As We May Have Thunk
I was at a talk a while ago by Professor Wendy Hall, a computer scientist whose group’s pioneering hypermedia system Microcosm emerged just in time to be trumped by another called the World Wide Web. As part of her potted history of all things hypertextual and semantic webular, she asked how many in the audience had actually read Vannevar Bush’s landmark article As We May Think. I was one of the surprising number of people who weren’t among the surprisingly few who had. Three weeks later, I still haven’t, so this public confession is to remind me that I should.
Another talk a week later had me thinking old thoughts. Impressively bearded philosopher Daniel Dennett spoke at Edinburgh University about his new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, with a focus on cultural evolution. I wasn’t entirely convinced by his distinction between memes and other forms of idea, but I’ll have to read the book to be sure (which I bought at his signing afterwards, and left wondering when I would ever get around to it, given the size of my pile). Lots of other provocative stuff to think about, though. The guy sitting in front of me was shaking his head so hard he looked like he was about to jump up and start speaking in tongues.
And then last week Crooked Timber had a post on the traditionality of modernity, prompted no doubt by the Commonwealth Games. Aussie Timberite John Quiggan wondered whether in recent decades we have been more tradition-obsessed than in the 19th century, or other times we think of as being tradition-obsessed—a question it would have taken me all day, or more likely all year, to respond to properly, in a week when I was grappling with open source software and university bureaucracy. (It prompts a few questions about who this “we” are, for a start.) I would leave a comment now, but their front page moves faster than a herd of stampeding wildermemes, so it feels a bit too late.