Inner Space Explorers

This course is providing a clarity of insight about new media. It’s making the everyday known - there is so much that we do without being aware of what is actually occurring…the text we click on, the connections within a website, the social experience  we are coming to rely on to provide us with a blanket of familiarity.  It allows us to experience ourselves as ‘inner space explorers’, a particularly significant descriptor that Rheingold provides.

We are stumbling through this incredible period that reading Bush tells me began well before the time that I thought it had actually began. It wasn’t the 70s, it wasn’t the 40’s; it truly builds on all of the media and thinkers that came before it – the alphabet, the printing press, the work of Charles Babbage and Ada, Boole with his “algebra of logic.

I’m comforted by the fact that it took Boole twenty years after his “flash of inspiration “ to teach himself enough mathematics to write The Laws of Thought. (Rheingold, 2000). It does take time to truly understand what is occurring. We can learn how to surf the web, build a blog and (in a very few days that are left to me) post a podcast. It take time to truly understand what it is that we are experiencing in warp speed compared to Boole. That is what we need to come to terms with. 

Bush says that “truly significant attainment becomes lost in the mass of the inconsequential” and he looks to technology to address this gap. Yet as we harness more and more technology, we are still finding that we are left with the conundrum of having access to more information and yet feeling no closer the attainment of knowledge.