Share This Course!

“Culture is conversation, and the role of the intermediary is to
shape that conversation and give new meaning to readers’ lives
simply by helping them find the books they need to read.”
- Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books.

So, as the structure of the book began to reveal itself to us, with the first third of it to cover the sharing of culture, I happened to find myself in the local library browsing the shelves and my eyes landed on the spine of a book entitled, ‘So Many Books.’  It is the source of the quotation above as well as the following:

“But culture is a conversation without a centre.”

In considering how we – each one of us – has become expert in the sharing of digital things, what are the conversations that we are aware of being a part? How many are there, what types and how do they intermingle?

When we come to envisage the sharing of the Share This Book book, who do we picture as the people that need to read the book? What are the conversations that we will be having?

I thought I’d share another picture with you to prompt some discussion.

What you see below is what I have conceptualised after having reread a few of Mark’s articles on changing culture and the various ‘hyper’ terms that we have been studying over the last few weeks.

This was a slightly more difficult exercise than my attempts of the first schematic I shared with you and I am not quite as confident on it’s capture of the various notions.  But I figure, why worry about not getting it exactly right when I have a group of people who will examine it and provide useful feedback on how it may be improved, not least for the fact that amongst you is the author of the articles I read to construct the picture.

In contrast to my (consciously provocative) depiction of the features of our current culture, I have given an interpretation of the features of the new culture emerging.  Note that we are only looking at a limited set of features and the picture is not really capable of describing either the current or the emerging culture as a whole.

The culture is changing

We have become broad grazers of culture.  Over the last decade, our ability to ‘go wide’ has reached unprecedented levels. Whether an uprising in Iran, a celebrity marriage gone sour, or the trivial factoids which obsess us, we now have the tools to take it all in, all the time, wherever we are.  The mainstream media have tried to follow us on or flight path into breadth, only succeeding in becoming more insubstantial.  But the time for breadth is over.  We’ve passed the test – with high marks.  We need to move along.

The other and mostly unexplored axis of an information-saturated culture is depth.  Each of us has the capacity to dive in and learn more about almost anything than ever before.  It nearly always starts with Wikipedia, which then points you to another resource, which points to another, and another, until, at the end, something like real mastery has been achieved. With depth comes judgment; walk a mile in another’s shoes and you can know their thoughts.  It’s not fast food, but it is a nutritious meal.

It’s interesting to note that the big movie this year (and probably the decade) is James Cameron’s Avatar.  Uttered at its climax, the film’s catch phrase is, ‘I see you.’  Three words framing an experience of depth, one soul knowing the soul of another.  That might be too much to ask on a planet of nearly seven billion souls, but we know we are lacking, and long to restore balance.  Depth must take its place alongside breadth as a core human capability in the era of hyperinformation.  Without it, we will simply evaporate into ephemera and trivia.  But with it – and this is my dream – we can reach the rock-solid core of being.