we acquire a new skill . . . obliteracy . . . the ability to make the apparent texts transparent to varying degrees. We disregard more assiduously than we attend . . . all information carries with it a catalytic energy, no matter how insignificant . . . The residue of excess information, its reverberations . . . add character to the gleaning of meaning . . . learning is being reinvented . . .
Knowledge is played on the hegemonica.
Looks like you’ve done a little vispo to Mr. James…
ReplyDeleteI feel the joy and space and possibility in your version that I didn’t get in the original.
I like the way he, linked to an earlier James, applies Dewey’s notion of localizing the global, finding there the essential humanity of the web. But methinks understanding the web in strictly human terms defeats its very purpose. As such, he comes off, in his fanciful modern-day flaneur pose arriving to rescue us from waste by reveling in it, as yet another victim of knowledge technology, seeking to still life and compress meaning and otherwise control the “bad.” He’s playing his father’s hegemonica, in other words.
I think the web at its most basic level is about the merging of human and non-human intelligence, and as such teaches us what the avatars and holy books tried but couldn’t: that the universe is one great mind, alive and linked at every point.
Thanks for the link. This is right in line with where my mind happens to be at this moment.
@WAS: great comment, I also hew to the "one great mind" concept . . .
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