Re the info overload part of John's post, about four decades ago serious
thought was given to the trend toward the immense amount of leasure time
people would soon have on their hands. That thinking came about through
labor contracts being negotiated and won that specified ever shorter
work weeks and greater social benefits, especially by Reuter for the
auto workers.
It was envisaged that eventually working would become a privilege. There
were also murmurings about the balance between the huge amount of
education/training needed for top professional insights/skills and the
limited number of hours a professional would be "allowed" to devote to
his profession.
And much later, with computers and robots, again came visions of la vita
dolce. But somehow all of this did not come to pass. Looking at my very
personal corner of the world of work, here I am picking my way through
heaps of expensive-yet-tiresome verbal trash about mark-up languages to
find in it those few nourishing items of coherent, useful info that may
get me off to do a better job for the Bootstrap Institute. And while
using my Netscape browser online, I am continually harassed by little
advertising windows that suddenly come up on my monitor. Then I imagine
corporations paying for people's surgery by projecting on their bare
bellies advertising about sportscars and golf courses and tampax
directed at those performing the operations.
And within this chaos of thoughts, I realize that every two items of
knowledge that stimulate us to try and create a connection between them
place us "at the beginning of an interminable waterway with in the
offing the sea and the sky welded together without a joint" (Joseph
Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"). From two thoughts and their connection
come three bits of knowledge that offer three attempts at connection.
From the ensuing six thoughts may come 15 thoughts, and so on. Granted
that many attempts bear fruit neither benign nor malign, the explosion
of mental work open to further pursuit is still exponential, without a
joint separating good from bad, nor purpose from happenstance.
And from all of this it seems to me that the real, but unstated
objective of Bush's "How we may think" and of Doug's augmenting the
collective IQ is for the benign fruits to outpace and subdue the malign
fruits born from our knowledge explosion. And then I realize that we
need to better cultivate a way for people to pursue the potentially
benign mental connections and discourage the potentially malign mental
connections.
In other words, our affect ought to do a better job of directing our
intellect.
Henry
"John J. Deneen" wrote:
> "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush - J U L Y 1 9 4 5
> <http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm>
>
> James Burke, writer and host of BBC’s “Connections 3” series also says
> this:
> “The Internet may bring destabilizing effects of information overload
> that will operate on a scale and at a rate well beyond anything that
> has happened before. Information abundance will stress society in ways
> for which it has not been prepared and damage centralized social
> systems designed to function in a nineteenth-century world.” - The
> Knowledge Web, p 22.
> etc., etc.
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