STRAIGHT
TALK:
What
I
Mean
by
a
Knowledge
Commons
Once I Owned a Bookstore
We are taking leave of the printed page. Our Knowledge Commons must make the journey with us from ink to code.
Back then, we literates were secured by a world of print.
But those fond friends and the places, the times they brought to life, are fading.
Bookstores, once workmanlike, now trend to the precious. Shelves of books as coffee shop decor.
A sure sign of a practice in dead languages.
The Site of Loss
STRAIGHT
TALK:
Can
This
Cyber
Be
Entrusted?
Can this cyber carrier be entrusted with the safekeeping of our Knowledge Commons? Beyond The Sell, that is.
Back then, a life given to that printworld felt set in stone. A calling, a context shared.
Everything was thought a building upon & all that’d come before we’d carry with us in those books, our being, referenced.
And yet, such a person of books, from a certain perspective, might think of herself as always coming into being.
All hangs in the balance.
A TIDBIT FROM MY LIBRARY:
"Nevertheless, without writing human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing. Literacy…is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art...
...There is hardly an oral culture left in the world today that is not somehow aware of the vast complex of powers forever inaccessible without literacy. This awareness is agony for persons rooted in primary orality, who want literacy passionately but who also know very well that moving into the exciting world of literacy means leaving behind much that is exciting and deeply loved in the earlier oral world. We have to die to continue living..."
Walter J. Ong
Framing the Loss
STRAIGHT
TALK:
The
Sell
A once world of editors, galley proofs and presses, bookstores and readers; the nature of meaning & how to contribute to that; etcetera.
My father, an enthusiastic scholar, would come into the bookstore & browse.
He always found a book worth purchase. Although he'd lent us the money to open the store in the first place.
These visits were his continued encouragement of us, of what we were, he’d say, “contributing."
It all seems, we suppose, slightly dusty now. Memory's brittling skin.
The Enthusiastic Scholar
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