Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind.
I have been thinking about David's manifesto, (David Gelernter: Manifesto) and some of my recent online socializing, and some of my readings. I read this article below online only a few days before I read David's manifesto. The manifesto talks of the lifestream concept. This article does not spell out the word, but I think it talks of the mindstream concept. It can be thought of as futuristic.
The Harvard Crimson :: Opinion :: My Disconnected Life .... Over the past several years, I’ve lost my cell phone more times than I care to admit. My friends consider me—endearingly, I hope—a clumsy, irresponsible fool. They shake their heads when I admit that voicemails have gone unheard .... To make matters worse, I am also notoriously bad with e-mails. Days can go by as I “forget” to check my mail; if my laptop’s charger isn’t nearby, that’s often reason enough to take a stroll instead of peruse my inbox. ...... Irresponsibility has allowed me to disconnect, and I am all the more happy for it. ...... It’s difficult to imagine life at Harvard without the Internet, cell phones, e-mail, instant messengers, and every other connectivity device. The proliferation of Blackberrys, Treos, and most recently, Moto Qs, have made our umbilical cords wireless, feeding off our addiction to mother e-mail. But life before these blessed, though burdensome, conveniences did exist. Without daily doses of Dems-talk, Throp-talk, Newstalk, and innumerable other e-lists, it feels as though we would never be informed of campus’ most important (and, alas, unimportant) debates. Procrastination would become more creative, and we would certainly be ignorant of the uncouthly candor that is brought about by impersonal conversation. ...... Without class e-mail lists, we would actually have to attend lecture to find out when our next assignment was due. Consulting teaching fellows about a troublesome paper would require face-to-face interaction in office hours, rather than the mundane chore of firing off an e-mail. Perhaps even classes would be fairer as compiling 40-page study guides that offer delinquent students the opportunity to sneak by with a B-plus would be much more challenging to coordinate. Keystroke, click, send—the Harvard soundtrack. ....... But what a liberating relief to be unreachable for a while. Friends often joke about the strange sensation that overtakes them when they suddenly drop their cell phone in the river or leave it stranded in a bar bathroom; just like that, they become a ghost for a day before reconnecting at T-Mobile. For those few pre-millennium hours, the world is a little less imposing. For a second, we are relieved of the obligation to be accounted for at every moment, to be responsive to everyone.......... It is during these hours that I realize—all too often, in mycase—that it can be nice to take refuge inmy own solitude. Uninterrupted by the pressure of constant phone-checking or e-mailing, we are forced to breathe and think and rest. As it stands, it seems unnatural to want to be out of the loop for a bit; people seem unnerved if I explain that I went “missing” for a while because my phone was dead. From what precisely I was missing is unclear; I was enjoying myself by myself. ......... we under-appreciate the virtue of taking time for ourselves. We no longer get away without a look of concern if we aren’t sitting in Lamont with our laptops, refreshing our inboxes, texting our friends, answering our phones, or seeming to care that—for a minute—we were walking around thinking alone. ......... It has become so expected to be in touch and online that sometimes it seems the only reasonable explanation for a prolonged disconnect is a little bit of irresponsibility. ........ I just want to be alone for a while.
The human mind can be considered the last frontier of human knowledge. We know less about the human brain than about any other piece of real estate in the universe. And the internet might be our best "telescope" yet into that human mind. If the mind expresses itself enough, maybe we will start seeing patterns, perhaps we will understand better.
But the mind might not achieve its best performance if permanently at the beck and call of the primitive gadgets at our disposal, a cellphone's ring, or the inbox' deluge. Mindnumbing keyboarding at some point is glorified slave labor. It is perhaps a shallow friendship that gets measured by if you replied to my last email or not.
Thinking is more important than reading. Technology does not change that. The mind, so, is more important than the web. The webstream, the interweb lifestream necessarily has to be respectful of the mindstream. Some mindstreams respond best to solitude, some to music, some to silence, some to intense socializing, some to the web, some to reading, writing. To each his or her own.
