I find myself more interested in philosophy than emerging technology. One textbook I've been reading (to learn about Control) is Dr. Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen. She described the development of personal computers using the opposing concepts of modernism and postmodernism.
modernism: looking at the world as a series of definite systems that can be reduced to simple processes and understood by scientific inquiry.
postmodernism: admitting that the complexity of the world is beyond human comprehension but learning the gist of how things work by exploration.
I've been a sort of postmodernist for years and didn't know it because I didn't know there was a definition for it. (That's one of the cool things about reading books: you can learn things that you didn't intend to which are really cool.)
I've been applying the postmodern view more explicitly. A couple weeks ago my friend told me about a book she's reading about a Chicago doctor that worked in a hospital that treated the local poor. He also lived in a house among those same people and wrestled with questions about how much to get involved helping the people around him. I told my friend that that was a postmodern approach to caring for the poor; the doctor didn't have a detailed plan to end poverty in that area. He just jumped in to the situation and learned what would help by experience.
I keep meaning to get psyched about digital concepts, but I get sidetracked by philosophy.
And physics. This class has also fanned the flames of my mostly neglected interest in the history and development of modern physics and cosmology. I like learning about how P.A.M. Dirac used mathematics to predict the existence of neutrinos, left the idea because he thought it was outlandish, only to have his theory proven correct a few years later by scientists operating a cloud chamber who were trying to do something else. I like reading one physicist's argument that human's shouldn't rule out the existence of a closed universe. I like Issac Asimov teaching me about the composition and motion of a comet by helping me imagine that I'm riding one as it flies past Earth.
How do those concepts relate to Digital Civilization? Well, on the surface, they don't really. But I could compare innovation in physics to innovation in digital concepts. (Maybe there's a connection to be made between the revision that needs to take place in copyright law and the efforts of Bohr, Schrodinger, and others to redefine atoms.)
I want to contribute to the class project. Either I'll pick a group and hope that I gain an enthusiam for the concept as I study it more or I'll lobby for a chapter in the book dedicated to digital philosophy and psychology. We could study how DigiCiv is changing the way people think. And how science has changed the way people think throughout history (think about Galileo destroying he contemporary view of what revolves around what in the heavens.)
*Image for copyright symbol came from this webpage.
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