“We are ‘creatures of information'”, “in the library of Babel, seeking information past and future”, says James Gleick in the Information.
We might look in hardback and paperback, print books and e-books, newspaper and news broadcast, but we are still after the information. It reminds me of a line by St Paul “though now we see through a glass darkly…”
Never enough, or soon enough, from tweets to tabloids. So we hacked into phones, into computers, even broke into hotel and hospital, (Colson ‘s Watergate) and (Coulson’s phonegate).
Watching trial-by-jury and inquiry-by-committee.
We want to know. The tree of knowledge.
Yet we succumbed easily to “bubbles” (every five years or so).
We lock away older people behind “secure” doors, so we can “own” our own mistakes.
Mrs Ford embodied the ERA generation, while the congress woman from Arizona, NRA‘s.
Interesting data points: Japan women soccer team won the World Cup this afternoon (Mrs Ford couldn’t have been prouder: slim, Asian, women and soccer, given her starting point in early days with breast cancer awareness).
We seek and send information at nano level while debt ceiling reaches Trillion-dollar level.
The result: Chinese consumers and travelers are here in NYC, to buy Made-in-China I-phones and hand-carry them home (suitcase entrepreneurs).
It’s been a long journey, being expelled from the Garden of Eden.
We asked for the Tree of knowledge. Now we know: knowledge without the ability to act is crippling and demoralising.
So we tuned out (having been over-exposed to repeated news from hot spots around the globe e.g. Syria, N Korea etc…)
like the character in “Being There”. We seek information past (history), and future (horoscope), we want to know from palm reading and Palm Pilot. What’s the latest tweet? (Explosion at Boston Marathon finish line?)
200 Million registered accounts constitute an Information-rich but compassion-fatigue society. In the beginning…was the Word. And that Logos must not be decoupled from Pathos.
Information-rich society should bear more responsibilities for the privilege it was endowed, or risk dumbing down, while the machine grows smarter. That “library of Babel” will reach the sky, way pass the cloud, sooner than we thought. Robust information flow, on steroid, racing across all channels: print, online, push and pull media, without BORDERS (the bookstore).
Thang Nguyen 555 