Back in the old days, knowing names was power. “Keep your true name secret, so the witches won’t conjure with it.” Magic was knowing formulas, incantations. We’re back to the old days, with Google. All you need is the right name, the right search string, to unlock great masses of information and insight. People who bother to carry the whole weight of information around with them are overloaded. “He’s trying to be a hard drive; he will fail.” The new scholarly mind is emerging: a spiderweb of hunches and names, holding together the known universe in a particular way. (And a new communication is emerging too: with a responsive database to fill things out, a lifework could be written on a cookie fortune or a tombstone.) I hope we don’t have an electro-magnetic pulse anytime soon; I’d like to see where this line of development leads.
Posted by shea0017 at September 25, 2004 12:02 PM