Preoccupations on Tumblr

“It’s like the difference between the brain and the mind,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “Explore the Internet and you find cables and computers. Explore the Web and you find information.”

BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; A Free and Simple Computer Link - New York Times, 1993

Richard Brautigan reads All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace — via Paul

An Ecology Of Mind (trailer)

The trends that I have described above are not forecasts (for which I have little use and scant respect); they are, if you will, conclusions. Everything discussed here has already happened; it is only the full impacts that are still to come. I expect most readers to nod and to say, “Of course”. But few, I suspect, have yet asked themselves: “What do these futures mean for my own work and my own organisation?”

— Petern Drucker, ‘The Futures That Have Already Happened’ (1989), via Quote Investigator

Ansel Adams to his friend, Cedric Wright

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.

— letter of 1937, via Letters of Note

‘What really excites me is that technology is finally becoming social … becoming something which is part of human lives instead of humans being part of its.’ — Matt Webb

“one of my favorite things about Twitter: You can tweak your feed into a fabulous novelty engine.”

An interview with William Gibson | The Verge

Vladimir Lukyanov’s water computer, 1936. Image courtesy of the Polytechnic Museum, Moscow (via Pruned: Gardens as Crypto-Water-Computers)

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration…shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects…All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

— Nietzche, Human, All Too Human, via Jonah Lehrer

slavin:

Freeman, Esther, and George Dyson. This was especially awesome.

hammersley:

Music and Life - Alan Watts (by seandulac)

What the Internet Means for How We Think About the World

I think the Net generation is beginning to see knowledge in a way that is closer to the truth about knowledge — a truth we’ve long known but couldn’t instantiate. My generation, and the many generations before mine, have thought about knowledge as being the collected set of trusted content, typically expressed in libraries full of books. Our tradition has taken the trans-generational project of building this Library of Knowledge book by book as our God-given task as humans. Yet, for the coming generation, knowing looks less like capturing truths in books than engaging in never-settled networks of discussion and argument. That social activity — collaborative and contentious, often at the same time — is a more accurate reflection of our condition as imperfect social creatures trying to understand a world that is too big and too complex for even the biggest-headed expert.

This new topology of knowledge reflects the topology of the Net. The Net (and especially the Web) is constructed quite literally out of links, each of which expresses some human interest. If I link to a site, it’s because I think it matters in some way, and I want it to matter that way to you. The result is a World Wide Web with billions of pages and probably trillions of links that is a direct reflection of what matters to us humans, for better or worse. The knowledge networks that live in this new ecosystem share in that property; they are built out of, and reflect, human interest. Like our collective interests, the Web and the knowledge that resides there is at odds and linked in conversation. That’s why the Internet, for all its weirdness, feels so familiar and comfortable to so many of us. And that’s the sense in which I think networked knowledge is more “natural.”

— David Weinberger