So I read this perfectly amazing book the other day, The Ghost Map, which is at basis a completely gripping tale of the detective work that went into understanding the waterborne nature of cholera for the first time, as well as an urban/medical drama about the combination of circumstances leading the London's 1854 epidemic.
Which then turns into a love letter to cities and a discussion - one I found really provocative - about the nature & role of the urban in the future of the planet, the similarity of all this internet nonsense to the mapping that was crucial to proving the disease theory and the potential of human beings to get some things right.
Click for more info about map and epidemic.
Thanks to Making Light for the recommendation.
As I tend to be a bit gloomy about the future of humanity I found it completely compelling, pretty plausible and really something to think about.
Which I have been doing.
And then Friday my email box went ding! with a notice from Edge - for which there is a link in my sidebar as well. Edge's stated purpose is to "arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."
I find it deeply comforting that somewhere in this world, someone is asking abstract & concrete rather than profit-minded questions about anything (outside of pure academia, because while I have no beef with academics and in fact many of these people are academics, it's a world that can be as insular as business or politics, and I really believe that the intersection of knowledge, rather than the isolation of knowledge, is better for us as individuals, as well as a species, and as a planet).
Which is actually how the cholera epidemic came to be tamed. A doctor with an interdisciplinary approach and a varied experience, from an atypical background, asking non-dogmatic questions, encountering a clergyman with intimate knowledge of a neighborhood, a load of anger and an open mind, both of them with the determination to put some serious shoe leather into figuring out how 700 people died in a week.
You could never plan for that. Never. Passion, questions, serendipity & hard, slogging work.
(Which is why I still think a broad education is a great idea. My dad would be so happy to hear me say that. Though I mean ACTUALLY broad, as in liberal arts people like me ought to not be allowed to escape from scientific education quite so completely, and vice versa. I knew some science types in school with a very limited understanding of life outside the lab, as well as a number of literary types *cough* who thought science was BOring. Bunch of idiots. Suck it up on both sides, with a little mutual respect.)
I tell you, the best moments in my education were when something I learned in class A and something I read in the paper, and something I saw on a beach somewhere and something else I read in high school all snapped together like magnets the size of tectonic plates, with a terrible, awesome crash of world-expanding neuroplasticity.
(God, doesn't it seem like everything you hear or see on TV or in the paper is about making the world smaller? And not in a good, reducing-distances-between-people kind of way, in a narrow, grasping, selfish, hysterical and profit-minded way?)
Where was I?
Oh right. The Edge. I love Edge. It always leaves me going - Hey, I never thought of that. Because I am definitely not one of the world's great thinkers. And that's OK, because they have something to teach me, I like to learn, and I don't have to be one of the world's great thinkers to be part of changing the world. I'm a point on the map. This post is a point on the map. And each person who reads it and reads more about it and clicks through and talks about what they think and passes it on, is another.
Today's email was about a speech called "Gin, Television and the Cognitive Surplus" and discussions relating. The index is here and while it will take a while, I highly recommend it. (The site is poorly organized for the internet. Imagine it's an actual paper thing and keep scrolling.)
The basic idea is that gin in the industrial revolution functioned as a society-wide numbing agent while human beings got used to an urban society, a numbing agent that was combated and discarded when people could begin to conceptualize the new world and use its resources more effectively, and that TV has performed this role for the 20th century, and now...
Did you know that for the first time since its invention TV watching is declining? Replaced with interactive media that are non-passive, connections between people and places and information through social networks and the Internet that are now ADDING something to humanity's experience. There's a video, and I can't figure out how to embed it. But I really, really, really beg you to go and watch it, or read the transcript (scroll way down, though the introductory articles you will go past are good too). Or both. BEG.
The intersection between the book, the Edge and my present brain state feels electrifying in some way - can you tell?
Because I've been thinking about how sitting on my ass watching the Olympics has felt like losing ground on life, and how as bloggers we are connected to this larger world, and Ravelry and Facebook and online dating how much I have learned from the internet and all the mad fools out there talking about books, and cast on techniques and art and home design and dressmaking and raising families and building personalities and politics and feminism and science and gaming and the human experience - using this medium to make creativity and growth and learning parts of their lives, and how great it is, though great is a weak word. Transformative. Because no fooling, my life has been transformed by this stuff and I bet yours has too.
And how the excess energy released by not sitting on my ass gives me so much more to give to things I care about. A few months ago I was talking about perfume with an acquaintance. And she said - I don't know how you have time. And I thought, Time? You are 10 years younger than me, and work 40 hours a week and are married and own a townhouse with your husband, no kids yet. I have never heard you mention a hobby, a bike ride, a trip, a museum, a book you've read, anything that you have passion for, a home improvement project, a great meal you've cooked or eaten. Nothing. How do you NOT have time?
And I'm not slamming her - she's a very nice person and I enjoy chatting with her when I run into her. She finds me exoticly amusing because I am always talking about something new. A date, a knitting project, a book I'm reading, something I cooked, a new gadget, shoes, something.
How do you find the time?
Well, for one thing, some days I don't turn on the TV. (And I am not patting myself on the back about this, I just told you I spent two weeks watching Olympians and I can't wait for Life to start up again. The idea is LESS. To not sink into inactivity, to make, to share, to generate.)
Clay Shirky, speaking on Edge, is calling it cognitive surplus and he thinks it can change the world like the rise and decline of gin drinking transformed the world (I dunno anything about either of the books I link here other than I would like to read them and this way I can find them again).
And I love it. It feels like a true possibility, it feels like a way to look at what we have and are and see the possibility for positive change in a useful and productive way, to take the chaos and change and use it, rather than being swamped by gloom over our inevitable destruction. Which is the same way I felt after finishing The Ghost Map. A friend said to me the other day that the world was incredibly large but so accessible. And you know, it is. If you care to look.
