Dataomes
In terms of book reading, especially non-fiction, I want to read something that I haven’t seen elsewhere. But the internet is that “elsewhere”—a place where we can find things that already exist. I find that most of the books that I’ve chosen to read because of a book review (usually on the ol’ Arts & Letters Daily) haven’t been that interesting in terms of new information. For younger readers it’s BookTok, but that is similarly imperfect. This is because it’s being churned on the internet, YouTube, and with LLMs. The distractions in younger people could be the result of this same phenomenon: They’re looking for something that’s truly interesting; they’re making new interesting connections instead of the usual churning. In fact, book reading for me is more “churning the pages”, and I find myself first consulting the Index to find access points. I think we’re looking for information now—something that can be passed around on social media. Teachers are partially correct in cutting to the chase in terms of making new connections between disparate bits of information, which is a quicker way to learn something rather than spending a week on one book cover-to-cover. But storytelling is also a valid way of cutting to the chase that could be equally transforming. We’re all looking for that satisfying savory experience as we would when we’re hungry for a favorite comfort food. Martha Beck says it might be that people are hyper-curious and creative, and are quickly attempting to create inspirational sparks. Or it could simply be a matter of selective attention driven by the curiosity searching for salient (savory) pieces of information that satiates craving for something that is usually undefined, but it’s still all about gorging on information in order to feel full.
5/9/2024
[5/9/2025: I recently read The Ascent of Information, and the idea of the “dataome”, a “morphic field” of information that we are merged with and is a self-organizing system which has a mind (and perhaps, soul) of its own. You wouldn’t think the oceans of data that we traverse daily is a mere skimming, as if fish just skim. Actually, Scharf’s book had things I had read before which related to Sheldrake’s morphic resonance theory from the late 90s].
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