fragments

“We are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.”
--Nicholas Carr.

This very much ties in with a book recommended by anton: 'The Necessity of Experience' by E.S. Reed. Books, music, films...at the end of the day they're just parcels of information that are felt on the blank screen of the mind, unpacked, re-arranged or aggregated and re-configured to form a 'picture' of the thing-in-itself. To talk about the experience of reading a book ...well, one might as well talk about 'red' and other mystical, unknowable qualities. What else is experience but something registered by the mind...what else could it be?

Whether this fragmentation is furthered by the internet and other social processes, whether this dispersion of attention is a symptom of a late capitalism that likes to keep everything at the surface and is replicated in our workplaces, schools, and daily lives or whether it, in fact, represents a fantastic opportunity for learning and sharing remains something only time will be able to tell (don't know what you think).

So what if the old state narratives don't bind any more? What information people select and want to share, what stories they turn to and turn out, increasingly depends on their affinities, interests, and tastes (Tony Judt). And isn't the freedom of the net something that unsettles established hierarchies, something that allows us to challenge everything? The resulting lack of solidarity (or, rather, the different type of solidarity) is the price we pay for greater freedom. And besides, wasn't modernity from its very inception about fragmentation, the explosion of the new, the 'anti-classical,' the many-faceted, multi-dimensionality of an open-ended reality?

~~~

England lost. Thank God!! There's nothing worse that seeing the swaggering arrogance of a bunch of over-paid, over-rated spoilt brats. It's not just that they're crap...lots of teams are. It's the ridiculous belief that one can be good simply because one is England. And amongst all that fake bravado what timidity and meekness! I think they need psychological help. Someone commenting in the Guardian hit just the right spot:

The English team visited some orphans in Soweto. "It was tragic to see their sad little faces without any hope," said Umbeki, aged six.

Now, if only Brasil can be thumped all will be good in the world...