On the sunset side of the mountain, for a change...
"We never see the world exactly as it is because we are how the world is. I think it was William James who said, 'My experience is what I agree to attend to, and only those things which I notice shape my mind'" ~ Maria Popova
While washing the dishes last night I listened to this eight minute clip from an interview with Maria Popova (of BrainPickings) by Krista Tippet from OnBeing titled "Mapping Meaning in a Digital Age", and thought many of you might appreciate some of her thoughts: http://www.onbeing.org/blog/krista-tippett-mapping-meaning-in-a-digital-age/8650 (The full interview and transcript is at http://www.onbeing.org/program/transcript/7584)
KT: You often say that one of the things you’re looking for in content for Brain Pickings is something that contains “both timeliness and timelessness.”
MP: So much of culture deals with what is urgent right now and not what is important in the grand scheme of things. And there is this sort of time bias or presentism bias that happens.
KT: Presentism. I like that.
MP: Which is in part because of the way that the Internet is structured. So when you think of anything from a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed to a news website, the most recent floats to the top, always. And it’s always in 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, to a point where we really have come to believe that things that are not on Google or on the news never happened, never existed, or don’t matter. The internet — its beauty is that it’s a self-perfecting organism, right? But as long as it’s an ad-supported medium, the motive will be to perfect commercial interest, to perfect the art of the listicle, the endless slideshow, the infinitely paginated article, and not to perfect the human spirit of the reader or the writer.
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Well, the thing to keep in mind is that this is such a young medium, you know? We have not even had a full generation live and die with it. And I think, like any territory to which we bring the pioneer spirit, it is bound to have both the good and the evil. And we’re not going to know how it turns out until much, much, much later. But in the meantime, the decisions we make, the microscopic decisions that we make daily, shape it.
