Between the Past and the Future
I'm a strong believer in journal keeping. I have a book out form the library about altering books. This craftswoman (artist?) takes books, any kind of book, and "alters" them by adding things to the pages, painting them, cutting holes, turning them into mosaics and montages and shadowboxes. Browsing through made me think about all the paper journals I've kept over the years, the pictures scribbled in margins, the occasional page consumed entirely by one big word, photographs and ticket stubs tapped in. honestly, I collect journals. I have three or four empty books around most of the time in anticipation of filling them. Right now I'm within the last twenty pages or so of the journal I've been filling and it's hard to not just put it down and start on one of the new books. The current one is a faux-leather hard-bound brown book with a palm tree embossed on the cover. The next is a small yellow soft-bound leather. I bought it almost six months ago in anticipation. I love to have something physical to hold onto. While I very much do appreciate the capacity for storage the internet affords, it lacks something of permanency and share-ability. While I can send my URL to anyone on the globe, I cannot share this website with those who will come long after our culture has wiped itself from the face of the earth. Because I don't own the hard drive these are stored on I may not even be able to share it with people surfing the internet two years from now. I would like to leave something for my children and grandchildren to hold in their hands.
Harold Innes described technology as being a balance between space and time. Space based technology is more concerned about bringing communication to as many people at the same time across as great an area as possible, while Time based technology is more concerned with the permanency of information. Television is a purely space based technology, it rolls incessantly on without regard to wether or not you're keeping up. All it wants is as many people receiving the signal as is possible. The internet is a little more moderate in its stand, being somewhat concerned with information hanging around a while, but the sheer fickleness of the infrastructure, the propensity for hard drive wipes and corrupted data, belies the fact that it's the people using the internet who want the information to remain around and not the medium. If it were the medium, it wouldn't misplace so much stuff. DVD is certainly a more time-based technology, the pitch for its space-based marketing being that it will last. Then, of course, we come to the most time based of all, stone carvings, metal plates, books, and scrolls. We have the art, wisdom, poetry, warnings, music, lore, government, economics, and religion of ages past encoded into these mediums. While there is most certainly a place for both in any culture, it is important that every civilization find some balance between the two. As humans we need both. We hunger for change, but thirst for permanency. I have heard it said that this is why God gave us the seasons, to give us a constant rolling change, but the security of permanency in that cycle. I digress though. I feel that our culture in many ways has glutted itself on space. It has become drunk with the capacity of its technology to reach every corner of the globe. I fear that there might not be much left of our wisdom and folly for our grandchildren to dig up as they build their cities over top our bones.
2 Observations:
I grapple with the same problem of finishing books; it's rare that I finish a book containing anything, sketchbooks, notebooks, personal thought books, journals. What does that say about me? The odd thing is that I do manage to keep a pen long enough to finish off the ink.
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