? A sort of therapeutic tool? CBT in progress via prose? Sure. Is it a place where I can strive to make sense … Read more
So I received the announcement today that my blog received its 100,000th visitor. That is visitors to my blog, not my website. The number of visitors to all the pages of my site in the past 26 years would be a much larger number. But still. It gives me pause. On the one hand, if … Read more
My younger daughter came up to me yesterday morning as I was eating breakfast and told me breathlessly, “Daddy! The schools in Florida are going into lockdown again. There is bird flu spreading rapidly there!” Having had her school locked-down and her fourth and fifth-grade school years essentially canceled back in 2020, my daughter was … Read more
AI and Human Evolution I read Thomas Friedman’s Op-ed piece today about Artificial Intelligence this morning with interest in the New York Times today. His essay makes ambitious claims about how Artificial Intelligence will affect almost all aspects of how we live and work. Here is one typical quote from that article: “You need to … Read more
Ah, the written word. How I love it. How I crave it. My brain drinks the words in. I remember having flunky post-college jobs where I would be doing some mindless-rote tasks, and I would be bored and seek out intellectual nourishment. I would work as a bartender at the Olive Garden restaurant, for example, … Read more
Posts on my webpage go up and down in popularity with Google, for God only knows what reason; I can see all the statistics in the Word Press app or Google Webmaster Console. I don’t care enough about getting attention for my posts to do a deep dive into Search Engine Optimization in the Google … Read more
At the moment I am watching everyone talk about how the social media network Twitter, bought recently by billionaire Elon Musk for 44 billion dollars, is supposedly going under. Long unprofitable, Twitter with its new owner is firing employees and urging those who remain to work harder – and many Twitter employees are quitting, too. … Read more
I just finished the book Behind Their Screens: What Teens are Facing (and Adults Are Missing) by Emily Weinstein and Carrie James. I read with interest at the end of chapter 6 where four teenagers, self-described as “liberal,” came together for a discussion about whether or not they should discuss politics with those who disagreed … Read more
I received the following communication from YouTube last Saturday night at 11:36 pm: I read this statement with unease. Here is the megacompany YouTube – worth approximately 86 billion dollars and with some two billion users, and owned by an even larger Google company – and they are worried about my “mental health” – someone … Read more
The U-Shaped Happiness Curve, touted by researchers, claims that the data is clear, across cultures and even species. The numbers show that on average life satisfaction drops during midlife and begins its recovery around age 50, reaching its peak at the end of life. Younger people tend to be happy and the eldery tend to … Read more
False Prophets of Hope and Ineffectual Shortcuts to Happiness “Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.” Milan Kundera So I made the mistake last night of reading the 180 page manifesto written by the 18-year old man-child who murdered … Read more
Yesterday I read an excellent article by George Packer where he says, among other things, the following: “We’ll need to help kids restore at least part of their crushed attention spans. If remote learning taught parents anything, it was that staring at a screen for hours is a heavy depressant, especially for teenagers. One day, … Read more
I wrote my last posting about the “metaverse,” which (in one form or another) experts assure us is the “3.0” future of the Internet. I was reading further more about it last night and I read the following: “The metaverse will take Big Data, biometrics, digital currencies (Bitcoin and its 10,000 brethren), blockchain technology, NFTs, … Read more
Dear Julia and Elizabeth, I am finally old. I think it is official. It has been coming on for a number of years, and maybe the preliminary step was my decision to get rid of social media and sever most of my online contacts. By 2019 I decided I would be a friend with you … Read more
I figured I would take a step back and write a birthday message about my personal webpage on the 25th anniversary of its inception. I intend to explain why it came into being and how it evolved over time, and to show some of the back-side technology details and performance statistics. I started my website … Read more
A day in the life — Sunday September 17, 2021. A snapshot into my daily existence. An exposition on the choices we all make on how we choose to live. I woke up yesterday and went to the grocery store with my wife, who needed milk to make pancakes for our daughters for Sunday morning … Read more
Some Meditations on Reading a Long Book During Quarantine in 2021: Patience and Perseverance, Purpose and Fulfilment They say that a book should be only as long as it takes to tell the story. It should be neither longer nor shorter than that. But that is plenty vague, and leaves lots of room for different … Read more
I have spoken at length about my antipathy towards social media — or what I would prefer to call it, anti-social media. Jack Dorsey and Twitter — with persons like Donald Trump and others — are trying to poison our country with splenetic 280-character bursts of poisonous partisan politics. The loudest, most outrageous attention getting … Read more
Among my friends and family It is a well known story: how I took my TV out to the desert and blew it up with a shotgun. That was back in 1986. It was a small black and white TV, befitting a college student with no money. But it was a highly symbolic action, and … Read more
I read the other day an outstanding article about abortion by the always wonderful Caitlin Flanagan — “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate”by Caitlin Flanagan The essay is nuanced and complicated and full of insight and intelligence. It cuts across party lines and cannot be described as pro- or anti- abortion. I live for these … Read more
Last night I was browsing the news when I came across the following article title and lede: “WHY IS JOE ROGAN SO POPULAR?” He understands men in America better than most people do. The rest of the country should start paying attention. by Devin Gordon. I had never heard of Joe Rogan — or maybe … Read more
“The boundaries of privacy are in dispute and its future is in doubt. Citizens, politicians and business leaders are asking if societies are making the wisest tradeoffs.” New York Times The New York Times last month launched a whole series of pieces on the danger of privacy going the way of the Dodo — with … Read more
Today in class I finished showing the 1980 movie “The Elephant Man” to my students. We are reading “Catcher in the Rye” and focusing on how alienated, troubled persons do or don’t get the help they need by finding those that can help them, and then making allies of them and getting the help they … Read more