SITE
MAP
How to see past this upheaval in our tools?
How to understand this different relationship,so demanding this ever-looping learning curve?
Meanwhile, the Cyber, with its promised broadmind a screentouch away, unbinds us from the misrepresentationidea that books equal literacy.
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“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…”
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.
EXPONENTIAL SYNTHESIZING
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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."
Cyber’s in utero code for expoadaptive radiationnential synthesizing and spread, could be percieved as 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.
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"Most books in the ancient world…took the form of scrolls…but by the fourth century Christians had almost completely opted for a different format, the codex, from which our familiar books derive...
The codex has the huge advantage of being far easier for readers to find their way about in: the text can be conveniently paginated and indexed, and the pages can be turned quickly to the desired place...
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...Not until the invention of the computer with its superior search functions, could a serious challenge be mounted to the codex’s magnificently simple and flexible format. Only now have we begun once again to speak of “scrolling” through a text.”
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.