TheWorldIsNotDoneYet. Part Two.
Cyber Literacy
STRAIGHT
TALK:
Cyber's
Promises
S
How to see past this upheaval in our tools?
How to Understand this different relationship, this ever-looping learning curve?
Meanwhile, the Cyber, with its promised broadmind a screentouch away, unbinds us from the idea that books equal literacy.
so demanding
In fact, can’t you feel the responsibility deepening?
But we are in no way released from learning to read meaning.
What it means to be a literate being?
A TIDBIT FROM MY LIBRARY
“In part because of the way the Internet is structured…the most recent floats to the top always, in a sort of reverse chronology, and I think that’s conditioning us to believe rather falsely that the most recent is the most important and that the older matters less, or just exists less…”
Podcast: On Being
Maria Popava with Krista Tippett.
Instead of Paper
DISCS OF
MEMORY
I can see her now, my mom, a silhouette in the window light of our office at the back of the bookstore, working away at my first personal computer. My partner and I, being forward thinking gals, had gotten an early version Mac. Small, beige machine, a slot for the memory disc.
For everything besides bookkeeping and addresses, we still used manual typewriters. They were cheap and abundant back then. You know, the kind you see now in movies to signify a more "authentic" way of a character's being.
STRAIGHT
TALK:
Earth
Vi ewed
with
a
Far
Sight
Cyber’s in utero code for exponential synthesizing and spread, an offering for sustainable meaning.
At last, this possible of a distanced view of earth and us with a far sight, a wide enough angle.
At last, to perceive the pattern of comings & goings, the to & fro in our species' long try at understanding something entire.
adaptive radiation
And maybe our place in it.
The comfort there.
All that earth is, has been, encoded in each atom of us.
Perhaps this, our head-heavy effort, in the hope consciousness would strengthen our chances. Would improve the odds, those zeros and ones.
I am sympathetic with the try. Lend my shoulder to the task. Why not?
S
ADDENDUM
ONE
(Nascent Multilogue entry)
EXPONENTIAL SYNTHESIZING
I wanted to share with you what my friend Shash, a prepost close reader of this work, wrote in response to what I say here about Cyber’s exponential synthesizing:
I too used to believe that a larger, more statistical view (as offered by the cyber world) can vanquish the prejudice of narrowly-fed false pre-conceptions. I’m no longer so sure. I agree that mass quantities of data can be too vast (see NSA) to ever explore totally, and that that flattens and dilutes their (theoretical) value. What now concerns me more than the problem of sheer mass of big data, is the all-too-human problem that supposedly “objective” data is gathered through algorithms written by “wet-ware” (AKA people), mostly men, mostly white, mostly young, well-educated men, who are rewarded with good pay and stock options, tasked to give others like them, but with more power, even more power yet, the ability to make more $....Thus the algorithms are themselves tainted, biased, limited. Making big databases have the same shortfalls, even before you try to work them for "The Sell."
ADDENDA
A TIDBIT FROM MY LIBRARY:
“Like all new technologies, the Internet appears to represent the world more faithfully than the technologies that proceeded it. And the Internet is an extraordinarily seductive representation of the world. We’ve never seen a work of art like it...
The Internet is a massive and collaborative work of realist art. Moreover, it’s so beguiling a realist showpiece, and so readily confused with reality, that books about it call themselves books about ‘business,’ ‘politics,’ or ‘science’ – the reigning bywords for reality. That’s a mistake...
...Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet’s glorious illusion: that the Internet is life.”
Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art
Virginia Heffernan
The Chore of Data Entry
TO KEEP GIVING LIFE
Mom came to the bookstore like clockwork every Tuesday for an hour or two, having ridden the bus downtown to do for us the chore of data entry for our mail order catalog. Back then, determined to make a living with books, I was all business.
But now I know, data entry was our reason, for my mom and me, to be together. Her way to keep giving life into my life. There, in the office at the back of that store.
Refusal of Tribalism
Site
Map
could be perceived as
misrepresentation