We tend not to believe in the next big war or economic swing; we certainly don't believe in the next big software revolution. ..... computing transcends computers. Information travels through a sea of anonymous, interchangeable computers like a breeze through tall grass. A dekstop computer is a scooped-out hole in the beach where information from the Cybersphere wells up like seawater. ...... The real topic in astronomy is the cosmos, not telescopes. The real topic in computing is the Cybersphere and the cyberstructures in it, not the computers we use as telescopes and tuners. ...... Browsers fasten users to remote computers, to "servers" on the internet...... Today's operating systems and browsers are obsolete because people no longer want to be connected to computers — near ones OR remote ones. (They probably never did). They want to be connected to information. In the future, people are connected to cyberbodies; cyberbodies drift in the computational cosmos — also known as the Swarm, the Cybersphere. ........ The future is dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush growths like Spanish moss. They will swarm like locusts. ....... the Net will change radically before it dies .... The Web makes the desktop impotent. .... Desktop power will inevitably drag information out of remote servers onto desktops. ..... The computer mouse ... Like any device that must be moved and placed precisely, it ought to provide tactile feedback; it doesn't. .... The computer screen is the window of your vehicle, the face-shield of your diving-helmet. ...... Under the desktop metaphor, the screen IS the interface — the interface is a square foot or two of glowing colors on a glass panel. In the landscape metaphor, the screen is just a viewing pane. When you look through it, you see the actual interface lying beyond. ...... Computers are fundamentally unlike file cabinets because they can take action. ....... If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don't bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous. ........ You shouldn't have to put files in directories. The directories should reach out and take them. If a file belongs in six directories, all six should reach out and grab it automatically, simultaneously. ....... A file should be allowed to have no name, one name or many names. Many files should be allowed to share one name. A file should be allowed to be in no directory, one directory, or many directories. Many files should be allowed to share one directory. Of these eight possibilities, only three are legal and the other five are banned — for no good reason. ....... In the beginning, computers dealt mainly in numbers and words. Today they deal mainly with pictures. In a new period now emerging, they will deal mainly with tangible time — time made visible and concrete. ....... Elements stored in a mind do not have names and are not organized into folders; are retrieved not by name or folder but by contents. .... A "lifestream" organizes information not as a file cabinet does but roughly as a mind does. ....... to stop building glorified file cabinets and start building (simplified, abstract) artificial minds ...... Many websites will be organized as lifestreams. ..... The lifestream (or some other system with the same properties) will become the most important information-organizing structure in computing ...... Today's operating systems connect users to computers. In the future we will deal directly with information, in the form of cyberbodies. ...... Your computer's operating system will make as much difference to you as the voltage level of a bit in memory. ..... A lifestream is a landscape you can navigate or fly over at any level. Flying towards the start of the stream is "time travel" into the past. ..... You can walk alongside a lifestream (browsing or searching) or you can jump in and be immersed in information. ...... A well-designed store or public building allows you to size up the whole space from outside, or as soon as you walk in — you see immediately how things are laid out and roughly how large and deep the space is. Today's typical web site is a failure because it is opaque. ....... Movies, TV shows, virtual museums and all sorts of other cultural products from symphonies to baseball games will be stored in lifestreams. ...... Your car, your school, your company and yourself are all one-track vehicles moving forward through time, and they will each leave a stream-shaped cyberbody (like an aircraft's contrail) behind them as they go. These vapor-trails of crystallized experience will represent our first concrete answer to a hard question: what is a company, a university, any sort of ongoing organization or institution, if its staff and customers and owners can all change, its buildings be bulldozed, its site relocated — what's left? What is it? The answer: a lifestream in cyberspace. ........ A software or service company equals the employees plus the company lifestream. .... The company's lifestream is an electronic approximation of the company's memories, its communal mind. .... Software can solve hard problems in two ways: by algorithm or by making connections — by delivering the problem to exactly the right human problem-solver. The second technique is just as powerful as the first, but so far we have ignored it. ...... Lifestreams and microcosms are the two most important cyberbody types; they relate to each other as a single musical line relates to a single chord. The stream is a "moment in space," the microcosm a moment in time. ..... We'll know the system is working when a butterfly wanders into the in-box and (a few wingbeats later) flutters out — and in that brief interval the system has transcribed the creature's appearance and analyzed its way of moving, and the real butterfly leaves a shadow-butterfly behind. Some time soon afterward you'll be examining some tedious electronic document and a cyber-butterfly will appear at the bottom left corner of your screen (maybe a Hamearis lucina) and pause there, briefly hiding the text (and showing its neatly-folded rusty-chocolate wings like Victorian paisley, with orange eyespots) — and moments later will have crossed the screen and be gone. ....... If you have plenty of money, the best consequence (so they say) is that you no longer need to think about money. In the future we will have plenty of technology — and the best consequence will be that we will no longer have to think about technology. ..... We will return with gratitude and relief to the topics that actually count.
"We feel so smart when we are talking to ourselves!" - Hillary Clinton at the Kos Convention 2007
Is blogging a solitary act? Can it be a solitary act? Does it have to be a solitary act? As in, is it monk-ey business? Monks go solo. Well, not entirely true. Sangham Sharanam Gachhami is, to the community I go. But I am talking about the stereotypically stereotypical monk.
It can look like it. A guy/gal sitting in front of a computer in pajamas typing it away. It can look like it at first sight.
But think about it. The best bloggers are those who have something to say. And you can not have something to say if all you do is sit in front of a computer screen and type it away.
You must already know from before you started typing it away, through training, a prior job, career, life experiences, education. You must be willing to learn. You must be alive. You must be living. The online consumption of content, or electronic but not really online in the case of Kindle, is the bedrock of ongoing education for many of us. That counts. Consuming content counts.
Learning and teaching happens. They help.
But my question was more to the social aspects. Is blogging a solitary activity? Is it meant to be solitary? Does it end up solitary despite all our intentions to the contrary? Don't confuse me with the facts! Don't disturb me with people!
Photoblogging is social. Videoblogging better be social. I tried to do the camera thing myself a few years back, and I look dead in the water in those video clips, not my proudest moments. My best video clip of me to date is one where someone else is doing the camera work.
Text blogging itself is meant to be social. And for someone with an active blog, that blog gives you a better feel for that person than anything else they might have online, more so than their Twitter and Facebook accounts, more so than their website.
And many friendships get forged in the comments sections of blogs.
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