Last week at a conference I was listening to an intense diatribe by an artist who was positing that the availability of instant on-demand interactive media — the web, Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, and all that — would be the death knell for good old fashioned book reading.<\/p>\n
During the question and answer session that followed, a man in the audience started out a rather long question with the quote: “Language is an old-growth forest of the mind.” I was struck by the wit of this quote, so while he was formulating his question I typed that phrase into Google and found out that it was by the anthropologist Wade Davis (whom I had never heard of). That led me to the Wikipedia page about Wade Davis, from which I learned that Davis had written an influential and controversial book in 1985 called “The Serpent and the Rainbow”. I then went to Amazon.com and put the book in my shopping cart. By the time the guy had finished his question, I was already queued up to read this book.<\/p>\n
I did all this reflexively, without pausing to think about the process, but afterward it occurred to me that my experience was a direct refutation of the central point of the talk. I don’t read less because of these internet-enabled connections. I read more<\/i>. There is an intriguing interaction between my reading time — something I do in solitude when at leisure — and my real-time acquisition of knowledge about new topics to explore, something that would not have been possible before the age of the internet.<\/p>\n
The title of this post is from another quote by Wade Davis, one I find particularly inspiring and oddly relevant: “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week at a conference I was listening to an intense diatribe by an artist who was positing that the availability of instant on-demand interactive media — the web, Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, and all that — would be the death knell for good old fashioned book reading. During the question and answer session that followed, … Continue reading “The world in which you were born”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4511"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4511"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4518,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4511\/revisions\/4518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}