Computers are getting smarter all the time ... scientists tell us that soon they will be able to converse with us; computers that is, I doubt scientists will ever be able to converse with us. I spend so much time in front of this machine. Portal to the ether, vast repository of knowledge, albeit provenance unknown. I seldom read newspapers or magazines anymore. I check my mail on my mobile while I drive on the freeway, respond too, on occasion. I have somehow succumbed to the pace, the urgency. That shift where I have ensared myself in a need to be informed fast and to respond faster. There was a time when, if a man missed a coach he settled down at the inn for a few days to catch the next. Today I get irritated when I miss the first gap in a revolving door. Evolution or insanity?
Chat has made email seem pedestrian and formal. I prefer text to voice. My monitor, my shield? A filter, holding communication at arms length? I can no longer compose with a pen and paper, I need to spread my fingers qwerty-wise to engage brain (or bath and be damned by my inability to record).
Life intrudes ...
Shirky's an inspiration. "For the first time, we have the tools to make group action truly a reality. And they are going to change the world". With respect Clay, tense error. They have changed the world, irrevocably ... and it's extrapolar. Gathering pace in a way that makes be think that there's a barrier out there, about to be broken ... a social sonic boom.
Around 1440 Johannes Gutenberg triggered massive social change with the invention of his printing press, heralding the renaissance era and a century of social chaos in Europe. (Stephen Fry on the Gutenberg press here www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zqgs4iS76c) Then keepers of history, the core of catholicism and much else, scribes, gifted literate monks, are consigned to a role of decorative calligraphers. Fifty years later, a well meaning Abbott demonstrates the effectiveness of the shift in publishing his impassioned defence of that profession ... in movable type. And so, through the growth of literacy, enlightenment, the next quantum leap, and the next and the next. Personal computers, irc, the internet, email, mobile phones, social networking, blogging. It feels to me like we are moving from evolution, through revolution to ... to what? Change is becoming like watching cornstalks in a field from a passing train. It's breatholding to contemplate.
And where, pray tell, am I going with this? Hmmm ... you may well ask. Random orange thoughts these are Yoda. No more.
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