Jeremy Rifkin is a monster– I don’t mean that in a bad way. He’s a monstrously prolific author and is on our side. I’ve relied on several of his books in the past, and I certainly look forward to reading his new tome, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. I’ve pasted a snip below, but do yourself a favor and read the whole article, which is a summary of the book’s thesis. It strikes me as a bit Utopian, so I’ll need to read more closely his assumptions when the book comes out. But frankly, I’m in need of some Utopian thought right now. Something about the tone and outlook of the piece feels right.
The book’s Website has an online reader that will let you read the whole book.
Jeremy Rifkin: ‘The Empathic Civilization’: Rethinking Human Nature in the Biosphere Era:
“Whether in fact we will begin to empathize as a species will depend on how we use the new distributed communication medium. While distributed communications technologies-and, soon, distributed renewable energies – are connecting the human race, what is so shocking is that no one has offered much of a reason as to why we ought to be connected. We talk breathlessly about access and inclusion in a global communications network but speak little of exactly why we want to communicate with one another on such a planetary scale. What’s sorely missing is an overarching reason that billions of human beings should be increasingly connected. Toward what end? The only feeble explanations thus far offered are to share information, be entertained, advance commercial exchange and speed the globalization of the economy. All the above, while relevant, nonetheless seem insufficient to justify why nearly seven billion human beings should be connected and mutually embedded in a globalized society. The idea of even billion individual connections, absent any overall unifying purpose, seems a colossal waste of human energy. More important, making global connections without any real transcendent purpose risks a narrowing rather than an expanding of human consciousness. But what if our distributed global communication networks were put to the task of helping us re-participate in deep communion with the common biosphere that sustains all of our lives?”
6
Oct 07
A 21st century library
I’ve been reading Everything is Miscellaneous, which is a great primer on how all the crazy categorization schemes that we see as natural (alphabetic, numeric), are not only contrived, but are falling apart because of information technology. So I was interested to come across this interview with Prelinger Library librarian Nancy Pearl. Rick Prelinger’s collection is at the root of the Internet Archive, a great “resource of human knowledge,” i.e. copyright free images, movies, lectures, software and a bunch of other cool stuff.
Creating the 21st Century Library — In These Times:
How do you think the digitization of books should effect how libraries manage their print collections?
In the library and document preservation worlds, there exists a concern that the growth of the digital environment will result in the end of print, and that books and newspapers need to be rescued from the digital future. I don’t believe that. Books as artifacts will always have value apart from their digital counterparts.
Yes, the online environment obviously offers mass dispersal into the world and that’s not possible in a print library environment. But part of our library project is about collapsing the polarization between print and digital, and looking toward a third way where a library can be a hybrid analog-digital space. Books are both retained and valued, and where a digital collection exists, maybe it allows more freedom with what the analog collection can do, because you can always do a keyword search of the digital collection. Maybe the benefits of one liberate the other.