Texts without Contexts

Greetings,

You may find the New York Times article linked below worth reading. 

It refers to the ubiquitous Web, capitalized as if it were a capital of a place. It's an artificial state of mind.

I live in Web city where everyone is connected by instant glowing all to brief emotional attention spans. I am too poor to pay attention. Web's impact on personal and social development, reshaping human lives is good, bad and plain ugly.

For example, I'm sitting in a remote sleepy Cambodian town breathing, writing in my Moleskine and typing new human texts because my mind is a computer and the hand is faster than the eye. Electricity goes out. No juice. No power. All the local internet service providers are out of work. Having no internet connections is a profound joy meaning writers get, the joker word in English, writing done.

I've enjoyed many books lately balancing out creativity, sitting in the local market absorbing language and pedaling my black bike. Real paper books like, The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago which won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1998 and now Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami, the Kafka of Japan, among others noted in the Amazon side bar.

What's a side bar? Part of a river bank? A side bar according to the International Bar Association is a bar frequented by people on the side, content knowing their direct bar is indistinguishable from, say a bar not on the side.

A quote from the article. "As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” 

So, what did I do while reading the article? Using my handy-dandy gadget phone I traveled by wireless to Amazon Kindle downloading You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier and The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby. 

As Lanier writes, links and tags may be the most important inventions in the last 50 years. Incredible!

Before closing this entry I upgraded my MotionX-GPS to version 9.4 and added the application Star Walk to find my blind way home in the dark walking along a bridge in a constellation. 

 Texts Without Contexts...read more.

Metta.

An original computer using binary operations.