SUBSTRATED

A – America
David McCullough’s 1776.

It seems like this book’s been on the bestseller list for about a gazillion years (it’s actually been two), so I was surprised, even a little embarrassed when, upon being assigned it to read for a leadership seminar, I realized I hadn’t read it already.

I admit I’m not finished yet, so consider this preliminary. In any case, it’s pretty great. Mr. McCullough is engagingly adept at creating mood. He writes with a kind of all-knowing lucidity that leaves me wondering whether or not he’s just making half of the amazingly gripping detail up. He’s a storyteller, above all else. He tells it like it’s an old, well-known folktale (which, arguably, it is) with the detail of Umberto Eco. He’s got an uncanny ability to integrate primary documents as if he were writing a script of the events he describes.

Most importantly, he has the historian’s propensity for narrative. It’s an epic, like the Illiad, or Star Wars. What really provokes thought in the evocation of narrative in history is the beauty of causality. In writing history as an epic, we have a inclination toward a kind of reification. History is ontologically abstract (unless perhaps you’re an archeologist, which isn’t a historian), so constructing such a concrete narrative based on causal mechanisms we cannot fully observe (or some we may be completely unaware of) means we can really only take 1776 at face value.

It’s pretty valuable, though. As a foundation account (or myth, if you like), it’s a wonderful celebration of the American psyche, of American values and where, exactly, they evolved from. And besides, the narrative is the most effective (and enjoyable) way to understand the interrelation of past and present. Hopefully, it can help shape the future.

B – Buzzwords
Is “Web 2.0” a thing?

Well, it’s a buzz word, but I’m not going to lie – I sort of like buzz words. So, what’s the problem with Web 2.0? Well, defining it. And, once that’s done, does the term really have any utility?

The way I see it, Web 2.0 should really be Media 2.0; as in all the new people-based, real-time, interactive and user-friendly (once a buzz word?) forms of communication and expression. Let’s not pretend that phones, tv and the internet are all linked. Ergo, media companies (which have their prodigiously Shiva-like fingers on every pulse) can interrelate all of them when they see the impetus (often coming from the grass roots. YouTube, anyone?). I watched a great edition of the show “Click” on BBC World that had some old-fangled interneters struggling to describe 2.0 as what the web had been intended to be all along. A web that’s “as easy to write as it is to read”, and “people taking control”. So hooray for video sharing, social networking, rss-ing, wiki-ing and so forth (especially wiki-ing). The future? Well… “Click” had some cute parts about the coming “internet of things” where your office, say, becomes malleable, instantly changable, and webbed-up to everything else. The walls displaying whatever you need, etc. These aren’t new ideas (just like the old-fangled guy said), but they’re the sprawled branches of the internet that are finally starting to fruit, so that’s promising… So, it is a thing?

Why not? Let’s think of it as the active web, rather than the passive. The web where wE, tEh pplz get to call the shots on content, and can then force it down the throats of all the other hep lolcatz out there, surfing the series of tubes.

C – Continua
The Academic Continuum

So, there I was, doodling away during class, when I came up with the idea of the Academic Conitnuum. It goes like this:

The further you move from what I’ll call the Academic Center (operationalize as “average education”), the more skeptical you’ll be. That’s a pretty rough sketch (and a pretty obvious idea), but I like it. So…

A<——————B——————->C

A (the uneducated) doesn’t think things are as complicated (or doesn’t care) as much as B (the averagely, or traditionally educated), who buys into traditional academic theories. So, A is more skeptical, as is C, who is more educated (or a more flexible thinker), and therefore views things as being more complex and more fluid than B will.

This is especially nice if, like me, you’re fond of postmodernism:

no philosophy<————modernism————->postmodernism

Art is another good example (cave drawings to romanticism to dadaism, or what-have-you) or literature, but I’ll spare you the visual representation this time. The problem, of course, with the right side (the educated skeptic), is that their theories offer limited or no solutions or explanations. C’est la vie.